Skeptics question the impact that our civilization may have on climate change. We are in a warm spell. I suggest you entertain a question of the cause of the ENORMOUS glacier mass in North America melting thousands of years ago. Don't you think that calling the present warming a catastrophy is a bit extreme compared to glaciers retreating from southern Wisconsin to northern Canada?
Any subject is debatable, and we should evaluate them from different perspectives. For example: Earth is a big warm sofisticated rock flying at enormous speed through the absolute zero temperature space while being bombarded with various rays and objects. Can you picture an SUV or a private jet of an "activist" trying to make it on time to a global warming event changing anything (I mean ANYTHING!) on that scale? All I can picture is a tiny fart that spoils the air, which I do not necessarily like, but at the same time I can't see how you can justify the idea of paying trillions of dollars for an ephemeral trend.
P.S. References (more are available):
1. "Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at M.I.T., notes that despite increasing carbon emissions, the rise in earth's temperature is less than you would expect and not consistent, interrupted by repeated cooling periods.
In a column posted on MSNBC.com, Lindzen writes that "average temperatures have risen only about 0.6 degree since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn't been uniform — warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between." Is solar activity the determining factor in earth's climate?
Says Patterson, the Canadian geologist: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on earth. "Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again. If we're to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."" (http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=267750744226033)
2. "Reed Bryson, the University of Wisconsin (Madison) professor emeritus who is known as the father of scientific climatology, didn't see Gore's feature-length cartoon, "An Inconvenient Truth." Bryson said last week on www.madison.com : "Don't make me throw up. It's not science. It is not true."
Bryson, 87, knows a little about climate science. He was the founding chairman of the department of meteorology at UW-Madison and of the Institute of Environmental Studies there. He says we've "been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years" and that while the Earth has been warming, "there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide."
Dr. William Gray, who is professor emeritus of the atmospheric department at Colorado State University...believes that a recent increase in hurricane activity is part of a naturally occurring cyclical pattern related to naturally changing ocean currents. This phenomenon, he says, "goes back thousands of years. These are natural processes. We shouldn't blame them on humans or CO2." Gray called Gore, the not-so-jolly green giant, a "gross alarmist" at the recent National Hurricane Conference held, appropriately enough, in New Orleans.
In the Financial Times of June 14, Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and a trained economist wrote: "As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."" (http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=267406366884151)
3. "NASA Administrator Michael Griffin on May 30 told National Public Radio listeners, "I have no doubt that . . . a trend of global warming exists," he said. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. "First of all," Griffin continued, "I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."
Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who appeared in the British documentary, "The Great Global Warming Swindle," said: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided and themselves labeled as industry stooges."
In 1633, Galileo Galilei was indicted by the church "for holding as true a false doctrine taught by many" and for "following the hypothesis of Copernicus" — namely that the earth was not the immovable center of the universe and in fact moved around the sun." (http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=266192191883285)
4. "James Hansen, the NASA scientist who is largely responsible for the global warming hysteria, knows as well as anyone that general circulation models spin out projections that are not reflected in the real world. His model predicted a 0.45 degree Celsius (0.81 degree Fahrenheit) rise in global temperature between 1988 and 1997.
But it was off by a factor of four. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change records show that ground-based temperatures had increased by only 0.11 degree Celsius.
Hansen's projection didn't fare well when compared with other measurements, either. In fact, it looks downright silly.
Weather balloons measuring temperatures in the lower atmosphere indicate a decline of 0.36 degree Celsius for that period. Satellite surveys, the most reliable form of measurement we now have, taken from the same atmospheric stratum also show a decline (0.24 degree Celsius).
As they say, garbage in, garbage out. It appears that in an effort to convince the public that our fossil-fuel-burning ways will lead to an environmental calamity, some trash has been fed into the models.
For one example, the surface temperature data used in the models represent only a portion of Earth; temperatures from large parts of the globe are not used because they are not recorded.
The database, to cite another problem, provides temperatures from a short span of time. The Fraser Institute's "The Science Isn't Settled" from 2004 tells us that "most of the record of surface temperatures covers less than 50 years and only a few stations are as much as 100 years old."" (http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=264121930373043)