Martha Coakley: Too Immoral For Teddy Kennedy’s Seat
Belief in ‘messianic’ Obama misplaced
Murder Spree by People Who Refuse to Ask for Directions
Coulter vs. The Counter-Coulters
The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace
What must our enemies be thinking?
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
The Sun Also Sets
Martha Coakley: Too Immoral For Teddy Kennedy’s Seat
By Ann Coulter
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
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In Tuesday’s primary election, Massachusetts Democrats chose as their Senate nominee a woman who kept a clearly innocent man in prison in order to advance her political career.
Martha Coakley isn’t even fit for the late Teddy Kennedy’s old seat. (What is it about this particular Senate seat?)
During the daycare/child molestation hysteria of the ’80s, Gerald Amirault, his mother, Violet, and sister, Cheryl, were accused of raping children at the family’s preschool in Malden, Mass., in what came to be known as the second-most notorious witch trial in Massachusetts history.
The allegations against the Amiraults were preposterous on their face. Children made claims of robots abusing them, a “bad clown” who took the children to a “magic room” for sex play, rape with a 2-foot butcher knife, other acts of sodomy with a “magic wand,” naked children tied to trees within view of a highway, and — standard fare in the child abuse hysteria era — animal sacrifices.
There was not one shred of physical evidence to support the allegations — no mutilated animals, no magic rooms, no butcher knives, no photographs, no physical signs of any abuse on the children.
Not one parent noticed so much as unusual behavior in their children — until after the molestation hysteria began.
There were no witnesses to the alleged acts of abuse, despite the continuous and unannounced presence of staff members, teachers, parents and other visitors at the school.
Not one student ever spontaneously claimed to have been abused. Indeed, the allegations of abuse didn’t arise until the child therapists arrived.
Nor was there anything in the backgrounds of the Amiraults that fit the profile of sadistic, child-abusing monsters. Violet Amirault had started the Fells Acre Day School 18 years before the child molestation hysteria erupted.
Thousands of happy and well-adjusted students had passed through Fells Acres. Many returned to visit the school; some even attended Cheryl’s wedding a few years before the inquisition began.
It’s one thing to put a person in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s another to put an entire family in prison for a crime that didn’t take place.
In the most outrageous miscarriage of justice since the Salem witch trials, in July 1986, Gerald Amirault was convicted of raping and assaulting six girls and three boys and sentenced to 30 to 40 years in prison. The following year, Violet and Cheryl Amirault were convicted of raping and assaulting three girls and a boy and were sentenced to 8 to 20 years.
The motto of the witch-hunters was “Believe the Children!” But the therapists resolutely refused to believe the children as long as they denied being abused. As the police advised the parents: In cases of child abuse, &rlquo;no” can mean &rlquo;yes.”
To the children’s credit, they held firm to their denials for heroic amounts of time in the face of relentless questioning.
But as copious research in the wake of the child abuse cases has demonstrated, small children are highly suggestible. It’s surprisingly easy to implant false memories into young minds by simply asking the same questions over and over again.
Indeed, the interviewing techniques in the Amirault case were so successful that the children also made accusations against three other teachers, two imaginary people named “Mr. Gatt” and “Al” and even against the child therapist herself — the one claim of abuse that was provably true.
But only the Amiraults were put on trial for any alleged acts of abuse.
Coakley wasn’t the prosecutor on the original trial. What she did was worse.
At least the original prosecutors, craven and ambition-driven though they were, could claim to have been caught up in the child abuse panic of the ’80s. There had not yet been extensive psychological studies on the suggestibility of small children. A dozen similar cases from around the country had not already been discredited and the innocent freed.
Of all the men and women falsely convicted during the child molestation hysteria of the ’80s, by 2001, only Gerald Amirault still sat in prison. Even his sister and mother had been released after serving eight years in prison for crimes that never occurred.
In July 2001, the notoriously tough Massachusetts parole board voted unanimously to grant Gerald Amirault clemency. Although the parole board is not permitted to consider guilt or innocence, its recommendation said: “(I)t is clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner’s conviction.”
Immediately after the board’s recommendation, The Boston Globe reported that Gov. Jane Swift was leaning toward accepting the board’s recommendation and freeing Amirault.
Enter Martha Coakley, Middlesex district attorney. Gerald Amirault had already spent 15 years in prison for crimes he no more committed than anyone reading this column did. But Coakley put on a full court press to keep Amirault in prison simply to further her political ambitions.
By then, every sentient person knew that Amirault was innocent. But instead of saying nothing, Coakley frantically lobbied Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison to show that she was a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, who stood up for “the children.” As a result of Coakley’s efforts — and her contagious ambition — Gov. Swift denied Amirault’s clemency.
