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Kubes.SG
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« Reply #57 on: 19 September 2008, 23:37:42 pm » |
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Good article.
Absurd claims of alarm
Manmade global warming is a myth, and the cult surrounding it will fade into obscurity, says JOE FONE , but the costs and taxes imposed to combat this imagined menace will remain.
In 1998, a peculiar thing happened. Global warming, such as it was, came to an end. Since then, global temperatures have trended downwards, while carbon-dioxide emissions have risen.
The disconnect between carbon-dioxide emissions and global temperature trends proved what many scientists had been saying for some time, that the two are unrelated. But this should have been intuitively obvious in any case because industrial carbon dioxide represents only a tiny percentage of the atmosphere, so it is hardly likely to be a powerful climatic driving force.
It stretches credibility to suppose that such a vanishingly small percentage of a naturally occurring minor gas would be potent enough to drive Earth's climate into meltdown. But it stretches credibility even further to suppose that reducing this fraction by a few per cent would then be sufficient to reverse it.
If the Earth's atmosphere were that sensitive to infinitesimal tweaks to its minor constituent gasses, we would not be here today debating it, because the climate would have spiralled out of control millions of years ago when carbon-dioxide levels were some 10 times higher than today.
In his alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore suggests the Earth's biosphere is also incapable of surviving slight shifts in temperature, where less than 1deg rise over a century is cause for alarm. But if this were so, mankind would not have survived the Roman warm period, the mediaeval warm period or the 1930s dust-bowl era, when temperatures were consistently higher than today.
So there is nothing unusual in either higher temperatures or higher levels of carbon dioxide. Indeed, history shows that higher temperatures are entirely beneficial to mankind.
It was during the mediaeval warm period, after all, that most of Europe's cathedrals were built, England was balmy enough to be a major wine producer, and Eric the Red colonised Greenland.
So what is going on? What is so special about carbon dioxide and 0.6deg warming over 150 years that has the political world in such a flap?
Why is carbon dioxide considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be a polluting scourge inimical to life on Earth when the opposite is true?
Despite mounting evidence that manmade climate change is a myth and the science behind it is tenuous at best, the issue is so politically entrenched that the United Nations Human Rights Council has made climate change a human-rights issue.
This astounding development reflects the attitude of Maurice Strong, adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who said: "We may get to the point where the only way to save the world will be for industrial civilisation to collapse."
Not to be outdone, the United States Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, Timothy Wirth, declared: "We have got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
Even worse, Richard Benedick, who headed policy divisions of the US State Department, said: "A global-warming treaty must be implemented, even if there is no scientific evidence to back the (enhanced) greenhouse effect".
Yet thousands of scientists are scathing of the IPCC's forecasts and are concerned that science is being manipulated to prove there is a catastrophe facing mankind, when no such threat exists. They warn of the dangers in relying upon computer models, which have proved hopelessly inaccurate, while being used as a basis for massive economic change.
Dr Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in the Wall Street Journal: "What the public fails to grasp is that these claims (of increased carbon-dioxide emissions) neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred.
"In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating scepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming".
Many scientists are concerned that the IPCC is using the implausible threat of catastrophic climate change to frighten governments into introducing drastic economic penalties for carbon emissions solely to undermine Western democracies, scientific progress and industrialisation.
According to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), it is precisely because the IPCC is an entity of the UN and is dominated by socialist political agendas that it is predisposed to produce reports championing the manmade global-warming hypothesis.
Yet the 1990 IPCC Summary ignored satellite data that showed no such warming, while significant textual alterations were made to the 1995 IPCC report after it had been approved by the scientists.
The 2001 IPCC report claimed that the last century showed unusual warming based on the infamous "hockey-stick" graph, which was later proved fraudulent by Canadian mathematicians Ross McKitrick and Stephen McKintyre.
The 2007 IPCC report downplayed the effects of solar variability on climate, implying the Sun's massive influence is easily overpowered by minuscule artificial adjustments to a minor natural gas. This is a laughable proposition, yet it is considered sufficient reason on its own to bring about huge economic change affecting the lives of billions of people.
However, as the science behind anthropogenic global warming unravels and the politics based on it becomes untenable, the issue morphs into other hobgoblins: global warming morphs into "climate change" and climate change morphs into "sustainability".
The carbon cult will ultimately fade into obscurity and become a joke, but the costs and taxes imposed to combat the imagined menace will remain.
Meanwhile, the outspoken alarmists who so espoused this carbon-based religion will fade away or stealthily change their tune to sustainability, as though that had been the issue all along.
"A lie told often enough becomes truth," as Vladimir Lenin said.
* Joe Fone is a bibliophile, amateur astronomer and avid reader of science, philosophy, science history and ancient history.
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