Heating Up Over Nothing: Some Facts About Global Warming

Associated Content ^ | February 20, 2007 | Tim Phares

[TBP]

It is ironic that as a major cold snap sweeps the eastern and central United States, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an agency of the United Nations, has released a report warning us of global warming and insisted that it was caused primarily by human activity.

The United Nations does not have a high record of reliability. The Los Angeles Times reported when one of the UN's agencies wrote a report a few years which disagreed with conventional wisdom on second-hand smoke that the UN suppressed the report. The UN is also well known for its anti-Americanism.

Nobody denies that the climate is changing. It has been changing ever since Earth came into being. That is why there are no longer dinosaurs, mastodons, and other life forms that used to roam the planet. But over the past 100 years, the average temperature has gone up seven tenths of a degree Celsius, or about a degree Fahrenheit, most of that before 1940.

As Jonah Goldberg writes in the February 8 issue of the Los Angeles Times, "The Earth got about 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer in the 20th century while it increased its GDP by 1,800%, by one estimate." He goes on to say, "Given the option of getting another 1,800% richer in exchange for another 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer, I'd take the heat in a heartbeat." So would I.

But the Marxist Luddites of the "global warming" movement don't see it that way. They would prefer to subject the United States to the restrictions of the Kyoto protocol (which the U.S. Senate defeated 95-0 during the Clinton-Gore Administration), despite the fact that China, India, and other Third World countries are exempt and that pollution is much worse in the Third World then in the industrialized world.

In an excellent article published February 5 at the Canada Free Press website, Dr. Timothy Ball, a doctor of climatology and Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, wrote that "Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification." He notes that 30 years ago, we were being warned about global cooling by the same interests.

That is not even taking into account the fact that the polar ice caps are melting on Mars and there is even some melting on Pluto. Now, I wonder how the human race made that happen.

Interestingly, these changes coincide with an increase in solar activity. According to scientists with the Max Planck Institute, sunspot activity is at its highest in 1000 years.

It also fails to account for the fact that there was a significant warm period in the Middle Ages (roughly 800-1300 AD) in which the Vikings farmed Greenland and wine grapes grew in Nova Scotia. This was followed by a major cooling during the Renaissance, lasting from about 1350 until about 1900. Since then, we've been in a warming cycle. Like the current warm cycle, the medieval warm period (which was warmer than today, by most reports) coincided with increased activity on the Sun. Columnist Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette notes that "The Medieval Warm Period was a time (mostly) of peace and plenty; the little Ice Age (mostly) of starvation and war."

But, but, but...there's a scientific consensus, the "global warming" advocates say. Well, it was that kind of scientific consensus that got Galileo imprisoned. You can't do science by consensus. Dr. Ball writes, "Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact."

Besides, there isn't really all that much of a consensus. The actions of the "global warming" activists underline that fact. Note the recent controversy at the Weather Channel. Heidi Cullen, a self-proclaimed "climate expert" for the Weather Channel, called for silencing any meteorologist who questions man-made "global warming" by decertifying them. Cullen said, "It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement." Of course, she apparently did not know that in the Southern Hemisphere, hurricanes do rotate counterclockwise. On December 17, 2006, her program, "The Climate Code," featured Grist Magazine's Dave Roberts calling for Nuremberg trials for anyone who questioned man-made "global warming." Cullen is a contributor to the IPCC report. Yet all responsible meteorologists admit that the climate goes in cycles. But that apparently doesn't matter to Cullen and her friends.

The meteorologists and climatologists who promote the alarmist theory of global warming told us that the 2006 hurricane season would be dramatically worse than the 2005 season. It was not nearly as bad. If they were that for off on a short-term projection like that, why are we supposed to take their word for it on a long-term theory such as anthropogenic global warming?

When physician-scientist-author Michael Crichton suggested that climate change theories be reviewed by double-blind studies and evidentiary standards akin to what the Food and Drug Administration uses for new medicine, he was verbally vandalized by Senator Barbara Boxer. Senators Susan Collins ("R"-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) have demanded that Exxon Mobil stop funding research that questions man-made global warming, something it hasn't been doing at least since 2005.

Former Vice President Al Gore cancelled an interview with a Danish newspaper (one which had been long scheduled) rather than appear with Bjorn Lonborg, a former member of Greenpeace who is a global-warming skeptic. Yet Gore remains a major stockholder in Occidental Petroleum.

Why do the advocates of the man-made warming viewpoint have to resort to these intimidation tactics if there is a scientific consensus? The answer is because there isn't.

Recently, Fred Singer and Dennis Avery wrote a book called Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years in which they show that there is evidence of 600 warmings in the last million years.

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia is one of a group of hundreds of climate scientists who question the man-made global warming hypothesis. Another is Canadian Professor Tim Patterson of Carleton University. He says, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years."

Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences argues that the small increase in temperatures may be caused by atmospheric changes not related to human activity. He notes that until early in the 20th century, temperatures were going down. Shaidurov explains that the most common greenhouse gas is water and very small changes in the water vapor in the atmosphere can contribute to significant changes in the temperature of the Earth's surface. We have little control over the amount of water vapor.These are just a few of the hundreds of climate scientists who diverge from the theory of man-made "global warming." Yet the effort to force us to embrace extreme solutions to this problem, solutions that could damage our standard of living, continues. Are we getting all heated up over nothing?

[TBP]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030321075236.htm