John Stossel: The Global Warming Myth?

ABC ^

[Omega Man II]

The Global Warming Myth?

The End Is Not Near -- Instead of Panicking Over Climate Change, Learn to Adjust to It

By JOHN STOSSEL

April 20, 2007 — - The heavy breathing over global warming is enough to terrify anyone.

Last week the Washington Post interviewed a 9-year-old who said the Earth is "just starting to fade away." In 20 years there will be "no oxygen" he said, and he'll be dead. The Post went on to say that "for many children and young adults, global warming is…defining their generation." How sad.

Thirty-six years of consumer reporting have taught me to be skeptical of environmental scares. Much of what the media scares us about turns out to be myths.

Watch "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity" on a special edition of "20/20" Friday, May 4th at 10 p.m. EDT

But is the global warming crisis a myth? Read on.

Excerpts from "Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity," coming out in paperback May 1. (Click here to buy "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity").

MYTH: Global warming will cause huge disruptions in climate, more storms, and the coasts will flood! America must sign the Kyoto Treaty!

This has to be broken into four pieces.

MYTH No. 1: The Earth is warming!
TRUTH: The Earth is warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the global average surface temperature increased about 0.6 degrees Celsius over the 20th century.

MYTH No. 2: The Earth is warming because of us!
TRUTH: Maybe. The frantic media suggest it's all about us. But the IPCC only said it is likely that we have increased the warming.

Our climate has always undergone changes. Greenland was named Greenland because its coasts used to be very green. It's presumptuous to think humans' impact matters so much in comparison to the frightening geologic history of the earth. And who is to say that last year's temperature is the perfect optimum? Warmer may be better! More people die in cold waves than heat waves.

MYTH No. 3: There will be storms, flooded coasts and huge disruptions in climate!
TRUTH: There are always storms and floods. Will there be much bigger disruptions in climate? Probably not.

Schoolchildren I've interviewed were convinced that America is "dying" in a sea of pollution and that "cities will soon be under water!"

Lawyers from the Natural Resources Defense Council (another environmental group with more lawyers than scientists) warn that "sea levels will rise, flooding coastal areas. Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense. Droughts and wildfires will occur more often."

Wow.

But many scientists laugh at the panic.

Dr. John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville said: "I remember as a college student at the first Earth Day being told it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy. Such doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines, but have proven to be completely false." "Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change," he continued, "sound all too familiar and all too exaggerated to me as someone who actually produces and analyzes climate information."

The media, of course, like the exaggerated claims. Most are based on computer models that purport to predict future climates. But computer models are lousy at predicting climate because water vapor and cloud effects cause changes that computers fail to predict. In the mid-1970s, computer models told us we should prepare for global cooling.

Scientists tell reporters that computer models should "be viewed with great skepticism." Well, why aren't they?

The fundamentalist doom mongers also ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas said added CO2 in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season, and might end the droughts in the Sahara Desert.

Why don't we hear about this part of the global warming argument? "It's the money!" said Dr. Baliunas. "Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it."

MYTH No. 4: Signing the Kyoto Treaty would stop the warming.
TRUTH: Hardly.

In 1997, the United Nations met in Kyoto, Japan, and asked the developed nations of the world to cut CO2 emission to below 1990 levels.

And even advocates of Kyoto admit that if all the nations signed the Kyoto agreement and obeyed it, global temperatures would still increase. The difference by 2050 would be less than a tenth of a degree. The fuss over Kyoto is absurd. Even if Kyoto would have an impact, do you think all the signers are going to honor what they signed? China is predicted to out-emit us in five to 10 years. India will soon follow. What incentive do they have to stop burning fossil fuels? Get the shovel.

The fundamentalist greens imply if we just conserved energy, and switched from fossil fuels to wind and solar power (they rarely mention nuclear power -- the most practical alternative), we would live in a nonglobal-warming fairyland of happiness. But their proposals are hopelessly impractical. Building solar panels burns energy, as does trucking them and installing them. Not to mention taking them down again to repair them.

To think that solar energy could stop the predicted temperature increase is nonsensical. EPCOT, a theme park with a solar energy ride, consumes about 395,000 kilowatt-hours per day. The Department of Energy says you'd need around a thousand acres of solar panels to generate that much electricity. EPCOT itself only sits on 300 acres, so you'd have to triple the size of the park just to operate it. (Windmills are no panacea either. They are giant bird-killing Cuisinarts, and we'd have to build lots of them to produce significant energy.)

In 2000, a group called Cape Wind proposed to erect 130 windmills in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Massachusetts. I think the drawings make them look interesting, but -- horrors! -- they would be visible from the Kennedy family vacation compound in Hyannis Port. Robert Kennedy Jr., grand poo-bah of the environmental zealotry movement, is leading a campaign to ban the windmills from Nantucket Sound. The group he leads, the Waterkeeper Alliance, said it supports wind farms -- but Kennedy fights the one near his home. What a hypocrite.

Eighty percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. Kyoto would decimate just about every Third World country's economy, and deliver a catastrophic blow to our own.

So what should we do about the threat of global warming?

First, calm down.

Second, if the world is warming, it is much more reasonable to adjust to it, rather than try to stop it. If sea levels rise, we can build dykes and move back from the coasts. It worked for Holland.

Farmers can plant different crops or move north. Russian farmers farmed northern Siberia for centuries. When the area became cold and desolate, the farmers moved south.

Far better to keep studying global warming, let the science develop and adjust to it if it happens, rather than wreck life as we know it by trying to stop it.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

[penowa]

"...environmentalists think they can manage nature..."