Thanks to Martha Coakley, Gerald Amirault sat in prison for another three years.
Remember all that talk about President Bush shredding constitutional rights? Overzealous liberal prosecutors and feminist do-gooders allowed Gerald Amirault to sit in prison for 18 years for crimes that didn’t exist — except in the imaginations of small children under the influence of incompetent child “therapists.”
Martha Coakley allowed her ambition to trump basic human decency as she campaigned to keep a patently innocent man in prison.
Anyone with the smallest sense of justice cannot vote to put this woman in any office. If you absolutely cannot vote for a Republican on Jan. 19, 2010, write in the name “Gerald Amirault.”
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ANN COULTER
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1130 Walnut, Kansas City, MO 64106
Belief in ‘messianic’ Obama misplaced
By Ken Smith
Letter to the Editor, Littleton Independent, January 29, 2009
To the editor,
So, now that President Bush is out of office is it still “patriotic to dissent?” because I would like to dissent a bit. Not to complain about President Obama - although given the historic component of his election there are a handful of black conservatives that I would prefer to have seen inaugurated last week - but to make a point about the messianic adulation and breathless expression of hope that so many people bestow upon him.
Granted, times are difficult for some, but how is it that so many people who have been blessed with the gift of liberty from the moment of birth have become so conditioned to look to the government for their well-being and happiness? How come so many have become dependent upon government? More to the point, how is it that so many are seemingly reliant upon a single person, namely President Obama? I get the implications of America electing its first black president; the significance is obvious (although the racist comments by Rev. Joseph Lowery in the inaugural’s closing prayer sure took the shine off of the day’s message of racial harmony). But what was it that was so discernibly bad about the President Bush’s tenure that it seems as if America was going to slip into oblivion or annihilation if Sen. Obama didn’t win the election?
America is bigger than any one person or presidency. Building your hopes – essentially, turning over your life – to an entity like government or any single person is to build your life on sand rather than rock. And, frankly, the hyper-adulation for President Obama is unnerving because history has shown time after time that professed obeisance is the critical element for conniving the majority into dependence and submission. Doubt the obeisance? Just open any newspaper or tune into the leading media outlets: they and many Americans have lost all sense of objectivity.
Wherein liberty and freedom are the blessings that have made America so great and prosperous it’s distressingly ironic that so many are proclaiming that only now, through President Obama (i.e., the government), can we move forward and be happy. The nearly desperate sense of relief as measured by the professed sense hope by some of his supporters gives the impression that they believe, because of him, there won’t be any more pain and suffering. Have all those who have laid all of their hopes in the President’s basket of hope and change really been leading miserable, unfulfilling lives for the last eight years?
Rare is the person who has put their entire faith in one human being and hasn’t come away deeply hurt or disappointed at some point. Take today’s economy. Look at what all the trust and responsibility we have placed in our government has gotten us – and please don’t buy into the nonsense that capitalism brought this trouble upon us.
Although my expectations for the direction of the country in the next four years are quite low, I am optimistic that now that President Obama has to address all of the threats to our economy and our safety, as opposed to being able to hide behind campaign rhetoric, he will not govern according to his campaign promises. Whichever way he decides to govern though, I won’t let his beliefs decide my happiness. Instead of looking toward one fellow human being or some government entity for hope and happiness I recommend that we all look towards the Cross. It’s not always easy because it reveals some hard truths, but you can be sure it will never let you down and bring you lasting happiness.
Ken Smith
Powers Road
Murder Spree by People Who Refuse to Ask for Directions
By Ann Coulter
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
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In a front-page article on Jan. 2 of this year, The New York Times took a brief respite from its ongoing canonization of Barack Obama and returned to its series on violent crimes committed by returning GIs, or as I call it: “U.S. Military, Psycho Killers.”
The Treason Times’ banner series about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans accused of murder began in January last year but was quickly discontinued as readers noticed that the Times doggedly refused to provide any statistics comparing veteran murders with murders in any other group.
So they waited a year, hoping readers wouldn’t notice they were still including no relevant comparisons.
What, for example, is the percentage of murderers among veterans compared to the percentage of murderers in the population at large -- or, more germane, in the general population of young males, inasmuch as violent crime is committed almost exclusively by young men?
Any group composed primarily of young men will contain a seemingly mammoth number of murderers.
Consider the harmless fantasy game, Dungeons and Dragons -- which happens to be played almost exclusively by young males. When murders were committed in the ’80s by (1) young men, who were (2) Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts, some people concluded that factor (2), rather than factor (1), led to murderous tendencies.
