| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Captain Compassion" |
| Date: |
21 Jun 2006 08:58:54 PM |
| Object: |
The False Alert of Global Warming |
The False Alert of Global Warming
By Tom Bethell
Published 5/18/2005 12:06:43 AM
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8177
Global warming became the environmentalists' cause celebre in the late
1980s. They had turned on a dime, for only a few years earlier global
cooling had been their mantra. They didn't know what had caused that
earlier "cooling trend," but its effects were sure to be bad. "The
drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only in ten
years," Newsweek reported in 1975. "The resulting famines could be
catastrophic."
Now warming is the specter, with its melting glaciers, inundated
cities, and the Gulf Stream reversing course. But I doubt if the
enviros can keep on fomenting the scare much longer. It has been based
on little more than extrapolated temperatures and spurious charts.
What are the facts? Surface temperature measurements show a global
warming period from about 1910 to 1940, followed by a cooling period
until 1975. Since then we have experienced a slight warming trend.
These three periods add up to a surface-temperature increase of
perhaps one-degree Fahrenheit for the entire 20th century.
Satellite measurements of atmospheric temperatures do not agree,
however. They began only in 1979, and have shown no significant
increase over the last quarter century. Balloon readings did show an
abrupt, one-time increase in 1976-1977. Since then, those temperatures
have stabilized.
Environmentalists believe that the 20th-century warming was caused by
human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. That produces
carbon dioxide -- one of several "greenhouse gases." The argument is
that their release into the atmosphere wraps the Earth in an invisible
shroud. This makes the escape of heat into outer space slightly more
difficult than its initial absorption from sunlight. This is the
Greenhouse Effect. So the Earth warms up.
But whether man-made carbon-dioxide emissions have caused measurable
temperature increases over the last 30 years is debated. Carbon
dioxide is itself a benign and essential substance, incidentally.
Without it, plants would not grow, and without plant-life animals
could not live. Any increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
causes plants, trees, and forests to grow more abundantly. It should
be a tree-hugger's delight.
The surface data suggest that man-made carbon dioxide has not in fact
increased global temperatures. From 1940 to 1975, coal-fired plants
emitted fumes with great abandon and without restraint by Greens. Yet
the Earth cooled slightly in that time. And if man-made global warming
is real, atmospheric as well as surface temperatures should have
increased steadily. But they haven't. There was merely that one-time
increase, possibly caused by a solar anomaly. In addition, an "urban
heat island effect" has been identified. Build a tarmac runway near a
weather station, and the nearby temperature readings will go up.
GLOBAL WARMING BECAME THE FOCUS of activism at the time of the Earth
Summit in Rio, in 1992. Bush the elder signed a climate-change treaty,
with signatories agreeing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions below
1990 levels. The details were worked out in Kyoto, Japan. But America
was the principal target, everyone knew it, and Clinton didn't submit
the treaty to the Senate for ratification. The 1990 date had been
carefully chosen. Emissions in Germany and the Soviet Union were still
high; Germany had just absorbed East Germany, then still using
inefficient coal-fired plants. After they were modernized, Germany's
emissions dropped, so the demand that they be reduced below 1990
levels had already been met and became an exercise in painless
moralizing.
The same was true for the Soviet Union. After its collapse, in 1991,
economic activity fell by about one-third. As for France, most of its
electricity comes from nuclear power, which has no global-warming
effects but has been demonized for other reasons. If the enviros were
serious about reducing carbon dioxide they would be urging us to build
nuclear power plants, but that is not on their agenda. They want
windmills (whether or not they kill golden eagles).
Under the Kyoto Protocol, U.S. emissions would have to be cut so much
that economic depression would have been the only certain outcome. We
were expected to reduce energy use by about 35 percent within ten
years, which might have meant eliminating one-third of all cars. You
can see why the enviros fell in love with the idea.
Third World countries are exempt, as are China and India. Australia,
like the U.S., has refused to ratify. Thirty-five countries, mostly in
Europe, have agreed to reduce emissions. But there are no enforcement
mechanisms, the potential for cheating is unlimited, and the principal
irritation today is that the main enemy, the United States, slipped
the noose.
Any unusual event is now likely to be linked to climate change. Within
24 hours of the tsunami in December, the CBS evening news displayed a
graphic that had only the words "global warming" and "tsunamis."
Citing unnamed "climate experts," Dan Rather intoned:
Climate experts warned today that tsunamis could become more common
around the world and more dangerous. They cite a number of factors,
including a creeping rise in sea levels believed to come from global
warming and growing populations along coastal areas.
The claim that the globe is warming depends on knowing earlier
temperatures. Such information can only be obtained indirectly.
Climate scientists depend on tree rings, bore holes, ice cores, the
skeletons of marine organisms. The graph that was most effective in
persuading policy-makers became known as the hockey stick. The
temperature line is mostly horizontal, perhaps declining slightly for
900 years, then abruptly heading up into a warmer range over the last
100 years. The 900 years are the handle, the last hundred are the
blade.
THE "HOCKEY STICK" was first published in 1998 by the climatologist
Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, and co-authors. It was
immediately used by the United Nations to promote the idea that we
have an unprecedented crisis on our hands. But the chart also aroused
suspicions, because for years there had been a broad agreement among
climatologists that global temperatures had not been as unvarying as
the chart implied. There had been something called the Medieval Warm
Period, which persisted until the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the
14th and 15th centuries. Both periods lasted for several hundred
years.
The warmer period, accompanied by a flowering of prosperity,
knowledge, and art in Europe, seems to have been wholly beneficial.
