e. magill's Intrigue

Further Deconstructing the Myth of Man Made Global Warming

In my last rant, I attempted to explain my skepticism when it comes to the subject of man made global warming, mostly because I see a frightening increase in those who blindly accept it as fact and because those who champion it are advocating some pretty radical changes under the friendly guise of saving the planet. I tried to attack the global warming mythos point by point, but I don’t believe I was clear enough in my opposition. Therefore, in response to this, I am outlining an even more detailed analysis, and I am including a multitude of links to back myself up.

Before I begin, however, let me make a few things clear.

Firstly, I am not trying to deny that global warming exists. The data do indicate an observed average increase in global temperatures over the last fifty years or so, but the ultimate causes for that increase are not clearly identified at this stage of the game.

Secondly, I am not trying to say that we shouldn’t be doing all we can to curb our addiction to fossil fuels. There are a multitude of reasons, from pollution to national security, that we should be looking at alternative energy sources, but global warming is not one of them.

Thirdly, I am not arguing that consciousness of the human impact on global climate is pointless. Indeed, I believe that, as our technology grows, we will one day be able to exert massive amounts of influence over the weather, and on that day, we better be responsible enough to know how to use our newfound power. I just don’t think that day has passed yet.

And lastly, I am not against environmentalism. Far from it. In fact, I believe that there are several environmental causes worth carrying a torch for, and as I will address towards the end of this rant, I think that the global warming scare is doing more harm than good by taking people’s attention away from the very real and very fixable problems facing us today.

So, now that the disclaimers are out of the way and without further ado, here are the reasons why you shouldn’t blithely accept the story that mankind is responsible for destroying the Earth and the only way to stop it is to crumble the world economy:

1. There are other causes for global warming.

There are literally billions of factors that account for the weather. This is one of those no-brainer, inconvenient truths that the proponents of global warming tend to gloss over. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission is only one of those billion factors, one that the storytellers want you to believe is far bigger than any other. Forgive me if I don’t simply accept this as fact without at least examining the effects of other variables on the world’s climate.

First of all, if we want to talk about size, there’s the sun. It’s a giant ball of unimaginably hot fire in the sky, and it is responsible not only for keeping the Earth warm, but it is responsible for our very existence. Surely, this gargantuan heat machine—the diameter of which is equal to that of 110 Earths strung together [1] and the mass of which accounts for 99.8% of the solar system [2]—has some effect on the temperature here at home.

What may be surprising, however, is that the sun and its effects are not static. In fact, the sun has cycles, both long and short, a lifespan, and growth patterns. It even has its own weather [3]! Therefore, it is illogical to talk about Earth’s climate as something divorced totally from the sun. However, how much of an effect does it have? Does the sun activity alter the amount of radiation hitting the Earth? Does that impact global climate? Could it have anything to do with the observed average temperature rise over the last fifty years or so?

The answer, to be blunt, is yes. There has been a steady increase in the amount of solar activity in the last few centuries [4], and one can use observations of sunspots (the best indicator of solar activity) to note that there has been a lot of unusual activity in the sun for the last few decades [5]. You could even observe that sunspot activity was remarkably lower in the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago and has been increasing ever since, as has the amount of warming radiation being spewed at the Earth, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation anyway.

Speaking of which, the correlation between climate change and carbon dioxide emissions doesn’t actually match! It’s remarkable, but the very heart of the global warming argument—that global temperature rises are directly correlated to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions—is flat-out untrue (proponents of global warming, most notably Al Gore, have used an infamous graph known as the “hockey stick” to prove the correlation, but a simple Google search will alert you to how widely discredited this graph has been and show you the more up-to-date—and far less dramatic—version). Let me say that again, just in case you missed it: there is no direct correlation between the observed increase of global temperatures and the increase of man made carbon dioxide emissions.

I know I have to back this up, so let’s get to it. Firstly, observations of global temperatures during the period between 1940 and 1970—at the tail end of which we were being warned about global cooling (more on that later)—show a decrease, not an increase, in mean surface temperature while carbon dioxide emissions were skyrocketing upwards [6, 7]. Secondly, the observed increase of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere after the last ice age occurred after warming had begun [8]. Indeed, going deep into Earth’s climatological history, you can find an instance (the end of the Paleozoic era’s Ordovician period) of the global carbon dioxide saturation being eleven and a half times what it is today, and the Earth was declining into an ice age!