Nah! They know they can't manage nature, but that isn't what they are all about. Environmentalists know they can manage the sheeple if they can just scare them into putting them in charge of the sheeple's lives. Greenie Weenies = Oldtime Commies pretending to care about the environment to fool the morons

[BenLurkin]

"I remember as a college student at the first Earth Day being told it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy. Such doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines, but have proven to be completely false."

[Frank_2001]

Excellent observation! No bias in the media, that’s for sure;)

[M203M4]

Some more quotes:

Frightening Quotes from Environmentalists

(Attack Of The Socialist-Luddites)

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.

—Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth”
concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!

—Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).

Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…. Capitalism is destroying the earth.

—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.

—David Foreman, Earth First!

Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.

—Pentti Linkola

If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.

—Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth–Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22

The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world.

—John Shuttleworth

What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

—Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.

—Economist editorial

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.

—David Foreman, Earth First!

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.

—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS

—Earth First! Newsletter

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.

—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.

—Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”

—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

Poverty For “Those People”

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.

—Carl Amery

Every time you turn on an electric light, you are making another brainless baby.

—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.

—Lamont Cole

If there is going to be electricity, I would like it to be decentralized, small, solar-powered.

—Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute’s online magazine The Edge

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don’t suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them.

—Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.

—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.

—Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

—Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

—Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.

—Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.

—Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it.

—Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.

—Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling”, 1976

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.

—Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

[honolulugal]

Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown

FReepmail me to get on or off

New!!: Dr. John Ray’s
GREENIE WATCH

Please ping me if you find one I’ve missed.
OKSooner and I are doing the POGW
ping list while xcamel is on vacation.

---

[Para-Ord.45]

ping

[cynwoody]

The global warming myth is mainly a tactic to promote Watermelon Power — green on the outside and red on the inside (not to mention all wet).

See "Global Warming, Global Stifling", by Gary Jason, for a detailed dissection of the myth and its various promoters.

[what's up]

Remember Y2K.

Nothing happened.

[Loyal Buckeye]

Speaking of global warming nuts, is it legal for the Sierra Club to call me if I am on the no call list? I’ve had two computerized calls this week.

[csn vinnie]

I’m starting a new investment vehicle. We will be buying coastal real estate from environmental wackos for a penny on the dollar or less. We give them back a twenty year life estate, after which the property belongs to the Global Warming Investment Fund. They get some immediate money and give up nothing, since it will all be under water, and we will all be dead in twenty years. We will take our chances.

Now what good liberal wouldn’t sell his beachfront property to the GWIF?

[finnman69]

The current hype about global warming is a thinly veiled attempt to promote anti-capitalism, anti-industrialism, and anti-Americanism. It’s ex communists ans socialists who did not do well trying to topple capitalism.

Environmental terror is their boogieman du juor to insiste we all leave like cavemen and use outhouses.

It’s one of the reaosns they are anti-nuclear. Nuclear power would solve the false threat of increased CO2. But it would allow us to live the same way. That’s not ok to your global warming enviroweenie.

Oh, and Al Gore’s famou graph/cherry picker ride? The one that shows a 450,000 correlation between temperature and CO2? It’s right. Except temperature leads CO2. What?!?!? Yes, temperature changes are causing the C02 changes, not vice versa.

[BenLurkin]

Lunatics.

[Ladysmith]

...rather than wreck life as we know it by trying to stop it.

Ah, but that's their prime objective...

[pollyannaish]

Great! Stossell is my hero. It’s so nice to see a journalist with the courage to actually question conventional wisdom.

[Reagan Man]

John Stossel is a good reporter and he’s usually right on the money too.

All this crap over global warming is pure bunkum.

[pollyannaish]

THAT is the South Park ticket, isn’t it?

[Kay Ludlow]

They want nature to adapt to their perception of how nature should be.

The problem with that is their perception is a static view of nature rather than understanding that nature itself is always changing.

You are exactly right! Their perceptions of what the natural world is like are downright strange, many of them are urban and not spent much time in the natural world, and many others have lived in rural areas but moved so often they don't realize a tree can mature AND DIE within their lifetime.

One of the environmentalists at our own local "conservancy" group, as part of a discussion on putting trees along stream, took off on a little rant about how "there is no reason, absolutely NO REASON, that there shouldn't be native brown trout there" about a section of the creek that hasn't ever been known to have brown trout - it's been KNOWN to be an intermittent stream. Nonetheless, she sits in her office with her vision of how each stream and forest SHOULD be, and writes up government grant applications to get money to make it that way.

Many communities around the country are getting "natural heritage surveys" done, since various levels of government are paying for it. They don't realize that the impetus behind the surveys is to develop data to use to show what needs to be done to get to the 'right' mix of species - how many deer are appropriate, how many squirrels, how much poison ivy, how many snails and skinks, so they can work toward 'restoring our natural heritage'. Unlike the people of the worlds great religions who recognize a power greater than themselves, these people think they have the ability and the obligation to put everything in nature to rights. They are Gaia worshipers, but they don't think Gaia is more powerful than they are...

[CedarDave]

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Best current link to the program (the links change all the time):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2332531355859226455

[Thermalseeker]

"So, John, do you still think wrestling is fake?"

Actually, it was Geraldo Rivera that was flattened by the pro wrestler.

[attiladhun2]

Unlike the Russian farmers in days of old, they do not want to adapt

They do not want to adapt, because they believe an all-powerful government can solve every problem by just micro-managing everything, passing laws and raising taxes. There is a word for this state of mind. It is called:
HUBRIS