President Barack Obama showed that he has bought into global warming hysteria when he declared in his State of the Union address: “For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.”
He is not alone.
A 2008 article in The Guardian reported that professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and his team produced a forecast “which indicated that by 2013 there will be no ice in the Arctic, other than a few outcrops on islands near Greenland and Canada, between mid-July and mid-September.”
Maslowski said, “The crucial point is that ice is clearly not building up enough over winter to restore cover and that when you combine current estimates of ice thickness with the extent of the ice cap, you get a very clear indication that the Arctic is going to be ice-free in summer in five years.”
The article also quoted professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge in Britain, who noted: “Now the most detailed computer models suggest the Arctic’s summer ice is going to last for only a few more years ... . However, arctic ice did not disappear last summer ... .”
In a Nov. 24, 2012, New York Times article, “Is This the End?” James Atlas commented, “We’d seen it before, the Piazza San Marco in Venice submerged by the acqua alta; New Orleans underwater in the aftermath of Katrina; the wreckage-strewn beaches of Indonesia left behind by the tsunami of 2004. We just hadn’t seen it here (last summer’s Hurricane Irene did a lot of damage on the East Coast, but New York City was spared the worst). ‘Fear death by water,’ T. S. Eliot intoned in The Waste Land, ‘We do now.”
Respected climate scientist Richard Lindzen, who is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in remarks quoted by the Climate Depot website: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century 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.”
A March 2012 Investors.com posting reported that “... global warming alarmists ... claim that man is causing climate change. Fact is, they’re not even close. ... Many climate scientists believe that emissions of greenhouse gases are heating the Earth. Of course there are some who don’t. ... But when confining the question to geoscientists and engineers, it turns out that only 36 percent believe that human activities are causing Earth’s climate to warm. ... Members of this group, not unexpectedly, ‘Express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.’ ... However, another group believe that climate science ‘is a fraud and hoax and that regulation is futile, useless and impossible.’”
In 2008, The Guardian reported that a poll of Brits found that the public was not “convinced that climate change is caused by humans — and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem. ... There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public’s doubts on (the) Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.
“Because of purported global warming, the world supposedly ‘suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s.’ The U.N. cited one unpublished study to prove this. When the research eventually was published in 2008 after the IPCC report was released, the authors backpedaled: ‘We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.’
“Getting facts wrong and citing dubious sources isn’t the worst of it. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the U.N.‘s climate chief, remained silent when he knew information was false and denied he had been aware of the Himalayan glaciers error before the recent climate-change summit in Copenhagen, which made a big deal about this nonexistent crisis. He only grudgingly came partly clean when Pallava Bagla, a writer for the journal Science, pointed to email correspondence from last autumn showing Mr. Pachauri already knew of the fraud.”
A 2010 Washington Post editorial made the following observations, “Record snowfall illustrates the obvious: The global warming fraud is without equal in modern science. The fundamental problems exposed about climate-change theory undermine the very basis of scientific inquiry. Huge numbers of researchers refuse to provide their data to other scientists. Some referenced data is found not to have existed. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report that global warming activists continually cite invented a large number of purported facts.
“Man-made global warming theory isn’t backed up by science; it’s a hoax. The fact that the world has been asked to spend tens of trillions of dollars on global warming solutions without being able to evaluate the data upon which the claims were made should have been the first warning that something was seriously wrong. The public and world leaders have been sold expensive snake oil by charlatans like Mr. Pachauri. It’s time to admit it’s all baloney and move on.”
My own conclusion is that the Earth has been experiencing both warming and cooling cycles since the beginning of time. The problem is that it has become a convenient tool for politicians to raise money and disparage political opponents who dare to disagree with them.
— Harris Sherline is a retired CPA and former chairman and CEO of Santa Ynez Valley Hospital. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
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