However, I’m sure the global warming proponents have plenty of prepared responses to this argument, so let’s look at some other variables to the climate equation.

How about the ocean? It may not be as big as the sun, but it definitely has an effect on the Earth’s climate. It is responsible for the most dramatic weather and it transports warm air, cold air, and precipitation to coastal regions [9]. Indeed, scientists tell us that the surest way to change the weather would be to control the global ocean conveyor, the enormous current system that warms and cools every landmass on the planet [10].

Even though recent changes have been noted to the global ocean conveyor and connected to changing climate patterns, the global warming advocates are so quick to attribute the oceanic changes to carbon dioxide emissions (a correlation that can be neither proved nor disproved) that it is a meaningless argument to pursue unless someone can definitively prove that the two factors are unrelated. So much for the scientific need to exclude variables.

Okay, so what about volcanoes? Would it surprise you to know that volcanoes regularly spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? Would you be surprised to learn that eruptions actually cause the surrounding surface temperatures to drop because they increase the amount of solar radiation that is reflected back into space? Would it surprise you to know that the amount of volcanic eruptions can be directly correlated to global temperatures? Would you be surprised to learn that the average number of volcanic eruptions has dropped significantly in the last few centuries? Believe it or not, it’s all true [11, 12, 13].

I guess volcanoes only erupt when people aren’t emitting carbon dioxide.

So let’s move away from the obviously non-influential forces of nature and into the more esoteric realm of theory. Let’s talk about the so-called Butterfly Effect, and no, I’m not about to discuss an Ashton Kutcher film.

Chaos Theory, a scientific precept founded by Edward Lorenz and popularized in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (Crichton, in case you don't know, is one of the global warming advocate's worst enemies—check out his novel State of Fear), is a way of understanding how minute changes can affect complex systems. In fact, the theory came out of an attempt to predict the weather (Lorenz himself was a meteorologist), and it is used to explain how a complex system like weather is inherently unpredictable [14, 15]. The Butterfly Effect is the most well-known example, an anecdote about how a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking can cause (or fail to cause) a tornado in New England.

The existence of Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect, which are widely accepted in mainstream science as common sense, fly directly in the face of the notion that we can be absolutely sure that anthropogenic global warming is a reality. I fail to see how any scientist can believe both things without some degree of cognitive dissonance, because in order for one to believe that man made emission of carbon dioxide is the only relevant factor in global climate change, one has to believe that weather is inherently predictable.

There is nothing as mercurial as the weather, and that can be easily proven not only by common sense but by the number of variables that account for it. that doesn’t seem to sway the advocates, though, so let’s move on to other reasons why you shouldn’t accept the myth just yet.

2. There is no consensus.

One of the most important things the advocates want you to believe is that the scientific community is united in its opinion about global warming, that the debate is over. There is a consensus, they posit, that global warming is a reality, that it is a serious problem, that man is the sole cause of it, and that it should be taught in school as a reality as unchangeable as mathematics. This is—and there’s no other way to put it, really—a flat-out, bold-faced, incontrovertible lie.

And I can easily prove it, by listing all the people who disagree with the theory. Incidentally, they are not all Republicans, they are not all Americans, and they are not on the payroll of the oil industry, despite what the more conspiracy theory-driven pundits would have you believe.

Let’s start with Timothy Ball, PhD., a Canadian climate scientist, retired university professor, and vocal global warming skeptic. He has gone on record saying things like there is “no correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature at any time in Earth’s history,” [16] and the “Earth is warming up…but it’s not humans that are doing it” [17]. He’s also become vehemently opposed to the trend of referring to global warming skeptics as “deniers,” because it is an obvious and obscene reference to Holocaust deniers [18].

Then there’s Russian mathematician and physicist at the solar physics laboratory at the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as supervisor of the Astrometria project on the International Space Station, Khabibullo Ismailovich Abdusamatov, who notes that “global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy – almost throughout the last century – growth in its intensity" [19].

Next is Australian professor, geologist, and paleoclimatologist Bob Carter, who has long debated the idea that there is any sort of scientific consensus on the causes or nature of global warming. He writes:

Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming. [20]

Then there’s Zbigniew Jaworowski, who states that “the atmospheric temperature variations do not follow the changes in the concentrations of CO2 ... climate change fluctuations comes ... from cosmic radiation” [21]. Oh, by the way, he’s chair of the Scientific Council at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw.

