Comments and reports about global warming are getting silly and even ridiculous. Al Gore says we have ten years left. We’re told cooling is due to warming. More rain and flooding and less rain and drought are both due to warming. More hurricanes are predicted while fewer occur. Global temperatures declined as much in the first few months of 2008 as they increased in the previous 100 plus years due to warming. Recently we were told global warming is causing an increase in kidney stones in a travesty of geographic correlation assuming cause and effect. One blogger who began recording, with tongue in cheek, all the events attributed to global warming was John Brignell.
Actually, ridiculous statements and definitive claims of doom are a good sign. Good because they are a sign of desperation as evidence accumulates that human CO2 is not causing warming or climate change. Good because people and governments are changing their positions faced with the evidence and the costs already incurred by wrong policies and actions. Good because governments are coming to their senses and getting their priorities right. India putting development to feed starving citizens ahead of unsubstantiated threats of climate change is a great advance. It also provides an argument that transcends and regains the moral high ground environmentalists claim.
There are troubling aspects with how far the myth of human caused climate change has been carried because so much has already become entrenched in legislature, commerce and behavior. For example, the fact they have the direction wrong as we prepare for warming while cooling occurs and is expected to continue. Director of the Space and Science Research Center, John L. Casey, declared:
“After an exhaustive review of a substantial body of climate research, and in conjunction with the obvious and compelling new evidence that exists, it is time that the world community acknowledges that the Earth has begun its next climate change. In an opinion echoed by many scientists around the world, the Space and Science Research Center (SSRC), today declares that the world’s climate warming of the past decades has now come to an end. A new climate era has already started that is bringing predominantly colder global temperatures for many years into the future. In some years this new climate will create dangerously cold weather with significant ill-effects world wide. Global warming is over – a new cold climate has begun.”—Space & Science
More extreme stories predicting disasters at worst or unprecedented change at best are due to growing desperation as awareness builds among the public that humans are not causing warming or climate change. However, they are also the legacy of the mandate and procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We heard about the 2,500 members being a consensus of scientists, but this is anything but the truth. A majority, 1,900, only look at the impacts of global warming or climate change. Most are bureaucrats not scientists. Worse, they start from a false assumption because they accept the results of the Science Report that changes are due to human activity and then speculate on the impacts.
IPCC Reports engender many of the news stories about the impending doom and disaster. This has created the severe bias against any benefits from warming. I received more attacks and nasty emails over an article I wrote suggesting many of the benefits of warming, especially for cold climate countries. This reaction and the pattern of responses to evidence that human CO2 is not causing climate change will lead to more extreme claims and statements.
While climate science was taken over by politicians, environmentalists and scientists with political agendas, the steady but inexorable search for scientific truth continued. This was inevitable as skeptical scientists tested and challenged what is known as the Anthropogenic Warming Theory (AGW). Atmospheric CO2 levels would increase because of human contributions and since it was a Greenhouse gas temperatures would increase. That has not happened.
Instead the major assumptions of the theory have collapsed. Since 2000, global temperatures have declined while atmospheric CO2 levels increased. All records of any duration for any time period from the 600 million year geologic record to the 600,000 year ice core record to the modern instrumental record show temperature increases before CO2 increases. Even more damaging is the growing evidence that CO2 causes cooling not warming.
As more and more experts examine climate science they find it wanting at the most basic levels. Jim Peden wrote,
“As a dissenting physicist, I simply can no longer buy the notion that CO2 produces any significant warming of the atmosphere at any rate. I’ve studied the atomic absorption physics to death, from John Nicol’s extensive development to the much longer winded dissertation by Gerlich & Tscheuschner and everything in between, it simply doesn’t add up.—Qando.net
Dr. Kelvin Kemm, former scientist at South Africa’s Atomic Energy Corporation, wrote, “There is no evidence man-made CO2 causes climate change.”—Engineering News
More and more people are questioning and learning about the bad science. They see and hear the contradictions in the claims, the failure of previous disaster predictions. Enough reports trickle through to raise questions about previous threats. For example, hysteria about arctic sea ice last year dominated the news while the fact Antarctic sea ice reached record levels was barely reported. Similarly, we are not hearing in main stream media about the current situation because the situation has returned to ‘normal’ and that is not good news for the purveyors of doom.
“On a global basis, sea ice anomalies in May 2008 continue to be above the long-term average during the 1979-2008 satellite period – the 10th highest on record. SH (Southern Hemisphere) sea ice is off a bit (in anomaly terms) from record levels earlier in 2008, but remains at near record levels (3rd highest May anomaly).”—Climate Audit
Thanks to the Internet, enough people hear about the real story and enough trickles through to an increasingly skeptical public. They receive the information in the context of their knowledge that weather forecasts are frequently wrong especially beyond 48 hours.
Why does the myth of humans causing global warming or climate change persist? The obvious answer is money and that is certainly true. In fact it is increasingly true as more and more individuals, companies and countries profit from carbon credits, cap and trade, business opportunities and taxes. We must never forget that a major proponent and marketer of carbon credits was Ken Lay as CEO of Enron or that Al Gore has a company that benefits from them. But there are other forces at work. The mix of socialist ideology with environmentalism as a religion, especially among the few select scientists associated with IPCC tends to transcend financial reward. Dogma has a very powerful determination.
We also have the problem of why apparently intelligent people and especially scientists persist in the face of evidence. Leo Tolstoi, Russian author provided one explanation when he wrote ”I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Debate exists on many blogs about whether their actions are malfeasance or incompetence. Were the errors made in the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) data showing 1998 the warmest year in the US record when it was actually 1934 a genuine error or an adjustment that reinforced the claim by the Director James Hansen and his friend Al Gore that the warming in the 1990s were evidence of the human cause of warming and climate change? It is a debate that will and should expand once it reaches the public forum through mainstream media. The question of accountability for the damage done is another issue.
Al Gore’s ten year threat implies a tipping point. James Hansen and others similarly warn we are close to such a point. Ironically, we are reaching a tipping point, but it is not the one they envisioned. Rather it is the tipping point created by their extremism. A point where the increasing claims and threats become so irrational and ridiculous that they force people to change their perspective even if they still don’t understand the science.
