Blizzards in the Central states. Icicles all over New England.
The California citrus crop frozen. Where is Global Warming, now
that we need it?
If Al Gore and his friends are right about Global Warming, the
solution to this winter’s deep freeze is at hand. If everyone in,
say, Chicago and Boston were to buy a large new SUV the aggregate
emissions should drive up the temperature in no time. (Southern
California citrus growers will just have to make do with smudge
pots.)
This solution is no less fanciful that the notion that
fluctuations in the earth’s temperature are caused by human
activity. Although ground temperatures have increased slightly over
the last century, that is not true of air temperatures.
Nevertheless, it has provided the golden opportunity long sought by
environmentalist militants: stopping industrial society in its
tracks.
Feeding assumptions into computers to create predictive models
(keep in mind GIGO — Garbage In; Garbage Out), using selective
temperature data and dishing the information out to media writers
who are either gullible, lazy or sympathetic, the militants have
managed to persuade a large number of people — including
politicians — that their sky-is-falling theory is, indeed, Truth
Revealed.
Add to this a choir of Hollywood celebrities always on the
lookout for a cause and top it off with the certitude of Al Gore,
who once thought he would ride environmentalism to the Oval Office,
and you have a potent cadre of propagandists who make Henny Penny
look like a dumb cluck.
These folks and their compliant media chorus beat us about the
ears daily with alarms of rising sea levels, flooded coasts, dying
penguins and polar bears unless we stop driving automobiles,
cutting trees and populating the planet.
There are more than a few Global Warming skeptics among
scientists; however, the sky-is-falling people work assiduously to
demonize and silence them. Fortunately, two of them not only refuse
to be silent, but also mince no word in a candid new book,
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 years. The authors
are S. Fred Singer, a physicist and professor emeritus of
environmental science at the University of Virginia, and Dennis T.
Avery, a Hudson Institute fellow.
The crux of their book is that the earth’s slight warming is
part of an ages-old cycle of warming and cooling that has gone on
for about one million years. Their conclusion is based on a
detailed review of historical climate data. They say that these
cycles last about 1,500 years each and have no correlation to
levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Rather, the
swings are connected to activity of the sun.
The authors point out that most of the 20th century’s warming
occurred before 1940, while the greatest period of
industrialization occurred afterward. They conclude that all the
Greenhouse Gasbaggery to which we are subject these days is
prompted by stop-the-world ideologues and ambitious politicians who
have managed to mislead and frighten the public.
“We are being humbugged by activists with no credentials, of
whom we should automatically be wary,” they write. And, “Now we are
being humbugged by highly-trained professional scientists, many of
them working on government research grants.”
The Russians aren’t buying the Greenhouse Gas arguments either;
however, they have a different explanation for the unusually mild
winter they are experiencing. According to NTV television, the mild
weather is caused by the 1908 Tuguksa Event in which a meteor is
believed to have exploded over a remote corner of Siberia with the
force of a nuclear blast. The television report suggested that the
current winter weather might be one link in a chain reaction
leading to a new ice age and the end of the world in 2019.
Quick — rush thousands of SUV from Detroit to Russia before
it’s too late!
Peter Hannaford is at pdh3292@aol.com.