Next is Marcel Leroux, a former professor of climatology at the Université Jean Moulin, who writes:

The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the palaeoclimatic scale, ... solar activity, ...; volcanism ...; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned. [22]

William W. Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, who called global warming “one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people” [23], has also theorized that “warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential” [24].

I could go on, listing people like Sallie Baliunas, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Asrophysics, George V. Chilingar, Professor of Civil and Petrolium Engineering at the University of Southern California, Ian Clark, hydrogeologist and professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottowa, David Legates, the infamous Delaware State Climatologist and associate professor at the University of Delaware, Fred Michel, Associate Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University, Garth Paltridge, Professor Emeritus of the Antarctic CRC at the University of Tasmania, Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University, Ian Pilmer, professor at the University of Adelaide School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, Nir Shaviv, atrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Philip Stott, Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London, Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center, Jan Veizer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Ottowa, and Boris Winterhalter, retired Senior Scientist at the Geological Survey of Finland, but just one name would be enough to discredit the consensus theory. Besides, if you really want to find the names of all the scientists who are opposed to the manmade global warming theory, there are plenty of places to look and you will surely find several names I have not listed. In fact, if I were to list them all, it would at least quadruple the length of this rant.

Regardless, for every name of a scientist for or against global warming, there is an accusation of corruption. On one side, the claim is that anybody who is skeptical of global warming is on the payroll of the oil industry or is getting grant money from evil Republican fatcats. On the other side, you have those who claim that their skepticism is ignored or that they are bullied into keeping their mouths shut by threats of having grant money pulled by rabid left-wing environmentalists (or, locally, by the United States government itself, which hands out $20 billion in global warming research funds every year [36]). This is common enough to be the first chapter in any politician’s playbook: when you can’t prove or disprove something, attack the other side’s credibility.

Let’s be honest here, scientists from either side of the debate can be bought, blackmailed, bullied, and pressured, but the truth usually bleeds through somewhere; it’s just not easy to find where.

But more than just the names of scientists who disagree with the so-called “consensus,” there is, once again, common sense. I remember, when I was in school, being taught about science and the scientific method. Way back then, it was made abundantly clear to me that the idea of “consensus” was completely alien to science. From a purely theoretical standpoint, scientists never fully agree with anything, even the most basic Aristotelean Law of Identity where “A is A.”

Every so often in science, a new theory comes out that shatters every paradigm that preceded it, whether it be that the Earth is not the center of the universe, that man and ape share the same descendants, that time and space are aspects of the same thing, or that a particle can exist in two states simultaneously and transfer information faster than the speed of light. So my bullshit flag is raised and my skeptic glasses are put on the second anybody tries to tell me that there is anything even remotely close to a “scientific consensus.”

But the advocates want you to believe just that. They say that this enormous group of intensely skeptical people known as the scientific community have finally come to an agreement about something, and that something is anthropogenic global warming. I say bullshit, because if you look hard enough, I’m sure you can find someone out there arguing that the world is flat [25].

But just so you don’t think I’m equating global warming skepticism to arguing for ignorance, I will point out that the number of scientists—and climate scientists in particular—disagreeing with the so-called consensus is staggeringly high. Some say there is no warming, some say the warming is not global, some say we don’t know or appreciate the true causes of global warming, some say the cause is something other than mankind, some say warming isn’t something to be feared, and some say that the solution to man made global warming is nearly the opposite of the Kyoto Protocol.

Saying that all scientists agree on global warming is like saying George W. Bush won the last presidential election by a unanimous vote.

3. Warming might not be so bad.

In “recent” climatological history, there is something called the Little Ice Age, where average temperatures were much lower than they were immediately before or ever since. (By much lower, I mean no more than a single Celsius degree.) This cold period took place between roughly the 14th and 18th centuries, and during it, glaciers poured over entire villages, rendering large populations homeless, ice surrounded Iceland so much that it was cut off from all trade and its population was cut in half, the Viking colonies in Greenland were rendered extinct by an inability to grow food, and there was a drastic spike in disease, famine, and large-scale storm activity throughout all of Europe and North America. There is also considerable evidence to suggest similarly catastrophic problems throughout the entire world. [26, 27, 28]

What are the most widely believed causes of the Little Ice Age? You guessed it: solar activity, ocean currents, and volcanism. [26, 27, 28]