Similarly, for its series about how America’s bravest and finest young men are really a gang of psychopathic cutthroats, the Times triumphantly produced 121 homicides committed by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in order to pin the blame for the murders on the U.S. military.
Perhaps the Times’ next major expose could be on how a huge percentage of murderers are people who won’t ask for directions or share the TV remote.
Let’s compare murders by veterans to murders by other 18- to 35-year-olds in the U.S. population at large. From 1976 to 2005, 18- to 24-year-olds -- both male and more gentle females -- committed homicide at a rate of 29.9 per 100,000. Twenty-five- to 35-year-olds committed homicides at a rate of 15.8 per 100,000.
Since 9/11, about 1.6 million troops have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. That makes the homicide rate among veterans of these wars 7.6 per 100,000 -- or about one-third the homicide rate for their age group (18 to 35) in the general population of both sexes.
But fewer than 200,000 of the 1.6 million troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been women, and the murder rate for the general population includes both males and females. Inasmuch as males commit nearly 90 percent of all murders, the rate for males in those age groups is probably nearly double the male/female combined rates, which translates to about 30 to 55 murderers per 100,000 males aged 18 to 35.
So comparing the veterans’ rate of murder to only their male counterparts in the general population, we see that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are about 10 times less likely to commit a murder than non-veterans of those wars.
But as long as the Times has such a burning interest in the root causes of murder, how about considering the one factor more likely to create a murderer than any other? That is the topic we’re not allowed to discuss: single motherhood.
As I describe in my new book, Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, controlling for socioeconomic status, race and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent. (The second strongest factor is owning a Dennis Kucinich bumper sticker.)
By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers. Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced.
A 1990 study by the left-wing Progressive Policy Institute showed that, after controlling for single motherhood, the difference in black and white crime disappeared.
Various studies come up with slightly different numbers, but all the figures are grim. A study cited in the far left-wing Village Voice found that children brought up in single-mother homes “are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.”
With new children being born, running away, dropping out of high school and committing murder every year, it’s not a static problem to analyze. But however the numbers are run, single motherhood is a societal nuclear bomb.
Many of these studies, for example, are from the ’90s, when the percentage of teenagers raised by single parents was lower than it is today. In 1990, 28 percent of children under 18 were being raised in one-parent homes -- mother or father, divorced or never-married. By 2005, more than one-third of all babies born in the U.S. were illegitimate.
That’s a lot of social problems in the pipeline.
Think I’m being cruel? Imagine an America with 60 to 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, teenage births, teenage suicides and runaways, and you will appreciate what the sainted “single mothers” have accomplished.
Even in liberals’ fevered nightmares, predatory mortgage dealers, oil speculators and Ken Lay could never do as much harm to their fellow human beings as single mothers do to their own children, to say nothing of society at large.
But the Times won’t run that series because liberals adore single motherhood and the dissolution of traditional marriage in America. They detest the military, so they cite a few anecdotal examples of veterans who have committed murder and hope that no one asks for details.
© 2009 ANN COULTER
Coulter vs. The Counter-Coulters
By L. Brent Bozell III
January 07, 2009
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Ann Coulter’s new book “Guilty” is out and two things are certain: It will surely be another best-seller, and she will once again drive the Left bonkers. No institution will be more offended than the national press. Prepare to witness their meltdown.
The Drudge Report caused a firestorm when anonymous NBC insiders leaked the word that Coulter had been “banned for life” from that network. CBS featured her on “The Early Show” and a combative Harry Smith tried to insult her to the extreme. He called her “goofy,” “simplistic,” “sophomoric,” and a “whiner.” “You should have a cross,” he said dismissively. “You should put yourself up on a cross.” Why are they so upset?
The so-called “objective” media clearly feel threatened because they are the very liberals Coulter is attacking. If they weren’t liberals, none of her mockery of liberals would bother them. Oh, they might not appreciate her style, as some conservatives don’t. But they wouldn’t have pitched debates inside their walls about how they will savage her in interviews – and I defy the networks to deny this – or how they would remove her from their airwaves altogether.
Those rumored bans have been demanded by the leftist lobbyists for the Censorship Doctrine – people who say they oppose “conservative misinformation,” but clearly want conservatives tossed from the radio and TV airwaves before “misinformation” or just plain conservative thought spills out. They have pressured the networks to stop helping Coulter sell books. Freedom of speech is truly a dangerous concept when conservatives exercise it.
But liberals who claim to oppose “inflammatory rhetoric” on television when it comes from conservatives have no problem with uncivil liberalism. Or 100 percent hate-filled left-wing character assassination. Take NBC, which could not look sillier if it ever seriously banned Coulter for being hyperbolic, when vicious, hyperbolic liberals (Olbermann, Maddow, and Matthews) dominate MSNBC.
