The Fiction Of Climate Science Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."
Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY ? coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."
OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?
In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end?leading into the next ice age."
You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.
In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.
Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.
Sorry, I noticed.
It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.
Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes.
His PR folks say he's "carbon neutral" due to some trades. I'm unsure of how that works, but, maybe there's a tribe in the Sudan that cannot have a campfire for the next hundred years to cover Al's energy gluttony. I'm just not sophisticated enough to know how that stuff works. But I do understand he flies a private jet when the camera crew is gone.
The fall of Saigon in the '70s may have distracted the shrill pronouncements about the imminent ice age. Science's prediction of "A full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," came from its March 1, 1975 issue. The Christian Science Monitor observed that armadillos were retreating south from Nebraska to escape the "global cooling" in its Aug. 27, 1974 issue.
That armadillo caveat seems reminiscent of today's tales of polar bears drowning due to glaciers disappearing.
While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Their growth rings show what's happened no matter which philosophy is in power. Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales.
Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg.
Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans.
Today, as I peck out these words, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops."
To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. But the longer term changes are no more compelling, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age?
I can ask "outrageous" questions like that because I'm not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status.
Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis. They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. That's another inconvenient fact.
Show me the warming It's the science scandal of the year. A thousand e-mails and 2,000 other documents were swiped from the server of Britain's Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University and posted on the Web. Many were truly embarrassing to the writers, while others have been quoted out of context and falsely used as "proof" that global warming is "a hoax."
But in one e-mail, a top "warmist" researcher admits it's a "travesty" that "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment." (Emphasis added.) Further, "any consideration of geoengineering [is] quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!"
"Geoengineering," as in the Waxman-Markey "cap and trade" bill that passed the House and that the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates will lop $9.4 trillion off the economy? The one that President Barack Obama plans to support at next week's U.N. Climate Change Conference? Yes, that "geoengineering."
As it happens, the writer of that October 2009 e-mail--Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the warmist bible, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report--told Congress two years ago that evidence for manmade warming is "unequivocal." He claimed "the planet is running a 'fever' and the prognosis is that it is apt to get much worse."
But Trenberth's "lack of warming at the moment" has been going on at least a decade. "There has been no [surface-measured] warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995," observes MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. "According to satellite data, global warming stopped about 10 years ago and there's no way to know whether it's happening now," says Roy Spencer, former NASA senior scientist for climate studies.
Don't tell that to Al Gore. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," he warned a few years back. In a typically understated claim, he cautioned "we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced." He forgot the frogs, the locusts and the boils, but point made.
And yet during the past decade, we've belched so-called "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere at ever greater rates, from 6,510 million metric tons in 1996 to 8,230 in 2006--a 26% increase. Atmospheric concentrations have also reached the highest levels ever observed.
Still, there's no increase in warming. In fact, according to a study in Nature magazine last year, Trenberth's "moment" may last another decade, and we might even see some cooling.
"In the IPCC view, climate change is mostly under the control of humans," says Spencer. "I believe [temperature trends] are essentially natural."
Spencer is not alone in this belief. Recently, a major study in the American Geophysical Union's official publication, the Journal of Geophysical Research, supported earlier research in concluding that at least 80% and perhaps far more of the observed warming over the past half-century is natural. Factors well beyond our control, such as cloud cover, Spencer says, matter far more than we do.
None of this means mankind plays no role in climate. "We know there is a greenhouse effect and adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, like carbon dioxide, should cause more warming," Spencer says. "We just don't have a clue how much." But, he adds, "two or three times an extremely small number is still an extremely small number."
While Waxman-Markey and Obama's Copenhagen initiative would address global warming through costly carbon dioxide emissions reductions, we would get no return on such an investment. Waxman-Markey would have such a small effect on global climate that it's nothing more than a down payment, as even the most zealous global warming crusaders concede.
Just maybe, before we take out that mortgage with our struggling economy as collateral, we ought to see how the science develops. For those who say we can't afford to wait, the answer is we can't afford not to.
