The global warming scam

Asia Times ^ | 02.25.05 | Derek Kelly, PhD

[Dr. Marten]

The global warming scam
By Derek Kelly, PhD

Scam, noun: a swindle, a fraudulent arrangement.

A chronology of climate change
During most of the last billion years the Earth did not have permanent ice sheets. Nevertheless, at times large areas of the globe were covered with vast sheets of ice. Such times are known as glaciations. In the past 2 million to 3 million years, the temperature of the Earth has changed (warmed or cooled) at least 17 times, some say 33, with glaciations that last about 100,000 years interrupted by warm periods that last about 10,000 years.

The last glaciation began 70,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. The Earth was a lot colder than it is now; snow and ice had accumulated on a lot of the land, glaciers existed on large areas and the sea levels were lower.

15,000 years ago: The last glaciation reaches a peak, with continental glaciers that cover a lot of the sub-polar and polar areas of the land areas of Earth. In North America, all of New England and all of the Great Lakes area, most of Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota and the North Dakotas, lie under ice sheets hundreds of meters thick. More than 37 million cubic kilometers of ice was tied up in these global sheets of ice. The average temperature on the surface of the Earth is estimated to have been cooler by approximately 6 degrees Celsius than currently. The sea level was more than 90 meters lower than currently.

15,000 years ago to 6,000 years ago: Global warming begins. The sheets of ice melt, and sea levels rise. Some heat source causes approximately 37 million cubic kilometers of ice to melt in approximately 9,000 years. Around 9,500 years ago, the last of the Northern European sheets of ice leave Scandinavia. Around 7,500 years ago, the last of the American sheets of ice leave Canada. This warming is neither stable nor the same everywhere. There are periods when mountain glaciers advance, and periods when they withdraw. These climatic changes vary extensively from place to place, with some areas affected while others are not. The tendency of warming is global and obvious, but very uneven. The causes of this period of warming are unknown.

8,000 years ago to 4,000 years ago: About 6,000 years ago, temperatures on the surface of Earth are about 3 degrees warmer than currently. The Arctic Ocean is ice-free, and mountain glaciers have disappeared from the mountains of Norway and the Alps in Europe, and from the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada. The ocean of the world is some three meters higher than currently. A lot of the present desert of the Sahara has a more humid, savannah-like climate, with giraffes and savannah fauna species.

4,000 years ago to AD 900: Global cooling begins. The Arctic Ocean freezes over, mountain glaciers form once more in the Rocky Mountains, in Norway and in the Alps. The Black Sea freezes over several times, and ice forms on the Nile in Egypt. Northern Europe gets a lot wetter, and the marshes develop again in previously dry areas. The sea level drops to approximately its present level. The temperatures on the surface of the Earth are about 0.5-1 degree cooler than at present. The causes of this period of cooling are unknown.

AD 1000 to 1500: This period has quick, but uneven, warming of the climate of the Northern Hemisphere. The North Atlantic becomes ice-free and Norse exploration as far as North America takes place. The Norse colonies in Greenland even export crop surpluses to Scandinavia. Wine grapes grow in southern Britain. The temperatures are from 3-8 degrees warmer than currently. The period lasts only a brief 500 years. By the year 1500, it has vanished. The Earth experiences as much warming between the 11th and the 13th century as is now predicted by global-warming scientists for the next century. The causes of this period of warming are unknown.

1430 to 1880: This is a period of the fast but uneven cooling of Northern Hemisphere climates. Norwegian glaciers advance to their most distant extension in post-glacial times. The northern forests disappear, to be replaced with tundra. Severe winters characterize a lot of Europe and North America. The channels and rivers get colder, the snows get heavy, and the summers cool and short. The temperatures on the surface of the world are about 0.5-1.5 degrees cooler than present. In the United States, 1816 is known as the "year with no summer". Snow falls in New England in June. The widespread failure of crops and deaths due to hypothermia are common. The causes of this period of cooling are unknown.

1880 to 1940: A period of warming. The mountain glaciers recede and the ice in the Arctic Ocean begins to melt again. The causes of this period of warming are unknown.

