FReepmail me to get on or off
Click pn POGW graphic for full GW rundown
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Posted on 03/04/2007 4:15:16 PM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
Too bad it's over.
While it lasted, the global-warming debate was an entertaining free-for-all. Then this month the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with its latest report. It was if someone had pounded a gavel. No more discussion, please. This case is closed.
Those of you still skeptical that human activity is the prime cause of global warming - well, we've put up with your annoying behavior long enough. Go to your room. Be quiet. What's the matter with you anyway?
People began comparing misguided skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Al Gore was a bit less direct. His choice of words: "global warming deniers."
A San Diego Union-Tribune media columnist, Carol Goodhue, said the controversy no longer deserved balanced coverage in the newspaper. "Sometimes the facts are so overwhelming on one side that it's unfair and inaccurate to give equal weight to both sides," she wrote last week. "This is one of those times."
Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel said TV weathercasters who displayed disbelief in human-caused warming should have their professional certification yanked.
I'm no scientist, and I'll acknowledge human activity may have played a role in the one-degree increase in global temperatures measured over the last century. But how significant was that role? And are other factors, such as solar activity, more dominant?
I doubt that climate scientists, for all their professed certainty, know either, at least with enough certainty to justify demands that the activity causing the warming - economic growth - be squashed flat. Severe limits on greenhouse gas emissions, which many propose, would undermine the economic future for millions of people.
Nor is the global-warming consensus as rock solid as some would have us believe. Last April, 60 Canadian scientists sent a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, urging a fresh look at the science backing up the Kyoto global-warming treaty.
"Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models," the scientists wrote, "so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada's climate policies are based."
Even the U.N. intergovernmental panel backed away from earlier predictions that the sea level would rise by 3 feet by the end of the century. The new prediction: 17 inches.
Like manias in financial markets, there are manias in environmental fears.
In the late 1960s, the great fear was overpopulation. "The battle to feed all humanity is over," declared the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb." "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."
A few years later, the reigning fear was global cooling. Many became concerned about a disturbing trend in falling temperatures, beginning around 1940.
That trend reversed, obviously. But environmentalists have been predicting disasters of one sort or another - often in a bullying tone of closed-minded finality - for more than a generation. They see their attitude as "progressive" in some way, and science-based.
But the scientific mind is not incurious in the manner of, say, Heidi Cullen. The scientific impulse is to see settled beliefs as potential targets of opportunity.
For centuries, global temperature trends have ebbed and flowed in cycles some scientists now link to solar activity. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600, temperatures trended upward. From 600 to 900, the trend was down, then up again until 1300. What became known as the Little Ice Age ran from 1300 to 1850. These shifts had little to do with greenhouse gases.
Oops, sorry. I forgot the debate's over.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
E. Thomas McClanahan is a member of the Kansas City Star editorial board. Readers may write to him at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or by e-mail at mcclanahan@kcstar.com.
And here is the one and only Dr. Cullen getting her ass handed to her on her own blog: Weather Channel Blog: JUNK CONTROVERSY NOT JUNK SCIENCE...
"Then this month the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with its latest report."
They did no such thing. The IPCC released a "summary" of a not yet released (and still being rewritten) report.
Click pn POGW graphic for full GW rundown
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
It never received any such thing anyway, so it's just as well.
(Should I put a Captain Obvious alert on this post?)
Goodhue is an idiot for writing such a thing. Just because *SOME* of the relevant "facts" imply a man-made cause for global warming does not necessarily mean that *ALL* of the facts imply such a thing.
But the scientific mind is not incurious in the manner of, say, Heidi Cullen. The scientific impulse is to see settled beliefs as potential targets of opportunity.
Science is about questioning established notions, making observations and conducting relevant, ethical experiments that can be analyzed to produce new insights into how our world operates. Religion, on the other hand, is the exact opposite.
...
The socialist-environmentalist religion has an agenda, and they will cherry-pick facts, ignore data, and distort numbers to fit that agenda...and then attempt to silence anyone who dares to questions them.
So what if Greenland was green when the Nordics arrived (Vikings-circa 800 or prior the little ice age)? Core samples suggest that this may be the case. So what do we do then, when Greenland becomes green again? (Not enough carbon credits?)
1. Is there "global warming?" About all we ever know now that the debate is over is nothing in climate stays exactly the same year after year. If it did there would never be any records set. Things would always be a tie. I guess we know the temp has risen half a degree centigrade - on average - over the last half century. Depending on who reads the thermometers the average may have dropped a tenth of a degree in the last 5 years. Either way, I want you to know I'm in uncontrolled panic. Aren't you?
2. We no longer need to debate if humans caused it. It's settled. Of course those pesky Piltdown Men frankly my dear didn't give a darn when they were busy melting the glaciers starting 15,000 years ago or thereabouts. Or was it Neanderthals. I always get those two confused. The important thing is the world would have been a better place if the saber teeth tigers had just eaten every last one of those rummies and the mastadons had stamped out those other evil creatures walking upright.
3. There no longer is a debate, it's settled, as to whether all the evils of the calendar on items one and two are bad things. Never mind that life expectancies get longer day after day. Never mind that we are producing more food now than ever before it since Australopithicus first swung down from his tree. The only thing we are doing is feeding all those rummies, and we all know where that will lead.
All this is part of the guerrilla warfare that is going on between proponents and skeptics of global warming. Dennis Deming, a climate scientist at the University of Oklahoma, recently told the Senate about his experience in the field:
“In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.”
With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them.... One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."-- Nir J Shaviv, sciencebits.com
(Should I put a Captain Obvious alert on this post?)
YES!
The debate is closed, ignorant plebians. Now hurry and buy your carbon offsets (indulgences) from High Priest Gore or Mother Gaia's fury will rain down on all of you. /sarcasm
Heidi Cullen and her ilk want the government to go socialist and tax everybody to the point that they can't live in a decent home and drive a car. Problem is, the former USSR and Balkan states are the worst environmental offenders in the world despite the media barrage that says it's America.
LOL!
Wouldn't a scientist continually test his hypothesis?
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