I failed to contain my indignant laughter yesterday when an otherwise intelligent colleague cited the unusually warm winter we’re having as evidence that “global warming is real.” After composing myself, I explained that the gaping hole in his logic is about the size of the one Al Gore keeps telling us is in the ozone layer.
Specifically, I cited, somewhat in jest, the cyclical phenomenon of “Indian summer” – which is as old as the globe itself – as evidence that warm winters are nothing new. I then pointed out that unless Eastern Europe is part of a completely different globe, the arctic winter killing hundreds and stranding thousands there makes a mockery of the very notion of global warming.
Finally, I referred him to reports this week (most notably in U.S. News & World Report) that the polar ice caps are melting far less than previously thought. Which means that Gore’s inconvenient prediction about sea levels drowning Manhattan skyscrapers is at least a few thousand years premature.
But I’ve been quelling hysteria about global warming for years – as the following quote from my August 8, 2006 commentary, My final word on global warming, will attest:
I am convinced that all of the preaching about global warming is just hot air. Of course the planet is getting warmer (even if only by a sweltering 1°F (.17°C) every 100 years … ouch!). Moreover, I have no doubt that humans (especially Americans) are marginally to blame. But I also have no doubt that this warming is simply due to natural climate variations (i.e., it’s a cyclical phenomenon).
Perhaps you’ve noticed in recent years that the term “global warming” has fallen into desuetude. However, slapping the poll-tested term “climate change” on the same arguments is rather like putting lipstick on a pig. Actually, nothing betrays the fact that global warming is more about politics than science than this semantic sleight of hand.
At any rate, I have on the odd occasion been drawn out of hibernation and back into the fray since “my final word” in 2006. In this case, it was not the narrow-minded assertions of my colleague, but the stunning admission of a prominent scientist that has drawn me back.
I’m referring to an interview given by “former warmist” Fritz Vahrenholt in the February 8, 2012 edition of SPIEGEL. The headline for this interview quotes Vahreholt admitting, “I feel duped.” Here are some of his more pertinent statements:
[T]he official United Nations forecasts on the severity of climate change are overstated and supported by weak science…
[I] learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of a political than a scientific body. As a rapporteur on renewable energy, I witnessed how thin the factual basis is for predictions that are made at the IPCC…
I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century…
In terms of the climate, we have seen a cyclical up and down for the last 7,000 years, long before man began emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. There has been a warming phase every 1,000 years, including the Roman, the Medieval and the current warm periods….
Of course, Vahrenholt is hardly the first person to question the science behind the IPCC’s findings. Findings, incidentally, which formed the basis for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and for all of the international acclaim it attained, including a Nobel Prize he won jointly with the IPCC.
Anyway, here are excerpts from what even I had the good sense to write in an April 12, 2007 commentary, Mother Nature makes UN report on global warming seem like a flaming hoax:
After the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report last Friday, which zealous environmentalists are now touting as “the final word on global warming,” I felt obliged to respond…
The way the findings in this report are being proselytized begs allusions to the Holy Bible. It is ironic, though, that some renowned scientists (including Dr. Tim Ball – Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship and Dr. Richard Lindzen – Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are dismissing this IPCC report with the same intellectual derision with which secular humanists dismiss the Bible…
[G]lobal warming and cooling are natural phenomena that have occurred in (30 to 40-thousand-year) cycles since the beginning of time… Believers in global warming are uninformed, fad-obsessed herds being led by a cadre of myopic media and political elite…
I could not be more indignant at rich environmentalists who seek absolution for their environmental sins by ‘purchasing carbon credits’ in the same spirit with which Catholics once sought absolution for their moral sins by purchasing Papal indulgences.
I fear, however, that the IPCC will only be redeemed if melting ice caps defy God’s Rainbow Covenant and cause another flood of Biblical proportions. In the meantime, these revelations [about researchers manipulating scientific data to give credence to global-warming theories] should compel the Nobel Committee to revoke the IPCC’s, as well as Al Gore’s, Nobel Prize….
(“Climate change: as much fraud as junk science,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 2, 2010)
That said … again, it’s back into hibernation for me.
Related commentaries:
Final word on global warming
… as much fraud as junk science
Global cooling…