1940 to 1977: Cooling period. The temperatures are cooler than currently. Mountain glaciers recede, and some begin to advance. The tabloids inform us of widespread catastrophes due to the "New Glaciation". The causes of this period of cooling are unknown.

1977 to present: Warming period. The summer of 2003 is said to be the warmest one since the Middle Ages. The tabloids notify us of widespread catastrophes due to "global warming". The causes of warming are discovered - humanity and its carbon-dioxide-generating fossil-fuel use and deforestation.

Anyone else find something fishy about the final sentence?

Comments
The above chronology of recent (geologically speaking) climate changes should place global-warming catastrophists (such as those who developed the Kyoto treaty) in an awkward position. Their fundamental assumption is that Earth's climate was stable and was doing just fine before the Industrial Revolution started interfering with climate's "natural" state. It is the Industrial Revolution, and in particular the use of fossil-fuel-burning machines, that has led us to the brink of environmental catastrophe due to global warming caused by increasing amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

But it is plain to see that both warming and cooling occurred numerous times before the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, all the dire predictions of global-warming consequences - sea-level rise, for example - have happened in the past. In fact, the greatest warming period was when dinosaurs walked the land (about 70 million to 130 million years ago). There was then five to 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today, and the average temperature was 4-11 degrees Celsius warmer. Those conditions should have been very helpful to life, since they permitted those immense creatures to find an abundance of food and they survived.

The Cretaceous was an intense "greenhouse world" with high surface temperatures. These high temperatures were due to the much higher level of CO2 in the atmosphere at the time - four to 10 times as much as is in our air today. The biota was a mixture of the exotic and familiar - luxuriant green forests of now-extinct trees flourished within the Arctic Circle and dinosaurs roamed. The global sea level was at its highest ever during this period, peaking during the Late Cretaceous around 86 million years ago. It is certain that the global sea level was well over 200 meters higher during this time than it is today. The Earth was immensely hotter, the CO2 vastly more plentiful, and the sea levels much higher than they are today.

The Earth has also been immensely colder, the CO2 much less plentiful, and the sea levels much lower than today. Fifteen thousand years ago, the sea level was at least 90 meters lower than it is today. The land looked bare because it was too cold for beech and oak trees to grow. There were a few fir trees here and there. No grass grew, however, just shrubs, bushes and moss grass. In the northern parts of North America, Europe and Asia there was still tundra. The animals were different from today too. Back then there were woolly mammoth, woolly rhinos, cave bears (the former three now extinct), bison, wolves, horses, and herds of reindeer like modern-day reindeer.

The major "sin" for the global warmists is CO2. The Kyoto treaty is meant to reduce the amount of this gas so as, they say, to reduce the degree of warming and eventually return us to some stable climate system. If we look at the historical situation, however, this is cause for alarm. For one thing, there has never been a stable climate system. For another, the level of CO2 in our atmosphere is near its historic low. In the long run, the greatest danger is too little rather than too much CO2. There has been a long-term reduction of CO2 throughout the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth. If this tendency continues, eventually our planet may become as lifeless as Mars.

Glaciation has prevailed for 90% of the last several million years. Extreme cold. Biting cold. Cold too intense for bikinis and swimming trunks. No matter what scary scenarios global-warming enthusiasts dream up, they pale in comparison with the conditions another ice age would deliver. Look to our past climate. Fifteen thousand years ago, an ice sheet a kilometer and a half thick covered all of North America north of a line stretching from somewhere around Seattle to Cleveland and New York City.

Instead of reducing CO2, we should, perhaps, be increasing it. We should pay the smokestack industries hard dollars for every kilogram of soot they pump into the atmosphere. Instead of urging Chinese to stop using coal and turn instead to nuclear-generated electricity, we should beg them to continue using coal. Rather than bringing us to the edge of global-warming catastrophe, anthropogenic climate change may have spared us descent into what would be the most serious and far-reaching challenge facing humankind in the 21st century - dealing with a rapidly deteriorating climate that wants to plunge us into an ice age. Let's hope Antarctica and Greenland melt. Let's hope the sea levels rise. All life glorifies warmth. Only death prefers the icy fingers of endless winter.

