More bad news for environmental alarmists came last week
when 16 more well known and well respected scientists signed on to a Wall Street Journal article
titled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming: There's no compelling scientific
argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy,” adding their
names to a large and growing list of scientists opposing manmade climate change
dogma.
From the article:
In September, Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election,
publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that
begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS
policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is
occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the
Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human
health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases
beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton
changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global
warming is incontrovertible?"
Despite a long and arduous campaign to persuade the world
that “greenhouse” gases and increasing amounts of carbon dioxide will destroy
civilization, and in the face of heavy pressure from their colleagues to jump
on that bandwagon, more and more scientists agree with Dr. Giaever that stubborn
scientific facts argue against the alarmists’ position.
The climate change argument, originally called “manmade
global warming” until that title fell into disrepute when recent years have
been cooler rather than warmer, has suffered credibility problems in recent
years. Perhaps frustrated that many people, including many scientists, did not
get all sweaty over the idea that mankind is killing our world with
pollution-causing fossil fuels and excessive bovine flatulence, the climate
change alarmists resorted to data manipulation and outright fraud to promote
their version of “The Sky is Falling.”
The idea that climate change endangers the environment benefits
a special few, but it does great harm to many. Funding for research – totaling tens
of billions of dollars over the last two decades – is aggressively sought after
among researchers in academia and elsewhere. Indeed, without billions in
research funding many professors would be forced back into classrooms all
across the country, putting hundreds of graduate assistants and doctoral
students out of work.
Misplaced fears of climate catastrophe have unleashed
horrors on the populace, which as a result has been condemned to burn gasoline
polluted with ethanol, the manufacture of which has diverted countless tons of corn
out of the food chain, raising food prices, and to replace perfectly good incandescent
light bulbs with something called CFLs, a replacement bulb that puts users at
risk of mercury poisoning, and requires a HazMat team to dispose of the things.
And it allows true believers like Barack Obama to throw away millions of
taxpayer dollars on boondoggles like the Solyndra loan, and on ideologically
pleasing, but expensive and inefficient hybrid autos, like the Chevy Volt.
An excellent summary of the current mania is contained in
this statement by Dr. Richard Lindzen, an MIT Atmospheric Sciences professor, a
member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and also a former lead
author of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Future
generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first
century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged
temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross
exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into
implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial
age.” Dr. Lindzen is one of the 16 signatories to the Journal article.
No doubt some readers will dispute the professor’s
position—despite his experience, training and expertise—but that does nothing
to lessen the impact of his words and the truth they represent.
Back in the summer of 2006, fully 74 percent of participants
in a Pew Research poll thought global warming was a serious problem, while 24
percent thought it was not a serious problem. Last November those numbers were
65 percent and 33 percent, showing that despite the one-sided coverage of this
argument, the people are turning away from global warming/climate change as a
serious threat. The pro-climate change side lost 12 percent, while the
anti-climate change faction gained 29 percent.
More interesting, however, is this from the Daily Mail of London online last
weekend: “The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an
inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the
planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could
even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that
saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.”
A real crisis may be on the horizon. It is fair to wonder
how these climate change scientists will react to this, a real episode of
climate change, one that is not caused by humans. Maybe they will determine
that we really need fossil fuels, after all, to combat global cooling.
Drill, baby, drill.
Cross-posted from Observations
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