However, immediately preceding the Little Ice Age was a time known as the Medieval Warm Period, a time marked with prosperous crop growth, land development, exploration, increased lifespans, and relative meteorological stability. It is directly correlated to the last most recent peak in solar activity known as the Medieval Maximum. While it wasn’t all sunshine and roses—since there were a large number of prolonged droughts from North America to Africa—the Medieval Warm Period is considered one of the more comfortable periods in Earth’s climatological history. [29]

My point here is fairly obvious, but I’ll make it explicit anyway: while minute fluctuations to global climate can have dire consequences, global warming is not something to be feared; if anything, it should be welcomed as the most positive fluctuation of the sun’s natural cycles. The advocates have managed to turn it into false prophecies of increased hurricane activity, drowning polar bears, and New York under an ocean of snow and ice, but these are all the products of sheer fantasy and not scientific fact. I know you’ll want me to back that up, so I will.

After a long-foreseen tumultuous period of Atlantic hurricane activity in 2004 and 2005, the global warming advocates were ignoring the existence of forty to fifty-year hurricane cycles (called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) along with the very stern proclamations by most of the scientific community (including members of the U.N.'s own “unanimous” global warming poster boy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that there was absolutely no connection between hurricanes and global temperatures. [30, 31]

They were, in fact, proclaiming that anthropogenic global warming was the sole cause of the storms and were predicting a steady increase of the storms into the 2006 hurricane season, using a report by MIT professor Kerry Emanuel as their sole source [32]. It was humanity’s fault, they said. For once, the far left and the far right, as personified by Al Gore and Pat Robertson, agreed on something, that man’s misbehavior was the true cause of hurricanes, although Robertson’s religious rhetoric on the matter was considered laughable while Gore’s was considered serious news.

When 2006 turned out to carry one of the tamest hurricane seasons in recent memory, I guess it just wasn’t newsworthy anymore. That’s how it always is when apocalyptic environmental predictions are disproved, but I’ll get to that a little later.

I suppose the advocates are hoping for lots of death and destruction this year, because all that suffering to capitalize on is good news for them. If we’re lucky, we’ll get T-shirts with pictures of dead and bloated Katrina victims—children would be perfect—floating over flooded streets with the slogan “STOP GLOBAL WARMING” written underneath. But don’t worry, the pictures will be in tasteful black and white and the argument is based on scientific consensus. Hey, we’re not that far from it [33].

And in case you haven't noticed, it's already being done with polar bears. Check out the ads for the Weather Channel's global climate show, Forecast Earth, or any of the myriad Discovery Channel shows on alternative energy sources, like Addicted to Oil, and I guarantee you there'll be at least two completely unexplained shots of polar bears thrown in. The reason for this is that we are supposed to believe that global warming is causing polar bears to go extinct, because the ice upon which polar bears live is allegedly melting.

Despite the fact that polar bears do what was supposedly the most horrific thing to environmentalists a decade or so back—they kill baby seals—there is simply no evidence (Al Gore's touching CGI dramatizations notwithstanding) to suggest that it's true. In fact, recent studies have shown that the polar bear population in Canada's eastern Arctic has more than doubled since the mid-80s [34, 35], but even more startling than that, they have demonstrated that the areas where polar bear populations are declining are areas where the average temperature is actually dropping while the areas with rising temperatures are seeing an increase in polar bear populations [36].

This is not to say that polar bear populations deeper into the North Pole are safe and sound (reliable statistics are hard to get in that climate). Again, there are many factors to consider, but the advocates aren't interested in any of those other factors, one of which is environmentalism! It's true that the first counter-argument as to why polar bear populations seem to be on the rise is that environmentalists have successfully lobbied to restrict hunting of both polar bears and their primary food supplies (such as those cuddly and defenseless baby seals). That probably has more to do with it than anything else, and I freely admit that, but it is a far cry from justifying plastering pictures of drowning polar bears on posters for Hybrid cars.

Also, for the record, polar bears can swim quite well.

My point here is that one very important part of the anthropogenic global warming argument—that global warming is inherently bad—is going largely unquestioned, because of the subtle manipulations that most of us aren't even noticing. Sure, there's the obvious statements, the Al Gore documentary, the seemingly endless daily news reports about climate change, and the public school indoctrination, but there's also those split-second shots of polar bears followed by images of windmills—and many other examples of subliminal advertising for the green's cause de jour—that you need to be aware of.