What do you think?

Derek Kelly, who has been an American university teacher and a computer-software developer, is now trying to help Chinese university students speak English.

[Dr. Marten]

Ping!

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #61

Thanks for your ping! Interesting stuff.

[taxesareforever]

How come they always say it's the SUV's fault?

[Plutarch]

The Norse colonies in Greenland even export crop surpluses to Scandinavia.

Global warming alarmists should spend a year trying to grow crops and tend domestic animals amid these Viking ruins in Greenland, and then report back to us about how the global temperature is higher now than it ever has been.

[Gondring]

How come they always say it's the SUV's fault?

Okay, how does this relate to creationism and your claim to which I replied?

[Gondring]

Does the concept of global averages versus spot observations actually elude you, or are you being intentionally obtuse?

[taxesareforever]

That was a reply in need of an answer? Please enlighten me.

[Mr_Moonlight]

bump

[Gondring]

That was a reply in need of an answer? Please enlighten me

Follow the thread back...Click here or scroll up to #56 for your claim. I responded that I have no idea what you are talking about when you said, "There are four times as many wrong answers as there are right anzwers [sic] when it comes to creation."

[Protagoras]

What do you mean by what is the name of my group?

I'd be embarrassed too if I belonged to some wacko cult.

Maybe it's the "Church of Fred Flintstone" or something.

So, who do you espouse to be wiser than the God of the Bible?

No one. He was wise enough to use metaphors and literary devices to tell stories that even imbeciles could understand. SOME imbeciles didn't figure it out, they think the numbers were literal throughout the bible. Those people are called cultists.

Name a Christian group which says the earth is millions of years old.

The Roman Catholic Church and every other real Christian denomination acknowledge that the earth is not 8000 years old, but much much older.

Did the people in the bible ride on dinosaurs? Or just eat them? Did they have those little stone cars like Barney Rubble? Did Fred Flintstone really work on that dinosaurs' back at the quarry? Do you "chosen" ones have these answers? Inquiring minds want to know....

[taxesareforever]

I responded that I have no idea what you are talking about when you said, "There are four times as many wrong answers as there are right anzwers [sic] when it comes to creation."

I was being facetious. What I was alluding to is that it seems as if at least once a week another scientist makes a "discovery" which makes the world older than the last estimate. Or, some bone is discovered that changes the estimation of how old man is. It is almost as if they are playing "Name that tune in ___notes"

[taxesareforever]

What do you mean by what is the name of my group?

I'd be embarrassed too if I belonged to some wacko cult.

Well you must be embarrassed because I still haven't heard the name of your group.

And by the way, "Chosen" refers to Jesus choosing me or anyone else who believes in Him. If you have a hard spot with that, take it up with HIM.

[bizeemommie]

I find it interesting that you haven't really had any answers. You have gone into attack mode. I have a problem with your comments claiming an old earth. You say the Bible backs you up. But, does it? I think that you are using modern science to interpret the Bible. If the scientists say that the earth is billions of years old, and they have "proof", then the Bible's days must actually be symbolic and not literal. As a Christian, shouldn't you look to the Bible first? And look at fallible man secondary?

I know that it is hard for people to believe in what we can not see or understand. Science gives people something to hold on to. But, if you start by saying the Bible doesn't really mean 6 days, but each day was millions of years, then what else in the Bible can be re-interpreted using science? I believe the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God. I don't need science to explain it to me.


http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1866.asp

[spunkets]

"all of New England and all of the Great Lakes area, most of Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota and the North Dakotas, lie under ice sheets hundreds of meters thick. More than 37 million cubic kilometers of ice was tied up in these global sheets of ice. The average temperature on the surface of the Earth is estimated to have been cooler by approximately 6 degrees Celsius than currently. The sea level was more than 90 meters lower than currently."

The watermellons would want this state preserved if that's what the present conditions were.

[Protagoras]

Well you must be embarrassed because I still haven't heard the name of your group.

You never asked me the name of my denomintion. I belong to a Presbyterian Church.

