The fundamental premise of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is that C02 is a primary driver of climate change. However, simple observational evidence from the 20th century refutes this hypothesis. During the post war industrial boom unprecedented amounts of man-made C02 were being emitted into the atmosphere by factories, cars, and power plants. Yet from 1940-1975 the earth was cooling!
The following speculations from the 1970’s describe the human suffering and tumult that were supposed to result from the coming ice age. Due to almost four decades of falling temperatures, the conventional wisdom in the media and the “consensus” among scientists was that the cooling would have catastrophic implications for the human race. Sound familiar?
“The facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade”
-A group of climatologists in the Dec. 29, 1974 edition of New York Times
“World Food Crisis” “Weather Change: Poor Harvests”
-Time Magazine 1974 article headlines
“The Cooling World” “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically” “The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now.
-Newsweek, April 28, 1975
“The temperature has already fallen back some 0.6 degrees, and shows no sign of reversal”
-Science News, March 1, 1975
Fast forward to today, and after three decades of warming we are seeing the same headlines, only now the threat is global warming. In fact, the Business and Media Institute has done an extensive study called “Fire and Ice” that examines four separate climate scenarios of gloom and doom that have been propagated by our trusted ministry of truth in the last 110 years.
1895-1930’s Coming Ice Age
1920’s-1960’s Global Warming
1950’s-1970’s Coming Ice Age
Today Global Warming
Given the egregious and repeated mistakes of predicting climate in the past, one is justified in being skeptical of the current warming hysteria.
Words like “consensus” and phrases such as “the science is settled” are designed to silent skepticism, but are completely antithetical to the scientific method. The scientific method is an iterative process that is refined by many scientists over a number of years to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Generally, it consists of observing a phenomenon, developing a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon, and creating an experiment to test the hypothesis. The global warming hypothesis has never passed step two. At the very minimum, if a controllable test is impossible, the hypothesis should have some kind of predictive capability.
The computer models used to predict climate change have been so erroneous that the IPCC has had to adjust its previous estimates to avoid losing its already waning credibility. The latest report more than halved its previous prediction of rising sea levels from 3 feet to only 17 inches in the next 100 years. We could easily adapt to a 17-inch rise over the course of 100 years. The IPCC also admits that the 2001 report overestimated the human influence on climate change by at least one-third. The latest report also corroborates the 2001 report finding that global warming will have little effect on hurricanes. The cooling of the oceans since 2003 contradicts the computer models used and the popular notion that global warming was responsible for hurricane Katrina.
The other flawed premise that is automatically and unquestionably accepted is that warming temperatures are inherently negative. The current warming is well within the natural variation of temperature change. In fact there are two fairly recent examples of the climate warming and cooling substantially without any help from our SUVs and factories. During the Little Climatic Optimum, also known as the medieval warm period from the 10th to the 13th centuries, temperatures were warmer than they are today. There is no evidence of massive flooding, extinction of half of all species (the cute cuddly polar bears obviously survived), increasing storms, or widespread plagues and disease.
On the contrary it was a period of relative prosperity that allowed agricultural production to expand, and technological innovation to occur. The existence of the medieval warm period and the little ice age from 1500 to 1850 has been affirmed by the National Academy of Sciences, but Geology Profesor David Deming knows just how inconvenient these periods are for the global warming movement. “Around 1996, I became aware of how corrupt and ideologically driven current climate research can be. A major researcher working in the area of climate change confided in me that the factual record needed to be altered so that people would become alarmed over global warming. He said, ‘We have to get rid of the medieval warm Period.’ ”
Graph showing temperature change over last 1000 years exactly as it appeared in the 1990 IPCC report.
And they did get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age with the now infamous “Hockey Stick” chart in future IPCC reports. A group of Canadian researchers found that when random data was fed into the model, it produced a hockey stick figure 99% of the time. It should not surprise anyone however. The IPCC is a political institution, and it has prostituted science for politics. Dr. Christopher Landsea, one of the world’s most esteemed experts on hurricanes resigned as a contributing author, “The lead author for the chapter on extreme weather had demonstrated he would pursue a political agenda linking global warming to more severe hurricanes.” Richard Lindzen of MIT expressed similar sentiments as a contributing author in the third assessment. He asserted that the summary did not reflect accurately the chapter he contributed to.
Not to exhaust this point, but the IPCC refused to consider the views of entomologist Dr. Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, expert on mosquito-borne malaria, in the third assessment, and completely barred him from the fourth assessment because he did not agree that global warming would affect the spread of malaria. It is easy to manufacture an artificial consensus when one ignores any skepticism or contradictory evidence.
These following examples are just to illustrate the absurdity of the claim that there is zero disagreement in the scientific community over global warming. The journals Science and Nature recently published stories about Antarctica both cooling and gaining ice. Dr. Dunbar recently wrote in the Loquitur that Science Magazine is “the premier science magazine in the world today…” A recent study in Geophysical Research letters found that the sun was responsible for up to 50% of 20th century warming. On April 6, 2006 sixty Canadian scientists wrote a letter to the Canadian prime minister challenging the prevailing wisdom on global warming. They said “If back in the mid 1990’s we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.Climate change is real is a meaningless catchphrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause.
Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise'” As the science behind anthropogenic global warming begins to unravel, many scientists have transformed from believers to skeptics.
Some of you will dismiss these dissenting scientists by concluding that they are simply in bed with big oil. They are not, but I would ask you to consider this. Environmental special interest, through 527’s, spent $20 million in the 2004 election compared to $7 million that oil and gas spent. Also consider the fact that an entire field of science and a growing industry’s existence depends exclusively on keeping the global warming scare going.
It might feel good to think that you are saving the planet with your hybrid and your mercury laden fluorescent light bulbs, but let’s put this into perspective. If you shut down the entire American economy tomorrow, the emissions from other emerging economies will replace ours within 25 years. There are far greater problems to confront that we can actually control. In 2004 Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The skeptical environmentalist”, brought together a group of top Nobel Laureates to prioritize the most significant problems facing the planet.
Among the top priorities are control of HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, subsidies and trade barriers, water, and sanitation. Priorities addressing climate change such as carbon taxes and the Kyoto protocol were categorized as “bad projects”. This is because, as Senator Inhoffe has iterated, these solutions are all economic pain, for little or no environmental gain. Patrick Moore, founder of Green peace has stated, “The environmental Movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries.” Implementing the Kyoto mandate that developing countries curb emissions beginning in 2012 would be devastating to the world’s poor.
Global warming is first and foremost a political issue driven by fear and emotional manipulation. I suspect the barrage of warming panic will resume after this unusually (and in some places record setting) cold April is over.