4. Even if the myth is true, the suggested cure is worse than the disease.

I don't take issue with people pointing out global warming or even suggesting that it's the fault of mankind. It's that every mention of anthropogenic global warming always—always—comes with an agenda attached to it. That agenda—the unavoidable caveat—is that something must be done, whether it be signing on to the Kyoto Protocol, buying a super-expensive Hybrid minivan, funding fuel cell research, buying toxic and inefficient lightbulbs, or voting Democrat. If you don't do what must be done, you are destroying the planet!

But here's the thing: if you do what they tell you must be done, you're going to destroy the planet anyway, in a far more malicious way. I know we've been programmed to think that all arguments dealing with money are inherently selfish, greedy, and dubious, but if we did everything the advocates tell us to do, we will be spending all of the money in the world, and the worst part is that they say it won't even be enough to stop the world from overheating. By even the best estimates of IPCC, if we were to follow every step of the Kyoto Protocol, we would buy five years' worth of delay by the end of the 21st Century [45].

Now most of the suggestions for curbing anthropogenic global warming are not bad ideas. Believe it or not, I'm actually considering buying a hybrid car, mostly because the thing will pay for itself in gas mileage in a few years, as it's no secret that gas prices are going to continue to go up. Additionally, I'm all for finding alternative sources of energy, and some of the advancements in fuel cell technology are mind-bendingly awesome. Also, there are plenty of good reasons to vote Democrat (and good reasons not to, but that's not the focus of this rant). That leaves the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States Senate unanimously agreed, by a ninety-five to zero vote, not to ratify back in 1997 [38], and which the Clinton administration publicly opposed on multiple fronts and didn't even bother to pass along to Congress for ratification.

Besides the harrowing economic damage such an international policy would wreak (more on that in a moment), there's the political impact. The Kyoto Protocol, as it currently stands, is a treaty rife with bad implications. Not included in the restrictions placed on industry are nations like China and India (who were all too eager to sign up, since it doesn't actually require them to do anything), which makes for an international double standard that could easily lead to radical problems in the near future, like a spot of nuclear world war, for example. Additionally, the very idea that any superpower nation would voluntarily give up a measure of sovereignty to an international body so that competing nations could dictate domestic policy is downright ludicrous, despite the U.N.'s continued efforts to make it happen.

The Clinton administration wisely noted that any policy decisions regarding the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions should be done at home, not internationally, and even Al Gore remarked, “we will not submit this agreement for ratification until key developing nations participate in this effort,” [39, 40]. Just because George W. Bush said nearly the same thing a few years later [41, 42] does not mean that either administration is heartless about the environment.

But aside from the nearly apocalyptic political concerns, there's also the economic impact of Kyoto to consider. First of all, please note that, as our economy is developing right now, there is already plenty of pressure to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the market is already being saturated with new, alternative energy products and vehicles that are only going to get cleaner and cleaner. In other words, our economy is already working to change our energy habits, and it is doing so without the assistance of an international body or foreign pressure; it is doing so by the unrelenting forces of capitalism.

So, if we had ratified Kyoto back in 1997, where would we be? Aside from the international furor that would no doubt be thrown at us for not meeting Kyoto's high requirements (despite the abysmal failure of nearly all cosigners of the Kyoto Protocol to meet its standards), how would our economy look under the heel of Kyoto?

To get a feel for the economic damage that the Kyoto Protocol mandates, look no further than the Clinton administration's own assessment [43]. The Department of Energy made clear that, in 2010, we would need to be using four to seventeen percent less electricity than we were in 1998 and estimated that, without Kyoto, we would be using anywhere from twenty to eighty percent more, a broad estimate that fails to even take into account a growing population and growing technological dependence on things like Al Gore's Internet. In fact, according to the same Department of Energy, by 2005, our total electricity usage had only increased by roughly sixteen percent [44], a number that seems to be approaching the lowest possible edge of their 1998 estimate.

However, electricity isn't necessarily a cause for alarm when it comes to global warming. There is a perfectly carbon-dioxide-free method of generating electricity, and that is nuclear energy, a safe, clean, renewable resource that we don't generate more of for one reason and one reason only: environmental paranoia. Therefore, since nearly all of the advocates aren't suggesting that we use more nuclear energy as a way of curbing global warming, it must mean that they believe that global warming is less threatening than nuclear power.