So your little cult doesn't have a name?

[RepubMommy]

Look there is no global warming, okay? I'm in NJ and it snows here everyday. Last eummer, it only reached 90+ degrees briefly in early June and then we never saw that climate again. Did I mention it snows here everyday?

[Protagoras]

So you are another cult member who says dinosaurs and Jesus were around at the same time?

When DID those pesky little dinosaurs go away?

As a Christian, shouldn't you look to the Bible first?

I do. But you pretend that the bible and man's observations on the earth are mutually exclusive. The interpretation of what the bible says is the sticking point. Some people think that there is only one interpretation, theirs. And they are right, and thousands of years of scholarship by other Christians and Jews is wrong. Against all scholarship and evidence, some whacked out minister in some bizarre little cult is right, and everyone else is wrong. No wonder people end up at Jonestown and similar places.

For every poor fool looking for "a different way", there is some charlatan who is happy to take their money for his "Church of the what's happening now".

[taxesareforever]

By your responses I would not have thought that you were a member of a Christian church. I am a member of the Lutheran Church, Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

http://www.evluthsyn.org/

[JasonC]

Lead isotope ratio test.

There are rocks at that 4 billion years old. We can tell because they contain various types of lead that differ in the number of neutrons they contain, of exactly the types we see from the radioactive decay or uranium, in definite amounts. This much type A, this much type B, this much type C. We know the reactions that make each from higher up the chain of elements. The ratios between them change with time, because some of the higher up items in the chains leading to those end types are more stable than others, and hold things up for some routes more than other routes, through the list of intermediate stages.

If we look at the amount of A vs the amount of B and hypothesize "this came from decay of uranium", we can calculate from the rates of decay we see, what the implied age of the sample is. But one such ratio could be just a coincidence. So we check it - what about the ratio of A to C? Gives another date. Happens to be the same date, about. OK, maybe that is a coincidence - so we check it. We look at the ratio of B to C. That gives a third date, a third age for the same sample. Bang on the other two. Every time. Rocks brought up from deep strata, off in podunk, that nobody could possibly know or care about (in Australia e.g.). 4 billion years three ways, every time.

Now, maybe that is some truly elaborately conceived initial condition put their on purpose. But it sure as heck ain't a coincidence. And what imaginable process goes out of its way to fiddle with three tuned ratios of amounts of atomic varieties of lead, differing by a few extra neutrons, buries the result under acres of rock at the ends of the earth, then goes around doing the same thing everywhere? I mean, is it supposed to be a prank of the gods, or what? Or did something rejigger the laws of physics to make radioactive decay happen differently in the past, just for kicks? Unless you think so, and there is literally no earthly reason to think so, there are rocks billions of years old.

[taxesareforever]

And what imaginable process goes out of its way to fiddle with three tuned ratios of amounts of atomic varieties of lead, differing by a few extra neutrons, buries the result under acres of rock at the ends of the earth, then goes around doing the same thing everywhere?

The same Process that created the human body. And, by the way, why do we keep getting updated age of earth or age of bones? Talk about fiddling, consider the following in the case of the ordinary bee:
In 3 days the egg of the queen is hatched
It is fed for 9 days (3x3)
It reaches maturity in 15 days (3x5)
The worker grub reaches maturity in 21 days (7x3)
And it is at work 3 days after leaving it's cell
The drone matures in 24 days (8x3)
The bee is composed of 3 sections-head and two stomachs
The two eyes are made up of about 3,000 small eyes,
each (like the cells of the comb)having 6 sides (2x3)
Underneath the body are 6 (2x3)wax scales with which
the the comb is made
It has 6 (2x3)legs. Each leg is composed of 3 sections
The foot is formed of 3 triangular sections
The antennae consist of 9 (3x3) sections
The sting has 9 (3x3) barbs on each side.
Coincidence? Not if you believe what the God of Bible is capable of doing.
The procedure you quote should be good from square one and not need to be "readjusted". But then again, these readjustments are done by humans who are always looking to make grand discoveries in order to elevate their status in the scientific field. ("The fool says in his heart, there is no God")