It’s easy to run down a list of inflammatory liberals who are welcomed on the TV morning shows. Start with Kitty Kelley’s wild “investigative” books on the Reagans or the Bushes. Or Michael Moore’s kooky conspiracy theories. Or Al Franken suggesting Karl Rove and Scooter Libby should be executed over Plamegate. (NBC’s Matt Lauer and his off-camera crew laughed at that.)
Or recall Bill Maher on his HBO show in 2007 suggesting Arianna Huffington shouldn’t ban commenters on her website wishing Dick Cheney had died in a terrorist attack in Afghanistan. “That’s a funny joke,” Maher said. “If this isn’t China, shouldn’t you be able to say that?” He added that Cheney’s death by suicide bomber might be a public service: “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.”
Harry Smith hosted Maher on CBS just months ago on his faith-mocking movie “Religulous” and didn’t say one discouraging word to him about his caustic remarks about Cheney or his hateful anti-Christian bigotry. Not one word.
But when Ann Coulter speaks, the brass knuckles come out. In 2007, Coulter was heavily criticized for joking that she couldn’t talk about John Edwards, since an ABC actor was forced to apologize for saying “faggot” at the Golden Globes. Liberals were furious. Coulter responded by saying next time, she’d echo Bill Maher and just wish Edwards died in a terrorist attack. Elizabeth Edwards then denounced Coulter for suggesting she wanted her husband dead. Harry Smith invited Mrs. Edwards on CBS, offered her brief softballs and let her verbally whack Coulter with a bat.
Smith is an enormous hypocrite. He completely ignored vicious remarks by Mrs. Edwards just days before, in accepting a “Rage for Justice” award, that the Bush administration was waging a class war that compared to slaughters in Darfur:
“The White House has led the charge against working people, in their own class war. The late, great Molly Ivins once wrote: ‘If there was class warfare, that war was long over. And it was a massacre… a genocide to which there have been words of acknowledgment, as there have in Darfur, but as with Darfur, no meaningful action.’”
But when Ann Coulter comes on the set with Smith, the gloves come off.
Ann Coulter’s liberal-bashing columns and books and television appearances are fun for conservatives, simply because there’s nothing funnier for the right that witnessing CBS putting up on its own screen a Coulter quote about Ted Kennedy and CBS: “Kennedy may be a drunken slob, but unlike CBS News anchors, he is not certifiably insane.”
Call Coulter outrageous, call her a bomb-thrower, even state she goes beyond the pale of civility, if that’s your read. But do not assign that label to Coulter and then present your on-air love and kisses and giggles to all the public leftist hate-spewing that far exceeds any perceived incivility by Coulter. That is utterly transparent liberalism, and utterly transparent hypocrisy.
The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace
What must our enemies be thinking?
By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, |
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Earlier this year, 12,000 people in San Francisco signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush. The proposition is only one example of the classless disrespect many Americans have shown the president.
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According to recent Gallup polls, the president’s average approval rating is below 30% — down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.
This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, “Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust.”
Those bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties.
The president’s original Supreme Court choice of Harriet Miers alarmed Republicans, while his final nomination of Samuel Alito angered Democrats. His solutions to reform the immigration system alienated traditional conservatives, while his refusal to retreat in Iraq has enraged liberals who have unrealistic expectations about the challenges we face there.
It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.
Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.
Like the president said in his 2004 victory speech, “We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.”
To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman’s low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.
Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman’s presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years — and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.
Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.
Mr. Shapiro is an investigative reporter and lawyer who previously interned with John F. Kerry’s legal team during the presidential election in 2004.
Copyright ©2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
By Lorne Gunter, National PostMonday, February 25, 2008 |
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Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record?” Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it’s not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It’s way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it’s way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
The Sun Also Sets
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore’s mythical “consensus.” Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.
Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.
To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming.
Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.
This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.
Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a “stethoscope for the sun.” But he and his colleagues need better equipment.
In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun’s emissions more rapidly and accurately.
As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth’s climate over time has been the sun.
For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s temperature over the last 100 years.
R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”
Rather, he says, “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”
Patterson, sharing Tapping’s concern, says: “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”
“Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again,” Patterson says. “If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than %lsquo;global warming’ would have had.”
In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming “community” — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by “dramatic changes” in temperatures.
A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.
“The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100,” according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.
The study says that “try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures.”
The study concludes that if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, “there would not be much effect on temperatures.”
But if the sun shuts down, we’ve got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that’s hanging in the balance.
© Copyright 2008 Investor’s Business Daily. All Rights Reserved.