Here we go again with the Earth Day/global warming nonsense. Monday was Earth Day, and this week is Earth Week, so a politically correct network like the NBC family, including CNBC, has turned its peacock green with the tagline “Green Is Universal.”
Tell the folks in the upper Midwest that global warming will destroy the planet. They had a foot of snow last week in mid-April! Tax Day and snow, that’s cruel and unusual.
But the environmental lobbying machine has everyone thinking that global warming is a fact. The science is settled.
Heck, according to The New York Times, even bird-watchers know, because our feathered friends are migrating farther north. Of course, every pop star has gone green, as well as Mayor Bloomberg. What caused Hurricane Sandy? Well, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” blared the mayor’s magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, after the storm.
How can they be so sure? Science. The greens are blinding us with science. The only people that don’t believe in global warming or climate change are crackpots that still believe the world is flat, Sept. 11 “truthers,” those against fiat money, and other reactionary numbskulls.
But it turns out there are scientists on the side of denial. So before you get in a fight with your brother-in-law or the pickled greenie doing shots at the other end of the bar, first read through The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud* (*And Those Who Are Too Fearful to Do So).
This is a book that could help you realize something very important. If you doubt the green mania, you are not alone. Great minds stand with you. It is rational, and, indeed, scientific, to question the conventions. The global warming mania might not be anything but pseudoscience.
“Deniers” is a loaded word, as author Lawrence Solomon tells the reader right off the bat. Those that don’t believe in man’s degradation of the atmosphere are lumped in with those who claim the Holocaust didn’t happen. Any scientists that do come down on the denial side are assumed to be bought and paid for by the oil companies.
Mr. Solomon went looking for deniers and found plenty. Not all of them would talk to him. Some did so grudgingly. Others still hate him for outing them. It’s not easy not being green.
A picture’s worth a thousand words, and many folks remember Michael Mann’s visual (known as the “hockey stick” graph) that supposedly plots average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the last millennium. The graph reflects temperatures slowly declining until 1900, when temperatures rise dramatically with the modern industrial revolution.
Of course, there weren’t statistics way back in 1400, so many of the average temperatures plotted were just wild-assed guesses. But Dr. Edward Wegman found that, more importantly, Mann had erred in his methodology. Mann was looking for a hockey stick and created an algorithm to magnify the data.
As important as statistics are in ecological research, Mann’s team had made basic mistakes. This has convinced Wegman, an honored Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Iowa, as Solomon explains, “that much of climate science should be taken with a grain of salt, since so many studies have been peer reviewed by reviewers unqualified in statistics.”
When he was British prime minister, Tony Blair urged immediate action on global warming. Blair was prompted by the work of Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist for the World Bank. Of course, with those credentials, anything Stern would write or say should have been called into question. However, Stern combined climate models with economic models that predicted disaster, and gullible politicians gobbled it up.
Stern’s report claimed things like “the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever.” Dr. Richard Tol checked Stern’s numbers and said they were nonsense. Tol found that Stern counted risks not once, but three times, to skew the data and results.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says it’s “a scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations (U.N.).” According to its website, “It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change.”
The IPCC uses 2,500 scientists around the world to review its work. One of those scientists is Dr. Vincent Gray, who has been an active reviewer for many years. However, Dr. Gray’s experience makes him “an angry man,” writes Solomon, “aghast at what he sees as an appalling absence of scientific rigor in the IPCC’s review process.”
Dr. Gray says he is “convinced… that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic and was part of the organization from the very beginning.”
So to ask a basic question: Is global temperature rising or falling? Dr. Bob Carter, scientific award winner and author of over 100 papers in international science journals, says it “depends entirely on the chosen endpoints of the data being considered.” But the salient point is that the last few years of zero warming and 100 years of slight warming before are “too short to carry statistical significance regarding long-term climate change.”
Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Pulkovo Observatory, claims it is the rise of ocean temperatures that causes the increase in CO2. “So the common view that man’s industrial activities are a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause-and-effect relations.”
Abdussamatov actually thinks we’re on the verge of global cooling. “Global cooling will come relatively soon as the planet, having received increased solar energy over almost all of the 20th century, now gradually gives it back,” says Abdussamatov.
These are just a few of the deniers Solomon documents. The author has cobbled together the views of dozens of brilliant scientists to make for a very readable book questioning environmental hysteria. Solomon’s project started as a newspaper feature, and he was hoping to maybe stretch the material into six segments. By the time The Deniers was finished, he had over 100 deniers backlogged to write about and was adding more every day.
If you’re concerned that the author falls into the same trap of bias as the global warming crowd, you should know that the global warming debate is an open question for Solomon at the book’s beginning and remains that way at the end.
What he thinks for sure is that global warming is “not a certain problem, and it’s certainly not one of epic proportions…”
With environmental political correctness all around, it’s easy to be misled if you’re unsure and discouraged if you believe it’s all hokum. Either way, Earth Week is the perfect time to order The Deniers as an antidote for the hysteria and a fair reading of the issues and the science.
Sincerely,
Doug French