Agricultural yields increased, marshes and swamps -- today called
wetlands -- dried up, removing the breeding grounds of
malaria-spreading mosquitoes. Infant mortality fell, the population
grew. Greenland was settled by the Vikings, who reached a peak of
prosperity in the 12th and 13th centuries. They began declining in the
late 14th century, with the colder weather. Then the settlements
perished.
The warm period has been recognized in the climate textbooks for
decades, and it was an obvious embarrassment to those claiming that
the 20th-century warming was a true anomaly. Also, the earlier changes
occurred when fossil-fuel consumption could hardly have been the
culprit. They would prove that warming could occur without human
intervention.
Consider, in this context, the experience of David Deming with the
University of Oklahoma's College of Geosciences. In 1995, he published
a paper in the journal Science, reviewing the evidence showing that
bore hole data showed a warming of about one degree Celsius in North
America over the last 100 to 150 years. Deming continues:
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, someone who would pervert science in
the service of social and political causes. So 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."
Whether intentionally or not, that is exactly what Mann's "hockey
stick" did.
Once doomsayers convince us that we are experiencing something new,
they feel free to claim that we face a catastrophe. They can
extrapolate from the minor and beneficial warming that we may (or may
not) have experienced in the last generation and argue that
temperatures will keep on rising until the ice caps melt and cities
flood.
Then the hockey stick was challenged by a Toronto minerals consultant
named Stephen McIntyre, who, remarkably, had no credentials as a
climatologist. He spent two years and $5,000 of his own money trying
to uncover Mann's methods. Mann at first did give him some
information, but then cut him off saying he didn't have time to
respond to "every frivolous note" from nonscientists. McIntyre was
joined by another Canadian, and in 2003 they published a critical
article. Mann had "used flawed methods that yield meaningless
results."
In a rebuttal, Mann revealed new information that had not appeared in
his original paper. It had been published in the British journal
Nature, which later published a correction. McIntyre thinks there may
be more errors but still doesn't know how the graph was generated.
Mann has refused to release his secret formula. A Wall Street Journal
reporter doggedly pursued the matter and contacted Mann. He told the
reporter: "Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the
intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in."
Michael Mann now concedes it is plausible that past temperature
variations may have been larger than thought. Fred Singer, a leading
critic of warming scares and founder of the Science and Environmental
Policy Project, says that "the hockey stick is dead." He was recently
nominated by warmists to receive the First Annual Flat Earth Award for
being "the year's most prominent global warming denier." Nominated
along with him were Rush Limbaugh and Michael Crichton, the thriller
writer.
IN HIS RECENT BOOK State of Fear, Crichton unexpectedly emerged as a
powerful critic of modish conclusions about global warming. He studied
the subject for a couple of years before writing his recent book, to
which he added an appendix comparing global-warming science to
eugenics. Earlier, in a speech at Caltech, he had compared it to the
search for extraterrestrials (which he says is based on bogus
science). There may have been some warming as a part of a natural
trend, Crichton allows. But "no one knows how much of the present
trend might be natural or how much man-made."
"Open and frank discussion" of global warming is being suppressed, he
believes. One indication is that "so many of the outspoken critics of
global warming are retired professors." They can speak freely because
they are no longer seeking grants or facing colleagues "whose grant
applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their
criticisms."
Environmentalists have become adept at de-legitimizing their opponents
by saying they are "supported by industry," but studies funded by
environmentalist organizations are "every bit as biased," Crichton
added. They have become a special interest like any other, with
legislative goals and millions spent on lobbying.
Myron Ebell, who works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
in Washington, D.C., one of the few groups that examines
global-warming claims skeptically, says that environmentalism is now a
$1.5 billion industry. In Washington, skeptics (like himself) are
outnumbered by global warming advocates perhaps by a margin of 300 to
one. Yet CEI, greatly underfunded by comparison with groups like the
Sierra Club, tends to be characterized in the media as "industry
supported." The enviros' problem is that they have "everything going
for them except the facts," Ebell says.
Some environmentalists have begun to echo the complaint that they are
a special interest. A few months ago, Michael Shellenberger and Ted
Norhaus wrote a widely circulated 14,000-word essay called "The Death
of Environmentalism." It "provoked a civil war among tree huggers,"
Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in the New York Times. In effect, it was a
cry of anguish: Why have we been unable to win on our top issues,
especially global warming? They called it "the world's most serious
ecological crisis," which "may kill hundreds of millions of human
beings over the next century." They looked back to their golden age in
the 1970s -- the time when they began "using science to define the
problem as 'environmental.'"
"Using science" is what they were doing, all right, and the rest of us
were blinded by it, for about 25 years. But the problem wasn't that
the use of science had led them to propose unattractive "technical
fixes," when they should have been appealing to something larger in
the human spirit. The problem was that their science was never very
good to begin with. And as its inadequacies became more apparent,
their scare tactics became more apparent, too.
To keep the money rolling in, environmentalists always need a crisis.
It looks as though they will have to cook up a new one.
--
"Science is the record of dead religions." -- Oscar Wilde
"There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is
impossible." -- Jack Vance
"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
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| User: "PagCal" |
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| Title: Re: The False Alert of Global Warming |
23 Jun 2006 02:28:35 AM |
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Captain Compassion wrote:
The False Alert of Global Warming
By Tom Bethell
Published 5/18/2005 12:06:43 AM
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8177
Global warming became the environmentalists' cause celebre in the late
1980s. They had turned on a dime, for only a few years earlier global
cooling had been their mantra. They didn't know what had caused that
earlier "cooling trend," but its effects were sure to be bad. "The
drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only in ten
years," Newsweek reported in 1975. "The resulting famines could be
catastrophic."
What, more tripe from your oil buddies?
Just go read this one, and you can clearly see that Global Warming is
real: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13474997/
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