Monday, September 28, 2009

Global Warming debunked - again

John McLaughlin has an excellent piece on American Thinker demolishing the global warming "consensus" being pushed by the political left. Here is a sample:

It seems reasonable to ask, therefore, how can a seriously flawed -- if not actually fraudulent --mathematical model linking production of the relatively minuscule amount of an atmospheric trace gas be used to blame mankind for major planetary climate change? The answer lies in the intense public relations campaign launched by environmentalists worldwide following publication of the 1997 IPCC report. The entire debate has been framed by presenting only one side to the maximum extent possible while demeaning any skeptics. The worldwide distribution in 2006 of the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth added to the simplistic polarization and politicization of debate.

One cannot ignore how the IPCC report initiated within the United Nations played into an anti-Capitalism agenda. The report became justification to launch a major campaign throughout much of the late 1990s beginning with the 1997 Kyoto protocol and incorporating numerous U.N. special sessions and other international conferences during the following decade. All focused on accusing the world's richest countries of being long-standing polluters who must bear the burden for cutting greenhouse gases. A special 2007 UN conference, dominated by third world countries, demanded that rich industrial nations curtail their economic growth by reducing CO2 emissions and use their wealth to cuts in emissions in other countries. As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown put it, the effort involved "making the issue of climate change one of justice as much as economic development."

Given these multinational political forces seeking worldwide redistribution of wealth, it also becomes clear why throughout much of the 1990s only that scientific work promoting the concept of manmade global warming received serious financial support from government sources. This led to the perception of a scientific "consensus." Numerous scientists and mathematicians complained that serious debate on climate change was being suppressed by the lack of for skeptical research and the systematic criticism of such skeptics as just "tools" of energy companies or paid servants of Corporate America

However, as the work of McIntyre, McKitrick, Wegman, Carter and others has spread, scientific "consensus" in recent years has begun collapsing. A detailed review of 539 technical papers about climate change published between 2004 and 2007 found no evidence -- none --supporting specific "catastrophic" climate change due to man. In March 2009, a petition signed by over 31,000 scientists stated in part: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

And this from the conclusion:

What is becoming clearer is that the concept of "manmade global warming" may be one of the greatest hoaxes in world history. How soon this will become generally known will depend on how forcefully the political effort seeking both national and international control of industry and wealth redistribution can keep the hoax hidden by intimidation and forcefully amplified rhetoric while systematically jeopardizing the economies of America and other developed nations.

Conservatives (that is people who are both sane and of at least average intelligence) were deeply skeptical about human caused global warming from the beginning. I remember calling in to a radio talk show back at the very beginning of the effort to ramp up hysteria about warming and asking one of the leading proponents of AGW (at that time anyway) why warmer temperatures would be bad.

After all, I pointed out, warmer weather would increase growing seasons and make land which is currently useless for farming productive. This would seem to be a good thing in a world which is always experiencing a famine in one place or another.

The guy told me that global warming would produce a "unique type of heat" which would surround the plants and kill them thus decreasing rather than increasing the world's food supply.

At that point I realized that global warming proponents were either idiots or else beleived that the public were idiots.

It seems to be a bit of both.

Go read the whole article, it is very much worth your time.