Oh Please, Stop With the Global Warming Nonsense

I hate to get into the global warming issue again, but we are now being inundated with newspaper articles and television talking-heads screaming about ‘having to do “something” about man-made global warming’, inspired by the questionable film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, by Al Gore. We were saved from efforts to destroy our economy when socialists, posing as independent scientists, were defeated in 1997 by a 97 to 0 Senate vote against the now-failed Kyoto Treaty (when Al Gore was Vice President). I feel we are today being setup for another attack on our way of life in the same way that atheists and deviants used Darwinism to destroy belief in God.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, said that if a lie is told often enough, it becomes accepted as the truth. The lie here is that every competent scientist believes that global warming is an unnatural occurrence caused by man’s use of the world’s resources, and if we do not stop, catastrophe beckons. The truth is that there is considerable, reasoned opposition to the global warming alarmists, but this is not being reported, as momentum builds for the wrecking of the US economy.

Another and more important truth is that if the alarmists are correct, cutting back on fossil fuel use through regulations, tax policy and credits-swapping will have little effect. Only a massive switch to a nuclear and hydrogen economy throughout the world will save us.


Townhall.com

“More than 17,000 scientists, to date, have signed a petition sponsored by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, refuting Gore's claims that global warming is human-induced. The petition states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

Renowned meteorologist Dr. William Gray, in a recent interview with Discover Magazine (which has advocated the theory of human-induced global warming), says: "This human-induced global-warming thing ... is grossly exaggerated. ... I'm not disputing there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was global cooling in the middle '40s to the early '70s. Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical ... about this global-warming thing. But no one asks us." (Gray was described by Discover Magazine's editors as one of "the world's most famous hurricane experts.")

Commenting on the misuse of science to support political agendas, Harvard's Dr. Malcolm Ross concludes of such folly, "Freeze or fry, the problem is always industrial capitalism, and the solution is always international socialism."

Dr. Roy Spencer, former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, has issued "Questions for Al Gore" based on what he calls "Gore's Inconvenient Truth." NASA scientist James Hansen, director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, argues, "The natural fluctuations of climate are still large -- at least, the natural fluctuations of weather compared to long-term climate change." (Hansen, it should be noted, is a liberal who publicly endorsed the 2004 presidential campaign of John Kerry.)

Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center, is a bit less nuanced about Gore's claims: "[Global warming] is a hoax." Townhall.com

US Senate Committee on Environment and Public works

June 27,2006
Some report excerpts commenting on the Gore film:

Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, on Gore’s film:
"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

"The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." – Bob Carter as quoted in the Canadian Free Press, June 12, 2006

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, wrote:
“A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.” - Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal

Gore’s film also cites a review of scientific literature by the journal Science which claimed 100% consensus on global warming, but Lindzen pointed out the study was flat out incorrect.
“…A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.”- Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal.

Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, wrote an open letter to Gore criticizing his presentation of climate science in the film:
“…Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?”- Roy Spencer wrote in a May 25, 2006 column.

Former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball reacted to Gore’s claim that there has been a sharp drop-off in the thickness of the Arctic ice cap since 1970.
"The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology,” –Tim Ball said, according to the Canadian Free Press.

There are many similar articles that provide some balance to the hysteria running rampant on this issue. Let’s keep our heads while we make progress switching to fuels like nuclear and hydrogen, which are cleaner and cheaper than fossil fuels, and which eliminate our dependence on the crazies in the Middle East. Most of all, let's resist any crash program, focusing only on fossil fuels, that will destroy our economy, our freedoms and our way of life.