But base electricity usage is far from the only concern outlined in Clinton's assessment. In order to make more economical energy systems, the United States would have to dramatically increase its usage of renewable resources. Since nuclear power wasn't on the table in 1998 any more than it is today, that would mean a radical increase in wind, biomass, and solar energy, an increase so radical that it would cost the United States a ludicrously gargantuan amount of money. Due to supply and demand, gasoline prices would go up by well over fifty percent, driving up the costs of any goods shipped by truck (which accounts for, well, almost everything we buy), natural gas prices would rise by no less than twenty-five percent, there would be large-scale energy shortages across the country, decent food would become prohibitively expensive even for the upper-middle-class, companies would have to pay their workers less and charge more for goods and services, and all of that is just the beginning.

In short, you are talking about nothing less than the complete and utter annihilation of the United States economy [43].

All for what, a four to seventeen percent reduction in electricity usage that is but a feeble first step that might not even work in the war against a prosperous warming trend that might be the fault of mankind? Unfeasible doesn't even begin to describe it, and that's why no major nation has been able to come even remotely close to fulfilling the demands of the Kyoto Protocol.

However, if you let American capitalistic nature run its course, as we are—Thank God—doing, I'll bet you that we'll be well on our way to being cleaner, safer, and less dependent on fossil fuel-based energy in the very near future, even though it won't be as quick a transition as Kyoto would have demanded.

From a cynical point of view, you could see Kyoto as an insidious plan to weaken the United States, couldn't you? I wonder why the rest of the world would want to do that.

So let's say, for the sake of argument, that there is an allotted amount of money to be used for environmental purposes in the United States budget. Let's go even further and say that there's an allotted amount of money in the whole world for environmental causes. It stands to reason that, if we wanted to do the most good for our planet, we would need an agency to prioritize which problems are the most severe, cheapest to fix, and simplest to alleviate. We would need an agency that could prioritize the world's greatest problems in an efficient, business-like model.

Enter the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a group of shrewd environmentalists that is doing just that, with the assistance of “multilateral organizations, governments and other entities concerned with mitigating the consequences of the challenges which the world is facing” [45]. Last year, the CCC published a list of 40 problems facing the world today, everything from corruption to malnutrition, from communicable diseases to sanitation, and from trade barriers to, yes, global warming. At the very bottom of the list was global warming, and as CCC founder Bjorn Lomborg explains, it is because global warming is not as dire as the alarmists want you to believe nor is there an economically feasible way of fixing it [46]. The CCC does not claim that anthropogenic global warming is a myth—in fact Lomborg believes in it—but it does claim that there are far more logical ways of spending the world's money that would do far more good to the world than the ludicrously expensive Kyoto Protocol.

At the top of the list are basic health services, water sanitation, control of HIV/AIDS, control of malaria, and improving infant nutrition. These are all things that can be done cheaply, can save hundreds of millions of lives, and a far better bang for the environmentalist buck. Given a limited amount of money, there is every reason to pursue them first. I would go so far as to say that if you'd rather spend the world's money on stopping global warming than improving basic water sanitation or controlling AIDS, you are not a true environmentalist, and that's just common sense.

5. The environmentalist track record here should be addressed

The biggest problem with attempting to debunk anthropogenic global warming, no matter how much common sense you use, is that you cannot predict the future. The average person is more likely to fear a dire prediction than ignore it, so when your task is to outline how the dire prediction is unlikely, people aren't necessarily going to be very keen to hear you out.

So the best way to see the future, as any historian will tell you, is to look to the past. And apocalyptic predictions from environmentalists have quite a colorful history, one that they'd rather you not notice.

Remember the hole in the ozone layer? How about overpopulation? Chemical saturation? Oh, here's a good one: remember global cooling? Each of these predictions failed to live up to the fear-mongering advocate's prophecies. In fact, not a single one of them is considered a real threat today.

Believe it or not, the scientific method was designed to keep you from all the guesswork that wound up creating the dire environmental predictions of the past. The basic steps of the method are observation, description, hypothesis, experiment, and then observation once again [47].

For the sake of climatology, the experiment portion of the method is hard to do, especially since there is no control group for the planet aside from highly fallible computer models. However, there is the ability to observe the results of the hypothesis to see if there can be any reliability or confidence in it. Anthropogenic global warming is hardly the first hypothesis made by environmentalists that has become popular in society, so perhaps one way of discerning how much confidence we can have in such predictions—one way of deciding how reliable they are—is to observe their accuracy.

