southchild

Last week, much controversy was generated by this post by David Roberts to the Gristmill Blog which cutely and lovingly describes itself as a blogful of leafy green commentary. Here’s the post:

Check out this startling excerpt from George Monbiot’s new book Heat.

It’s about the climate-change “denial industry,” which most of you are probably familiar with. What you may not know about is the peculiar role of the tobacco industry in the whole mess. I’ve read about this stuff for years and even I was surprised by some of the details.

When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.

So much for “leafy, green commentary.” Is Roberts comparing scientists who question the Religion of Global Warming with Holocaust deniers? No, he is equating skeptics of his religion to the Nazi’s who murdered millions of Jews in his call for “Nuremberg” trials.

This is the face of the Global Warming Jihadists — the increasingly fanatical supporters of the Global Warming religion who, like their brothers of Islamic fascism, think that threats and violence are the means to winning their radical, unsupportable cause. In their desperation, the GW Jihadists are ratcheting up the rhetoric against those scientists who remain skeptical that human activity is the primary cause of temperature fluctuations on Earth (hint: the sun may play a role). Moreover, the jihadists are destroying their credibility by using threats and intimidation as weapons for their cause.

Georgetown University sophomore Somerset Perry wrote this rebuttal defending Global Warming. He claimed

Every time a media outlet publishes an article such as Michael Birrer’s “Jury Still Out On Global Warming Debate” (THE HOYA, Oct. 6, 2006, A3), it contributes another drop of gasoline to the fiery ignorance of global warming opponents that must be extinguished if our grandchildren are to live in a world that at all resembles ours. Global warming is real, and so is the fire of ignorance that inhibits our nation’s ability to react to the potential effects of this dangerous trend.

Despite certain idiosyncrasies and exceptions in scientific data and its interpretation, the overwhelming consensus among respected scientists is that global warming exists and immediate steps must be taken to reverse its effects.
…

The truth of everything, down to the fact that you and I even exist, is debatable. It is irrational and dangerous, however, to base the real decisions of our nation on split hairs.
…

What about the millions of people of sub-Sarahan Africa who’s farmlands have been destroyed by drought because U.S. automakers wanted to sell a few more Hummers and Excursions? The decision to fight global warming must be made for moral reasons in addition to the economic motives.

Notice that the last paragraph of Perry’s letter asserts, with no evidence, the following:

1. Millions of people in sub-Sarahan Africa have had their farmlands destroyed by drought.
2. The drought was caused by U.S. automakers.
3. The U.S. automakers who caused the drought just wanted to sell a few more Hummers and Excursions.

Perry’s “the sky is falling” scare mongering is common among proponents of the Kyoto protocol. These tactics are perceived as an effective way to convince Western nations to commit economic suicide by reverting to a pre-Industrial age in order to fight “Global Warming.” The appeals to Western guilt over having “destroyed” places like sub-Saharan Africa supplement the Chicken Little scare tactics.

Does it ever occur to these radicals that serious skeptics and scientists are not convinced by the baseless assertions made by alarmists like Perry and Al Gore? Have they not even considered the fact that scientists are convinced by science, not doom-and-gloom; that scientists consider fact over feelings?

Here’s an alternative viewpoint, “The real climate change catastrophe” by Paul Driessen in yesterday’s townhall.com. Driessen writes

Asserting “the science is settled” ignores the debate that still rages. Proclaiming that “climate change is real” ignores Earth’s constant, natural warming and cooling.

Vikings raised crops and cattle in Greenland 1000 years ago, while Britons grew grapes in England. Four hundred years later, the Vikings were frozen out, Europe was gripped in a Little Ice Age, and priests performed exorcisms on advancing Swiss glaciers. The globe warmed in 1850-1940, cooled for the next 35 years, then warmed slightly again.

Detroit experienced six snowstorms in April 1868, frosts in August 1869, a 98-degree heat wave in June 1874, and ice-free lakes in January 1877. Wisconsin’s record high of 114 degrees F in July 1936 was followed five years later by a record July low of 46. In 1980, five years after Newsweek’s “new little ice age” cover story, Washington, DC endured 67 days above 90 degrees.

Studies by National Academy of Sciences, NOAA, Danish and other scientists continue to raise inconvenient truths that question and contradict catastrophic climate change theories, computer models and assertions. The “hockey stick” temperature graph (which claimed 1990-2000 was the hottest decade in 1000 years) was shown to be invalid; the Southern Hemisphere has not warmed in the past 25 years; the US is yet to be hit by a major hurricane in 2006; interior Greenland and Antarctica are gaining ice mass, not losing it; and Gulf Stream circulation has not slowed, as claimed in 2005.

Other recent studies conclude the sun’s radiant heat and cosmic ray levels affect planetary warming and cloud formation more strongly than acknowledged by climate alarmists. That’s logical. Why would natural forces that caused climate change and bizarre weather in past centuries suddenly stop working?

If the Global Warming Jihadists intimidate Western countries into adopting the radical agenda of their pseudoscience-based religion, there will be real, indisputable effects. Driessen documents some of these inconvenient truths:

Just the current Kyoto Protocol could cost the world up to $1 trillion per year, in regulatory bills, higher energy costs and lost productivity. That’s several times more than the price tag for providing the world with clean drinking water and sanitation – which would prevent millions of deaths annually from intestinal diseases.

Over 2 billion of the Earth’s citizens still do not have electricity, to provide basic necessities like lights, refrigeration and modern hospitals. Instead they breathe polluted smoke from wood and dung fires, and die by the millions from lung diseases. But opposition to fossil fuel power plants, in the name of preventing climate change, ensures that these “indigenous” lifestyles, diseases and deaths will continue.

Opposition to hydroelectric projects (damming rivers) and nuclear power (radioactive wastes) likewise perpetuates endemic Third World poverty. So would a new European Union proposal to tax imports from China, India and other poor countries that are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, because this gives them an “unfair trade advantage” over EU countries that are struggling to meet their Kyoto #1 commitments.

But UK Climate Change Minister Ian Pearson insists that climate change “is one of the most pressing issues facing countries in sub-Saharan Africa.” And environmental zealots blame malaria rates on climate change, to deflect charges that their callous opposition to insecticides is killing African babies.

Elsewhere, government and private studies calculate that the Protocol would cost the United States up to $348 billion in 2012. The average American family of four would pay an extra $2,700 annually for energy and consumer goods, and in US minority communities, the climate treaty would destroy 1.3 million jobs and “substantially affect” standards of living.

Yet, even perfect compliance with Kyoto would result in Earth’s temperature being only 0.2 degrees F less by 2050 than under a business-as-usual scenario. Assuming humans really are the culprits, actually controlling theoretical global temperature increases would require 40 Kyoto treaties – each one more restrictive, each one expanding government control over housing, transportation, heating, cooling and manufacturing decisions.

The real danger is that we will handcuff economies and hammer poor families, to promote solutions which won’t solve a problem that the evidence increasingly suggests is moderate, manageable and primarily natural in origin.

The real catastrophe is that we are already using overwrought claims about a climate cataclysm to justify depriving Earth’s most impoverished citizens of electricity and other modern technologies that would make their lives infinitely better.

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Previous:

MIT’s Inconvenient Scientist
This Essay Breaks the Law
The Prince Should Stick to Polo
Eat More Salt
Environmentalists & Their Hypocrisy

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 12:13 pm and is filed under General, global warming cult, politics, science/tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.