>>> Hmmm... movies versus scientific consensus... I wonder which closer
>>> approximates reality?
A Bad Week For Al Gore
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, July 6, 2007
The religion of man-made global warming has had its orthodoxy shot to
pieces again right before an assorted gaggle of hypocrites and control
freaks, led by Al Gore, prepare this weekend to unleash Live Earth,
one of the most sophisticated and carefully packaged political
propaganda assaults in recent years.
This rejuvenated religion of Pagan earth worship took another blow
from hard science just today, after it was revealed that the oldest
plant DNA ever discovered showed that "the planet was far warmer
hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed," again
underscoring the fact that climate change is a routine and natural
phenomenon that has occurred throughout earth's history.
"They also indicated that during the last period between ice ages,
116,000-130,000 years ago, when temperatures were on average 5 C (9 F)
higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt
away," reports Reuters.
In another development, scientists examining the world's deepest ice
core samples concluded that records of greenhouse gases varied wildly
over the course of 800,000 years, producing temperatures that differed
as much as 15 C (27 F) at different periods of time.
These two new scientific papers, allied to the understanding that CO2
emissions lag behind temperature increase by hundreds of years,
reinforce the reality that we live on a volatile and constantly
changing planet.
The earth's climate has always been shifting and is dependent on ice
age cycles and the activity of the sun. Today we see global warming
and climate change on every planet and moon within the solar system,
largely due to increased sunspot activity. For humans to think that
they can contribute to significant climate change models that have
domineered the planet for eons before human civilization existed
betrays a supreme level of arrogance and self-importance.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjI4NTc0YWMzNTA3ZjRmYmJiMDRjNmI5MGEwZTFhM2E=
This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-
warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science
fiction.
The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very
serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland's
630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising
sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.
Where's the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the
recent Policymaker's Summary from the United Nations' much anticipated
compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change's medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse
gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by
2100. Gore's film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.
Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the
concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing
rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn't changed appreciably
for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently
pronounced the IPCC's methane emissions scenarios as "quite unlikely."
Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.'s new projection is about 30-
percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. "The projections
include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and
Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993," according to the IPCC,
"but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future."
According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005,
Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing
that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when
multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4
percent per century.
"Was" is the operative word. In early February, Science published
another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland's ice
loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.
Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find
any support for Gore's hypothesis. Instead, there's an unrefereed
editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal
Climate Change - edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University,
who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose "the right balance
between being effective and honest" about global warming - and a paper
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only
reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.
These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to
"do" something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami.
And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago,
the real clock must be down to eight years!
It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with
politicians about various "solutions" for climate change. The Kyoto
Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming
by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That's too small to measure,
because the earth's temperature varies by more than that from year to
year.
The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto - i.e.,
less than nothing - for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which
themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around
2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to
dictate our energy policy for today).
Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes
that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with
ethanol over the next decade. But it's well-known that even if we
turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace
only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on
global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the
U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food
supply to please a political mob.
And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol
efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from
transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of
gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below
present levels - resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than
Kyoto allows.
And there's other legislation out there, mandating, variously,
emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get
there if we can't even do Kyoto?
When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient.
And it's not just Gore's movie that's fiction. It's the rhetoric of
the Congress and the chief executive, too.
- Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at
the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion
of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
