Global Warming Redux

A fellow scientist sent me the article you can read here about the continuing unraveling of the global warming myth.

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.

Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google "Heartland" and "Quadrant").

Reams have been been written about global warming, but most of it is pure propaganda. It's reassuring to see that scientists who are qualified to speak on the subject are winning back the high ground from Al Gore and the hoards of sheeple who swallowed his hook.

Objective science, uninfluenced by the political agenda of the IPCC, has established these indisputable facts:

1. Computer models on which the IPCC bases its dramatic climate predictions have been unable to predict what we've been experiencing for the past decade.

2. Changes in average global temperatures are well within the range of natural fluctuations, to the best of scientists' ability to measure such things.

3. Cost-benefit analysis conducted by reputable economists demonstrates that the cost of reducing CO2 emissions to levels proposed by BHO exceeds the benefits, even if the predictions of the IPCC were accurate, which they evidently are not.

As people who are not climatologists with little ability to sort through the arguments and data, who will the rest of us choose to believe about global warming? People who choose Al Gore over Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, are really beginning to look quite ridiculous.