It’s long been an open secret — or no secret at all — that the “global warming” movement has little to do with the environment and much to do with a power grab by people committed to the ideology of centralized planning.
There are two problems with “anthropogenic” (human-caused) catastrophic worldwide warming, and they are in the first two words.
As more and more critics contest humanity’s role and the predictions of disaster, warming advocates switched to “climate change” — gaining a tactical advantage, as the climate is always changing and any alteration can be cited as evidence.
The past few weeks have seen a major increase in critical news about the issue, but it has been largely ignored by the major media. Few major outlets will tell you the warming conference in Durban, South Africa, this week will likely yield only overheated rhetoric (the adjective is intentional, and that would be the best possible outcome).
Few nations want to devastate their already weak economies with the warmists’ hugely expensive and ineffective wrecking balls.
It’s not news that the world has been getting warmer since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-1800s, a time when Niagara Falls froze and people ice-skated on the Thames in London.
But temperatures started rising well before industry started pumping “greenhouses gases” into the air, and a cooling trend in the 1970s led climatologists to predict a looming “new Ice Age” — which obviously didn’t happen. The current round of sensation was kicked off with the so-called “BEST report” in October that said temperatures had been warming since the 1850s and “hadn’t stopped.”
Hailed in the major media as definite proof the skeptics were wrong, most press accounts ignored two vitally important facts. The first was that its principal author, professor Richard Muller of U.C. Berkeley, himself said the study did not conclude that human action was warming’s major driving force.
The second was the lack of major media attention when a key co-author, Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, said Muller had rushed the release of the report without any peer review. She said he ignored the fact that global temperatures have been essentially flat for the entire past decade, contrary to warmists’ prior predictions. The warming model also calls for “severe weather events” such as hurricanes to increase in strength and frequency as CO2 levels rise. But data released this week shows that tropical storms worldwide have reached their lowest level ever, as the following news release notes:
“In his new paper, ‘Recent historically low global tropical cyclone activity,’ Dr. Ryan Maue, a meteorologist from Florida State University … found (that) since 2007, global tropical cyclone activity has decreased dramatically and has continued at near-historical low levels.
Indeed, only 64 tropical cyclones were observed globally in the 12 months from June 2010 to May 2011, nearly 23 storms below average, obliterating the previous record low set in 1977.”
The prestigious journal Science has just published a new statement from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, saying that the most severe predictions of temperature increases up to 8 degrees Celsius. worldwide — adopted by the U.N.’s chief agency studying climate in its influential 2007 report — had been “significantly overstated.”
“Now these very large changes can be ruled out, and we have some room to breathe and time to figure out solutions to the problem,” said its lead author, Andreas Schmittner, an associate professor at Oregon State University.
Columnist Bret Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal Nov. 29, laid out the similarities between warmism and other faiths:
“As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other ‘deniers.’ And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.”
Finally, there’s “Climategate 2.0,” an anonymous whistleblower’s new release of 5,000 emails from the IPCC center at England’s University of East Anglia.
The pilfered messages contain many interesting statements, including these:
“Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.”
“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get — and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept. of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
And my favorite, from a scientist who worries what will happen if they are wrong and people discover it:
“They’ll kill us probably.”
M.D. Harmon is a retired journalist. He can be contacted at:
mdharmoncol@yahoo.com
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