The hoax of man-made global warming revisited

Recent articles on this blog have pointed out the real threat to our American way of life presented by the misnamed Energy and Security Independence Act but we can’t escape the fact that this and other laws of the federal and state governments are prompted by the also misleading idea that man is causing our planet to ‘warm’. Despite numerous reports and articles by many actual scientists to the contrary, the public is made to believe that humans are the culprits behind global warming and it is irresponsible to not take some action, virtually any action dictated by the global warming alarmists, to diminish this alleged impending destruction of the Earth and with it, many inhabitants of the planet.

Although it may do little good to inform people about the enormous hoax world organizations and politicians of all stripes are playing on the public, one cannot help but to try to disperse as much information and facts to others in the hope that they in turn will spread the truth to still more ‘others’ so that it may be possible to stop the onslaught of this hubris before we are unable to reverse the trend of global dominance and redistribution of wealth from successful societies to primitive ones.

Let’s once again examine what is happening.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change issued their latest report on global warming, stating that “the earth's average temperature could rise by as much as 10.4 degrees over the next 100 years”, which is 60 percent higher than the same group predicted just six years ago. This was followed up with some alarming predictions of what this rise in temperature would mean to our planet and its inhabitants: “Ocean currents would be altered and huge portions of Alpine snowcaps would be wiped away. There would be devastating droughts, floods, violent storms and the spread of cholera and malaria”.

In a letter to the Washington Post, Dr. Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, which is on his Science and Environmental Policy Project website, pointing out that the spokesman for the IPCC claimed that the climate has warmed in the last 50 years. However, he and other scientists “have seen little or no warming since about 1940”. Therefore, they can't put much faith in these "theoretical forecasts."

Numerous scientists agree with Dr. Singer. In 1998, 17,000 scientists signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, saying, in part, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate"; but this petition has not been reported very much, if at all, in news media.

We are told that more than 2,000 scientists were consulted by the IPCC in drafting its report, but IPCC did not also mention that not all of them agreed with the findings. However, even if there had been total agreement among those ‘consulted’, the sad fact is that these scientists were handpicked by the IPCC and their respective governments, most of which were fully behind the Kyoto treaty. Clearly, the IPCC's reports are products of political rather than scientific processes.

One example of the shoddy support for the IPCC report: an observation by Harvard University oceanographer James J. McCarthy, a prominent member of the IPCC panel, was reported by the New York Times. Dr. McCarthy said “that for the first time in 50 million years the ice pack at the North Pole had melted”. It seems Dr. McCarthy had observed open water at the North Pole while on an educational cruise and he promptly reported this as evidence of the effects of human-induced climate change. This is the caliber of the ‘science’ supporting the idea of man-made global warming.

After printing Dr. McCarthy’s ‘observation’, the New York Times was contacted by scientists more familiar with the Arctic's climate history and geological record who pointed out that, during the summer, more than 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is free of ice and it is not rare that the North Pole is part of that 10 percent. Ten days later the New York Times printed a retraction which was not challenged by Dr. McCarthy.

The IPCC has stated that global warming is causing the sea level to rise dangerously. However, in October 1999, a team of scientists led by Dr. Howard Conway of the University of Washington reported that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was melting; but the melting was believed to be part of an ongoing natural cycle that began when the ice age ended 10,000 years ago - not as a result of anything humans did or are doing. Conway also predicted that it will take several thousand years before this melting ice sheet would begin to affect seaboard cities, assuming the earth doesn't enter a new ice age.

Here are some other points the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should have considered before issuing their report, and which gullible agents of man-made global warming should understand before jumping on the ‘melting ice berg’ pronounced by alarmists:

• "While the IPCC is able to show a recent temperature rise by averaging data from surface thermometers, there is no corresponding rise when data is obtained from well-controlled weather stations where local heating urban effects are eliminated.
• Data from more reliable weather satellites show no appreciable warming trend since 1979, nor does the data gathered from weather balloons.
• Data from tree rings, ice cores and ocean sediments shows, after the modest 1.0 degree global warming of the last 140 years, present-day temperatures remain cooler by about 1.0 degree than they were when the Vikings settled Greenland in medieval times.
• For more than 7,500 of the last 10,000 years, temperatures have been higher than today."

We who are skeptical of the IPCC report and its political consequences have every right to remain skeptical. We are in good company with thousands of expert scientists. The public should not be manipulated into accepting laws that transfer our wealth and cripple our economy, especially laws based on views of political scientists rather than the scientific evidence provided by actual scientists.