In 1967, famed environmentalist Paul Ehrlich (a PhD at Stanford) was one of the first environmentalists to theorize a connection between man made greenhouse gases and global climate change here on Earth. As he wrote in his book The Population Bomb, “The greenhouse effect is being enhanced now by the greatly increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the last century our burning of fossil fuels raised the level some 15%. The greenhouse effect today is being countered by low-level clouds generated by contrails, dust, and other contaminants that tend to keep the energy of the sun from warming the Earth in the first place” [48]. Many consider Ehrlich to be one of the founders of the modern day global warming environmentalist cause.

That same year, however, and indeed in the same book, he wrote that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He also concluded that “India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980,” and ultimately concluded that he had "yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971” [48, 49]. In 1969, he also proselytized that “hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles . . . the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979 . . . the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics” [27]. Despite how clearly inaccurate these and other public statements proved to be, Dr. Ehrlich is currently considered one of the top minds in environmentalist circles and he still warns, to this day, of the growing threat of overpopulation.

In fact, finding alarmist environmental predictions from the past is so easy and entertaining that I invite you to do your own research. Besides, listing them all here would be far too cumbersome, and I'm sure you're glad to be near the end of this rant.

Sufficed to say, most if not all of the dire apocalyptic predictions made in the past about the state of our environment—from the global cooling scare to the overpopulation madness, the fear of atmospheric chemical saturation to mass famine, from widespread nuclear meltdowns to a dramatic increase in hurricane activity—have failed to live up to the hype, and I see no reason to believe that the modern day global warming scare is any different.

LINKS/SOURCES:
(This list does not represent the entirety of my research on this subject)

1. SOHO (NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory): Our Star the Sun
2. Wikipedia: The Sun
3. SpaceWeather.com
4. The Telegraph: The truth about global warming – it’s the Sun that’s to blame
5. Nature magazine, Vol. 431: Unusual activity of the sun… (PDF)
6. Canada Free Press: Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?
7. Daily Mail: Greenhouse effect is a myth, say scientists
8. Historical carbon dioxide record from the Vostok ice core
9. Wikipedia: Ocean current
10. Ocean and Climate Change Institute: Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?
11. The Smithsonian Institution – Global Volcanism Program
12. USGS: Volcano Hazards Program
13. SDSU: How Volcanoes Work
14. Wikipedia: Butterfly effect
15. Chaos Theory: A Brief Introduction
16. Interview with Dr. Timothy Ball – The Myth of Global Warming?
17. Ottowa Citizen: Climate of Controversy
18. The Telegraph: Scientists threatened for ‘climate denial’
19. RIA Novosti – Russia – Russian academic says CO2 not to blame for global warming
20. The Telegraph – There IS a problem with global warming… it stopped in 1998
21. 21st Century Science and Technology, Winter 2003-2004: Solar Cycles, Not CO2, Determine Climate (PDF)
22. Global Warming – Myth or Reality?: The Erring Ways of Climatology by Marcel Leroux (Amazon.com)
23. Washington Post: The Tempest
24. BBC News: Viewpoint: Get off warming bandwagon
25. The Flat Earth Society
26. Wikipedia: Little Ice Age
27. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) by Christopher C. Horner (Amazon.com)
28. The Little Ice Age by Jean Grove (Amazon.com)
29. Wikipedia: Medieval Warm Period
30. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
31. CNN: Strong debate over fierce storms
32. EOS: Atlantic Hurricane Trends Linked to Climate Change (PDF)
33. CaféPress.com: Hurricane Katrina T-Shirts
34. The Telegraph: Polar bears 'thriving as the Arctic warms up'
35. CBC News: Polar bears thriving off Newfoundland
36. Polar Disasters: More Predictable Distortions of Science
37. A Basic Overview of Fuel Cell Technology
38. S.Res. 98, 105th Cong. (1997)
39. washingtonpost.com: Weary Delegates Set Emissions Cuts for Developed Nations
40. CNN.com: Clinton Hails Global Warming Pact
41. Text of a Letter From the President, March 13, 2001
42. Presidential Press Conference, March 29, 2001
43. Summary of Energy Market Results of Kyoto, 1998
44. EIA Electric Power Annual – Summary Statistics
45. The Copenhagen Consensus Center
46. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World by Bjorn Lomborg (Amazon.com)
47. Wikipedia: Scientific Method
48. The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (Amazon.com)
49. Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center: Bio of Dr. Paul Ehrlich

-e. magill, 6/26/2007