[GEC]

Whether it's global warming, ozone depletion, or the effects of DDT on wildlife and humans, the Communazis have been lying about science in order to promote their agenda since at least the beginning of last century.

[capt. norm]

Excellent post!

This sums it up so well, I'm saving this post for some friends who have bought into the idea of global warming.

[Eva]

Thanks for the post. I am very pleased to see that at least the Register is maintaining its sanity on the midst of the enviro freak attack.

I printed out the article for my husband to send to his associates in So. Cal, just in case they missed it.

[Cincinatus]

Another breath of fresh air, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World by Bjorn Lomborg.

[Mike Darancette]

Thank You Bump!

[Carry_Okie]

Wonderful summary article. Thank you. I wonder how many media hypists will read it... uh, better question: I wonder how many media hypists COULD read it.

[steve in DC]

Bump for later.

[zog]

Nice article. I liked the technical specualtion on the clouds, something I always sort of suspected as well. You can see it on a smaller local scale, how once an area has a decent amount of water trapped at the growth/surface level of the soil (lot of trees, farms, good humus level in the soil etc) it tends to make clouds, and helps mitigate the weather extremes as much. Heat of the day here, moisture gets sucked out of the ground, both direct evaporation from the soil and plant transpiration, causes clouds to form in the afternoon, it cools off,then usually gives up some rain back down. It works. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere actually helps plant growth, and adds to their oxygen production. this is a good thing, it's not 'bad' like the whackos insist.More CO2, more plants, the more we get an evener over-all rainfall spread, both helping to mitigate floods and droughts, and also moderating the temperature extremes. I think global co2 production is actually helpful for the climate.

There is a plant/animal mix on the planet, that's all, it's a symbiosis. We can be intelligent animals, work with the plants, and still enjoy our humaness and our technology. It's a doable thing. We can have progress, and still keep the planet self sustaining, in fact, it should get better!.

[Deckard]

Even some on the left have wised up. From Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch site (Sept. 7, 2001):

Global Warming As Political Science
Hot Air is Bad for Us

The current uproar over the posture of the Bush administration on global warming and, most recently, on power plant emissions vividly illustrate the political hypocrisy and opportunism imbuing debates on environmental issues.

Take first global warming. The charge that the current phase of global warming can be attributed to greenhouse gases generated by humans and their livestock is an article of faith among liberals as sturdy as is missile defense among the conservative crowd. The Democrats have seized on the issue of global warming as indicative of President Bush's wilful refusal to confront a global crisis that properly agitates all of America's major allies. Almost daily the major green groups reap rich political capital (and donations) on the issue.

Yet the so-called "anthropogenic origin" of global warming remains entirely non-proven. Back in the spring of this year even the International Panel on Climate Change which now has a huge stake in arguing the "caused-by-humans" thesis admits in its Summary that there could be as one in three chance its multitude of experts are wrong. A subsequent report issued under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences is ambivalent to the point of absurdity. An initial paragraph boldy asserting the "caused-by-humans" line is confounded a few pages later by far more cautious paragraphs admitting that the thesis is speculative and that major uncertainty rules on the role played in climate equations by water vapor and aerosols.

It's nothing new to say the earth is getting warmer. I myself think it is, and has been for a long, long time.On my shelf is an excellent volume put out in 1941 by the US Department of Agriculture called "Climate and Man ", which contains a chapter acknowledging "global warming" (that same phrase) and hailing it as a benign trend that would return the earth to the normalcy in climate it enjoyed several hundred thousand years ago.

Anything more than a glance at the computer models favored by the "caused by humans" crowd will show that the role of carbon dioxide is grotesquely exaggerated. Indeed the models are incapable of handling the role of the prime greenhouse gas, water vapor (clouds etc), which accounts for 25 to 30 times as much heat absorption as carbon dioxide.

Similarly the International Panel on Climate Change admits to a "very low" level of scientific understanding on an "aerosol indirect effect" that the Panel acknowledges is cooling the climate system at a hefty rate. (Aerosols are particles that are fine they float in air.)

In a particularly elegant paper published last May in Chemical Innovation, a journal of the American Chemical Society, Professor Robert Essenhigh of Ohio State University reminds us that for the last 800,000 years global temperature and carbon dioxide have been moving up and down in lockstep. Since 799,700 of these years were ones preceding any possible human effect on carbon dioxide, this raises the question of whether global warming caused the swings in carbon dioxide or vice versa. Essenhigh argues convincingly that the former is the case and as global temperatures warm a huge reservoir of carbon dioxide absorbed in the oceans is released to the atmosphere. Clearly this is a much potent input than the relatively puny human contribution to global carbon dioxide. Thus natural warming is driving the raised level of carbon dioxide and not the other way round.

But science can barely squeeze in the door with a serious debate about what is prompting global warming. Instead, the Europeans, the greens and the Democrats eagerly seize on the issue as a club with which to beat President Bush and kindred targets of opportunity ...