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The editorial board is in essence saying there is consensus. But there isn’t. For example, a climate specialist in Germany found that “fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed climate change is principally caused by human activity.”
Author Michael Crichton concludes that, “historically the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.”
Moreover, science is science; consensus is not science.
When I was a college student and a liberal, I bought into all of the “environmental disaster” theories. I read the doom and gloom propaganda to include Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Ehrlich’s “Commoner’s,” and many of the others.
Somewhere along the way, I began asking myself if there was any truth to any of it. The answer was very disconcerting.
Did 56 million Americans starve to death as Paul Ehrlich predicted?
No, we are obese. Did
80 percent of animal species disappear by 1995 (Smithsonian), did 50,000 species become extinct each year (World Wildlife Fund), or were 15 to 20 percent of earth’s lifeforms history by 2000 (Global Report 2000)? These projections were nonsense. Hysteria over acid rain resulted in a Clean Air Act. Ironically, just six weeks before Bush senior signed that bill, the government completed an almost $500 million study that concluded acid rain was essentially a nonissue. At one point, “consensus” even had many of us convinced that global cooling would lead to another ice age.
The cofounder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, said that, “the environmental movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s.”
Climatologist Stephen Schneider says, “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have.”
In a recent interview, Al Gore said essentially the same thing as Schneider. Real confidence builders aren’t they?
The basis for much of the warming theory is computer modeling. But researcher James Hansen says, “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
The “experts” have turned me into a skeptic.
However, Earth’s climate does warm and cool. The causes are much more complex than the climate change theory du jour. When trying to forecast climate change, climatologists must factor in such phenomenon as the earth’s “100,000-year elliptical cycle, the 41,000-year axial tilt cycle, and the 23,000 year precession or ‘wobble’ cycle plus the 1,500-year solar-driven cycle.”
In addition, there are the sun’s “87-year Gleissburg cycle ... the 210-year DeVires-Suess cycle” and the “Pacific Decadal Oscillation.” Add other emissions, the odd asteroid, and a major volcanic eruption and one gets just an inkling of how difficult it is.
If not human activity, what causes warming and cooling? The answer appears to be linked principally to changes in the sun’s activity.
Paleo-oceanographer Gerard Bond found that when “global temperatures and solar-strength records are laid next to each other” there is “close correlation.” Other research draws the same conclusion.
It was once assumed that conditions between ice ages were relatively stable.
But in examining ice cores, researchers found significant climate variability going back hundreds of thousands years. More recently, between 600 and 200 B.C., the earth was in a cooling period; 200 B.C. through 600 A.D., warming; 600 to 900, cooling; 900 to 1300, warming; 1300 to 1850 cooling (the little ice age); 1850 to 1940, warming); 1940-75, cooling; and 1976-2007, warming. Obviously there is more at play here than the simplistic notion that manmade carbon dioxide causes the climate to warm.
The theory is deficient.
First, manmade carbon dioxide production cannot account for the climate variability described above. Second, most of the recent warming began before 1940. Third, frightening scenarios forecast by the theory haven’t occurred.
Researchers have found that climate warming actually provides more quiescent conditions, not worse. Fourth, the theory says that increased carbon dioxide will warm the earth’s surface after it first heats up the lower atmosphere. Data shows the inverse to be occurring. Fifth, ice cores reveal that, for 240,000 years, carbon dioxide increases actually lag the warming climate. This should be a theory killer. Sixth, the theory says that the polar regions will experience the most significant warming. But the seas in the Arctic are colder than in the ’30s and, except for a peninsula accounting for about 2 to 3 percent of the its land area, Antarctic temperatures have been on the decline since the 1960s. Finally, there is the “heat vent” discovery in the Pacific by NASA and MIT researchers that negates the heating effect computer models predict.
Daily News editors say “the time for debate has come and gone. Now, is the time for action.” They also say that “it is right to set standards and goals but it is even more important to make a start.”
Government is already interfering by setting market “standards and goals” and creating unintended consequences. For example, the requirement for increased ethanol use will benefit farmers, but it won’t benefit those who use corn for heat or for the poor in the Third World who use it for food. Except for health and safety reasons, there should be absolutely no state or federally mandated fuel or diesel composition requirements. These decisions should be left to the marketplace. I am not afraid of global warming or the clean airhead movement, but I do fear the politicians.
This debate is far from over. Most assuredly, government “standards and goals” will substantially reduce our standard of living, especially for those in the Third World. What the world really needs is more prosperity.
Finally, if we got rid of all human activity, the earth would still warm and still cool.
Stan Gudmundson is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and writes from his home in Rushford, Minn.
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