Richard S Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT has a brilliant piece in the Wall St. Journal today entitled: “There Is No ‘Consensus’ On Global Warming” in which he debunks the popular myth among liberal-left academicians, Hollywood actors, and politicians such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton who perpetuate the notion that global warming is taking place which is the result primarily of man made activity.According to Gore, “the debate in the scientific community is over.”
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore’s approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended — at least not in terms of the actual science.
While most scientists do concur that there has been a about a 1 degree Farenheit warming trend over the past century it is far from clear that this is the result of man made activity:
Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early ’70s, increased again until the ’90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
It is also important to note that the greatest mean temperature increase coincided prior to the period of greatest industrial activity (prior to 1940) which contradicts the common notion among warming alarmists that man made activity is the primary cause of the earth’s “warming.”
As to Gore’s claim that “warming” is real and caused by man as representitive of the “consensus view” Professor Lindzen cites the following:
More recently, a study in the Journal of Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words “global climate change” produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
The eco-hysterics such as Paul Ehrlich have claimed that the American people are “a cancer to the planet.” and that the problem with the “environment worldwide was the Western way of life: capitalism, consumption, industry, and technology.” The current “global warming” movement we all know is nothing more than a way for the socialist-left in our country to further regulate private business and redistribute wealth. Indeed the new home for the Communist Party in America, as I have written in my book “Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies,” is in the “environmentalist movement.”
Unfortunately for the eco-hysterics like Al Gore the science does not back up their claims. Let’s consider some of the facts from my book.
For starters, carbon Dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels is not a toxic pollutant.
Global warming is a theory that has been contradicted by evidence of a cooling trend. Scientists with the National Science Foundationâ??s Long Term Ecological Research project in Antarctica have published a paper that reveals that the snow-covered continent has cooled over the past 35 years. The researchers â??argue in the paper that long-term data from weather stations across the continent, coupled with a separate set of measurements from the Dry Valleys, confirm each other and corroborate the conditional cooling trend,â? says NSF.
According to Accu-Weather, the worldâ??s leading commercial forecaster, “Global air temperatures as measured by land-based weather stations show an increase of about 0.45 degrees Celsius over the past century. This may be no more than normal climatic variation…[and] several biases in the data may be responsible for some of this increase.”
Clinton Administration officials conceded that global warming was not conclusive. President Clinton’s top advisor on economic issues Tim Wirth admitted, “We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
The National Academy of Sciences report from 2001 which was used by the environmental left as proof of a global warming trend, stated that there is no conclusive link to human activity and â??global warming.â? According to the report: â??Because of the large and still uncertain level of natural variability inherent in the climate record and the uncertainties in the time histories of the various forcing agents (and particularly aerosols), a causal linkage between the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and the observed climate change during the 20th century cannot be unequivocally established. The fact that the magnitude of the observed warming is large in comparison to natural variability as simulated in climate models is suggestive of such a linkage, but does not constitute proof of one because the model simulations could be deficient in natural variability on the decadal to century time scale.â?Â
The vast majority of the scientific community does not support the claim that there is a link between human activity and â??global warming.â? A Gallup survey indicated that only 17% of the members of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Society thought the warming of the 20th century was the result of an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
Although there has been about a 1 degree Farenheit increase in mean global temperature, the evidence is far from conclusive that this diminutive temperature increase is attributable to man and is considered by many to be nothing more than normal fluctuations in the mean temperature of our planet.