Posted on 08/01/2003 7:33:16 AM PDT by dalereed
Exposing global warming alarmists
Joseph Perkins
THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNEAugust 1, 2003
Jim Inhofe is my new hero. The Oklahoma lawmaker dared this week to deliver a speech on the Senate floor in which he declared that all the scary reports about catastrophic global warming are nothing less than a hoax.
"Much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science," said Inhofe, who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee.
"Global warming alarmists see a future plagued by catastrophic flooding, war, terrorism, economic dislocations, droughts, crop failures, mosquito-borne diseases – all caused by man-made greenhouse emissions."
Inhofe, a Republican, listed Hans Blix among the alarmists. Back in March, the chief United Nations weapons inspector absurdly remarked, "I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict."
Inhofe could have added to the list Sir John Houghton, former co-chair of climate science for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a visiting fellow at the University of California Irvine. In a commentary published this week in The Guardian, a British daily, Sir John stated that global warming is such a danger to the planet, "I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction."
He suggested that man-made warming somehow was responsible for pre-monsoon temperatures in India this year that were some 5 degrees above normal.
"Once this killer heat wave began to abate," he wrote, "1,500 people lay dead – half the number killed outright in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center." As if there were some moral equivalence.
That's the kind of thinking that reveals, in Inhofe's words, "the sheer lunacy of environmental extremists." What most offends about global warming alarmists like Houghton and, to a slightly lesser extent Blix, who has no training in climate science, is their intellectual dishonesty. Their pronouncements on global warming suggest that there is unanimity, or at least consensus, in the scientific community that the planet is dangerously overheating and that human activity is the blame.
But that simply is a fiction. There is no unanimity. There isn't even a consensus. Yet, as Inhofe noted, "even saying there is no scientific agreement over global warming is controversial."
Nevertheless, he added, "anyone who pays even cursory attention to the issue understands that scientists vigorously disagree over whether human activities are responsible for global warming, or whether those activities will precipitate natural disasters."
Indeed, much has been made of the 2001 report by the U.N. climate change panel that direly predicted that the Earth's average temperature could rise as much as 10.4 degrees over the century (60 percent higher than the panel predicted six years earlier).
News accounts almost always allude to the 2,000 scientists who purportedly endorse the panel's questionable conclusions. Yet, there have been hardly any news accounts of the more than 17,000 scientists who signed a petition challenging the U.N. climate change panel's alarmist conclusions.
Drafted by Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, it states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of Earth's climate.
"Moreover," it continued, "there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide may produce beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
Of course, scientists who challenge the global warming orthodoxy are subject to the most scurrilous attacks from politically motivated colleagues. That's what Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recently discovered.
After studying hundreds of peer-reviewed papers published by thousands of researchers over the past four decades, they distilled their findings into a paper that concluded "the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium."
That was heresy to global warming alarmists in the scientific community. Insinuations were made that Soon and Baliunas had been bought off by "energy interests," like the American Petroleum Institute.
But the Harvard scientists made no secret of the sources of their funding. The API contributed less than 10 percent. Most of the money that underwrote their study came from federal grants through NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It is "extremely important," said Inhofe, that the American public be fairly informed about the science of global warming.
For "without proper knowledge and understanding," he said, "alarmists will scare the country into enacting its ultimate goal: making energy suppression, in the form of harmful mandatory restrictions on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions, the official policy of the United States."
Inhofe has exposed the global warming hoax and the political motivation behind it. That's why I now count him among my heroes.
Perkins can be reached via e-mail at joseph.perkins@uniontrib.com.
Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
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Fear and $money$ and more United Nations agencies.
” "Global warming alarmists see a future plagued by catastrophic flooding, war, terrorism, economic dislocations, droughts, crop failures, mosquito-borne diseases – all caused by man-made greenhouse emissions."...these folks are like sheep, most live and work in ivory towers and make their living by supporting and writing about Global Warming and the supposed effects....folks there is NO global warming; there are Sun Storms that effect our climates for years and years, sometimes turning Mother Nature on her head – and due to sensitive respiratory systems, the EPA has demanded we pave over most dirt areas in and around cities, towns and even some villages...creating escalating heat in once cooler areas and creating a water shortage as in many dirt-less towns and cities, heaven sent rain can’t recharge properly. Fear the EPA, I do!
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
BTW, anyone have the link to the original declaration of scientists that said Global Warming exists?
When you start to look at the credentials of these 2,000 "scientists" you will find that among thes "scientists" are about 6 real enviornmental scientists, and the rest are everthing from proctologists to hotel managers and ALL of them are members of or support envirowacko organizations.
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