Global Warming: Silencing the Critics

Global Warming: Silencing The Critics

A recent poll of 530 climatologists in 27 countries showed 34.7 percent of interviewees endorsed the notion that a substantial part of the current global warming trend – which might see temperatures rise by a degree or two, on average, by century’s end – is caused by man’s industrial activities: driving cars and the like.

More than a fifth – 20.5 percent – rejected this “anthropogenic hypothesis.” Half were undecided. The skeptics now include the 85 climate experts who signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration; the 4,000 scientists from around the world (including 70 Nobel laureates) who signed the Heidelberg Appeal, and the 17,000 American scientists who signed the Oregon Petition.

Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, who bought the sky-is-falling scenario until he bothered to check some of the numbers, which led him to do his own research, at which point he wrote the book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and became the Man The Greens Love to Hate, reminded the folks at Tech Central Atation last November that most economists believe the projected level of warming would either have no effect or be beneficial.

Cold weather kills people, Lomborg reminded us. “It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths.” And that’s before we even get around to increased food production. (If you want a real climate catastrophe, let’s talk about the next Ice Age, which is due relatively soon.)

What’s more, scientists at Ohio State University announced Feb. 12 that Antarctic “temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.” In fact, they went down. So why would one get the sense from the daily barrage of electronic news that “all experts now agree” the earth is heating catastrophically, and that mankind’s use of fossil fuels is at fault?

First, pay attention to the wording. Just as many who want American taxpayers to provide welfare schooling and welfare health care for everyone who can walk here from Mexico and points south blithely lie and say their opponents “oppose immigration” – rather than acknowledging the debate is about “illegal immigration” – so are those who aim to cripple the industrial economies of the Western world careful to ridicule those who “deny global warming,” instead of acknowledging that most skeptics agree there is indeed some minor warming going on, only objecting to the notion that this is a crisis and that mankind’s activities are primarily “at fault” – along with the corollary nutty prescription that destroying every power plant and automobile in America and Western Europe would make much difference.

As demonstrated in the book “Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1,500 Years,” by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, based on the climate cycle discovered by Dansgaar, Oeschger, and Lorius (who received the Tyler Prize – the “environmental Nobel” – in 1996), those who attribute the bulk of the warming cycle to man’s modern technology willfully ignore the similar fluctuations known to history as the medieval warming period (when Greenland supported Viking farms), the Roman warming period, and the Holocene Climatic Optimum, when SUVs and coal-fired electric plants were notably thin on the ground.

But the second reason a casual viewer could conclude the skeptics have disappeared is that “Spreading the global warming gospel with unified voice are 12,000 environmental groups controlling about billion in assets,” the Tucson-based Doctors for Disaster Preparedness reported last month. In comparison, “Truth seekers have at most a few million, lack the support of the press or Hollywood, and are generally shut out of government-funded schools and universities.”

Which is where the foulest and most inexcusable abuses occur, of course. In direct contravention of the First Amendment guarantee that our tax dollars will never be spent to impose any “establishment of religion,” our children are in fact being spoon-fed the Green doctrine of global warming – memory bytes in doggerel and song – when they’re far too young to bring any critical faculties to bear on this hypothesis.

And some critical perspective sure is needed. Spiralling energy costs fueled by green hysteria “have caused the loss of 100,000 jobs in the UK over 18 months,” report Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, again citing Tech Central Station. Al Gore’s anti-global warming plan would leave the average person 30 percent poorer by 2100, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Singer & Avery book points out that scrapping every car, truck and SUV in America would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only about 2 percent. Meantime, merely extinguishing all the coal deposit fires that continue to burn unchecked around the world would reduce those emissions by 2 to

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