The first thing we have to do is fire all the reporters, editors and headline writers who have not got a clue about “global warming” except that it scares the hell out of readers and sells newspapers.
In late March, my local daily carried an Associated Press article by Randolph E. Schmid with a headline, “Global warming warns Earth of a sea change.” It ran the story across six columns and threw in a photo of the Greenland ice sheet.
Such stories are best distinguished by how many times the words “probably”, “may”, and “could” occur in the body of the text. These are very slippery words used by so-called scientists trying to justify their latest “findings.” If you look for something hard enough, you are bound to find some signs, some indicators, and some intimation that something is happening or about to happen. Every day people find a reason to buy stocks whose value disappears for unforeseen reasons.
Schmid began his article with his opinion that “The Earth is already shaking beneath melting ice as rising temperatures threaten to shrink polar glaciers and raise sea levels around the world.” You had to read to the end of the second paragraph to learn that he was proclaiming all this would occur thanks to “new research appearing in today’s issue of the journal Science.” The only problem is that this pathetic excuse for a scientific publication has been banging the global warming drum for so long, its editors are desperate to publish anything to support the theory.
At this point, all of us have been deluged with “research” that is cited as proof of global warming, ranging from the migration of a few thousand feet by some furry creatures in a national park to the momentary melting of snow on some African mountaintop. At no time is the activity of the Sun ever mentioned, nor is the increased volcanic activity in the Earth’s oceans, nor the fact that no one knows why clouds do what they do.
The Schmid article is just one long list of horrors, all of which, we have read and heard about for years. The research claims that the Earth’s temperature by 2100–a century from now–will “probably be at least 4 degrees warmer than now…” Since few of us will be around 90 years from now, no one will be able to confirm this prediction.
Other scientists cited in the article predict “Melting could raise the sea level one to three feet over the next 100 to 150 years…” And “increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the next century could raise Arctic temperatures as much as 5 to 8 degrees.”
Meanwhile, back on Earth, on March 12 a late season storm dropped 8 inches of snow on northern Great Britain and, a week earlier, there were blizzards in Western Europe that killed 17 people. Some regions of Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy saw the heaviest March snowfall in nearly three decades. In February it had snowed for 50 straight hours in Sichuan, China, and a record freeze occurred in Russia that destroyed an estimated 30% of its winter crops. “This is the worst winter in 28 years,” said Alexei Gordeyev, the Agricultural Minister. Are we looking at a trend? Nobody really knows.
While the editors of Science magazine were pumping up the hype about global warming, the Earth was providing a panorama of very cold events whose intensity appears to be growing. And why not? The Earth is currently at the tail end of a 12,000 interglacial period. In other words, if the cycle holds true, we are due for another Ice Age.
On a recent CBS “Sixty Minutes” program, NASA’s James Hansen proclaimed that humans now control the Earth’s climate. Do you get that funny feeling that there is a major, coordinated, propaganda campaign to convince us–one more time–that global warming is real?
Dr. Hansen cited as evidence that the edges of the Greenland ice sheet were rapidly melting. He attributed this to man-made greenhouse gases. Apparently Dr. Hansen had not read up on the history of Greenland because, as Dr. Dennis Avery, a senior fellow for Hudson Institute, pointed out, “Melting around the edges is exactly what the Vikings saw on Greenland 1,000 years ago when they named the island–for its green coastal meadows.”
During a period climatologists now call the “Medieval Warming”, the Vikings thrived for some 300 years. Then the “Little Ice Age” began and, by 1408, Greenland was, well, really cold and the Vikings had abandoned the place. Dr. Avery points out that “Our panic-prone scientists seem to have forgotten their own ice cores, drilled deep into the Greenland ice sheet in the 1980s.” Those ice cores revealed that the Earth is in a constant cycle between hot and cold climate.
It is instructive that, after the 1970s during which environmentalists were warning of a coming Ice Age, they changed course and began telling everyone “global warming” was coming. And where were all those man-made greenhouse gases in the pre-industrial age of the Vikings and elsewhere around the world that experienced the Medieval Warming? And why didn’t they fend off the Little Ice Age?
The warming that has occurred, 0.8 degree Celsius, “virtually all occurred before 1940,” notes Dr. Avery, “and thus before much industrial development. Ice cores from the Fremont Glacier in Wyoming “show it went from Little Ice Age cold to Modern Warming warm in the ten years between 1845 and 1855. Naturally.”
That’s the operative word. “Naturally.” It has to due with massive climate forces that were and will remain beyond any “control” by mankind. Is it just my imagination or is global warming getting–dare I say it–colder these days?
Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com. Alan can be reached at: acaruba@aol.com.
