GLOBAL COOLING OR WARMING? 5

Given the frequency and ferocity of hurricanes last year the prediction for the number of alleged Global Warming induced Atlantic hurricanes this season was originally 9, then 7, then 5. What did we end up with, one or two which alternated between being tropical storms and hurricanes and did no damage to the USA except for some flooding? Seems to me this is a prime example of the futility of predicting natural phenomena and the questionable, if not downright erroneous, assignment of causative factors. It is not that the primitive mind can not link cause (Global Warming) and effect (hurricanes), but often does so where none exists.

The following is a summary of an 11 page speech about Global Warming given on the US Senate floor on September 25, 2006 by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) with some of my comments and news items added:

Quote from Newsweek magazine: “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth.”

Quote from Time magazine: “As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.”

A New York Times headline: “Climate Changes Endanger World’s Food Output”

Sounds contemporary and parlous does it not? It does until one realizes these Brummagem opinions were made in 1974 & 75 by the fourth estate climate doom myrmidons and they were forecasting not global warming, but a coming ice age.

But wait, there is more:

Again a headline from the New York Times: “Geologists Think the World May be frozen Up Again” And when was this you may ask – why more than 100 years ago in 1895. The NYT has had myriad decades to practice their Chicken Little we-are-all-doomed philosophy.

A front page article in the 10/07/1912, yes again, New York Times, just a few months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, declared that a prominent professor “Warns us of an encroaching ice age.”

The very same day in 1912 the Los Angles Times ran an article warning that the “Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.”

An 8/09/1923 front page article in the Chicago Tribune declared: “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada.” The article quoted a Yale University professor who predicted that large parts of Europe and Asia would be “wiped out” and Switzerland would be “entirely obliterated.”

On 8/10/1923 a Washington Post article declared: “Ice age coming here.”

By the 1930’s the media took a break from reporting on the coming ice age and changed 180 degrees to promote global warming.

Time magazine (1939): “[Those] who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right…..weathermen have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”

Time magazine in 1951 pointed to receding permafrost in Russia as proof that the planet was warming.

In 1952 the New York Times noted that the “trump card” of global warming “has been the melting of glaciers.”

By the 1970’s the media had done another 180 degree turn to their previous we-are-all-going-to-freeze position. The news media have never been lacking in paralogism.

A December 29, 1974 New York Times article on global cooling reported that climatologists believed “the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade.” The article warned that unless government officials reacted to the coming catastrophe, “mass deaths by starvation and probably anarchy and violence would result.”

In 1975 the New York Times reported that “a major cooling [was] widely considered to be inevitable.” These past predictions of gloom and doom have a familiar ring do they not? They sound strikingly similar to our modern media promotion of Algore’s brand of climate alarmism.

Of course the current major media’s hysterical position on climate is back to the, we-are-all-going-to-burn-to-death syndrome. Their abrupt changes could induce whiplash for those foolish enough to follow them.

In April of this year, Time magazine devoted an issue to Global Warming alarmism titled: “Be Worried, Be Very Worried” This is the same magazine which first warned of a coming ice age in the 1920’s before switching to predicting dire consequences of Global Warming in the 1930’s before switching yet again to promoting the 1970’s coming ice age scare. Consistency has never been a hallmark of the left.

U.S. News & World Report carried a special report in their 4/10/2006 issue titled: “The Truth About Global Warming.” And no, it was not pitching the concept of Global Warming as a hoax. I read the article while waiting in a dentist’s office. Among other inanities it contained a graph connecting data labeled “Northern Hemisphere estimated average temperatures” 1000 A.D. – 1850 A.D. to “Actual recorded temperatures” 1850 -2000. What is wrong with that? First, correlating dubious estimated data with actual measurements is problematical enough, but even how correlative are measurements made 150 years ago with those of today? Second, many of the early data estimates cover the years of the Little Ice Age so those temperatures should by natural processes be lower than today. Third, the scale of the graph greatly exaggerates total temperature differences which are less than 1º C.

On 2/19/2006 CBS’s 60 Minutes produced a segment about the North Pole. This was a completely one-sided report, alleging rapid and unprecedented melting at the polar cap.
It even featured correspondent Scott Pelley claiming that the ice in Greenland was melting so fast that he barely got off an ice-berg before it collapsed into the water. 60 Minutes failed to inform its viewers that a 2005 study by Ola Johannessen and his colleagues showed that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice and mass and that according to scientists the Arctic was warmer in the 1930’s than today.

One of the experts featured by 60 Minutes was NASA scientist and alarmist James Hansen. Hansen has partisan ties to the seemingly labile Al Gore and was the recipient of a $250,000 grant from the left-wing Heinz Foundation. When the egregious Scott Pelley was asked why he justified excluding scientists skeptical of Global Warming alarmism from his story he responded that he considers skeptics the equivalent “holocaust deniers.” There is what passes for an objective journalist in the news media.

It is interesting that Monday (9/25/2006) on the CBS evening news I watched a segment about vineyards in southern Britain being cultivating for wine production made possible by claimed man-induced ever increasing warmer weather. For people such as the “perky one” Kathy Curic, history began today (“Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat its mistakes” – philosopher George Santayana). In the Medieval Warm Period (circa 1000A.D. – 1400 A.D.), British wine was produced in such quantity and quality that French wine producers wanted to impose tariffs to limit the import of British wines because they did not want the competition. Odd isn’t it that climate warming at that time can not reasonably be attributed to human folly?

I believe that in the past several years, perhaps since the 1990’s, global temperatures have increased a bit. What does this mean in the earth’s long climate trends of millennia – nothing; in the intermediate term of centuries – nothing; and in the short term of decades – not much. The contentious issue of whether this so far short warming trend is caused by man made pollution is simply not rationally solvable at this time. What is indisputably known is that the earth has gone through cycles of warming and cooling going back more than a million years as recorded in the geologic record. And whatever the causes, variable sun energy output, volcanic activity, or the Thermohaline Circulation effect it was not caused by human profligacy.

Just this week the top climate Cassandra, Al Gore (who wrote in his 1992 book Earth in the Lurch or was that Earth in the Balance? that the internal combustion engine was the greatest threat to mankind) said that cigarette smoke is a “significant contributor to Global Warming.” Also this week a report stated that it would cost $1,000,000,000,000, yes one trillion dollars, to cap greenhouse gas emissions. Yet another story said that Global Warming may drive the lemurs of Madagascar to extinction. My God, woe is us, we are all going to die before sundown! Steve Erwin turned out to be the lucky one.

The corybantic Global Warming fanatics fit the description of 1950’s & 60’s author Eric Hoffer’s “true believers” as much or more than any archetypes Hoffer actually wrote about.

The speech by Sen. Inhofe which was exhaustively researched and footnoted was not even mentioned in passing by the main stream print or electronic media. Why do suppose that is? Could it be that it does not fit the hard left, non-objective climate opinions of the New York Times, Los Angles Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC etc.? I was fortunate to have read it on the Drudge Report. For those who would like balance on the Global Warming opinions and propaganda, yes propaganda, of the news media and Hollywood elites I highly recommend reading the Inhofe speech.