The people who bring you the news of the day about nonexistent wiretaps and hypothetical invasions of privacy disguised as actual events are the same ones reporting on the “scientific evidence” that man is slowly turning Earth into the planet Venus.  Unfortunately for the NRDC, Al Gore, and other radical environmentalists, since man didn’t cause global warming, man can’t cure it.

Al Gore tells us that the world is getting hotter, and that man is responsible for making it that way.  Unless we take drastic steps now to correct this problem the ice caps will melt, our cities will flood, farmland will dry up and the rainforests will die. 

Before we get caught up in the same hysteria that thirty years earlier predicted the arrival of a new Ice Age, we might pause for a moment and ask: is any of this true?  And if it is, what role did man really play in altering the climate, and if it is getting hotter, what (if anything) can he actually do about it?

1. We begin with a simple question

Nineteen thousand years ago the Earth’s climate suddenly and dramatically changed.  Temperatures grew increasingly warmer, and with it the polar ice caps began to melt. This trend continued for almost 300 years, and did not end until ten percent of the polar ice cap had vanished.¹

How was this possible? 

19,000 years ago there were no cars driving down the highway poisoning the environment.  There were no aerosol cans depleting the ozone layer, or coal-burning factories belching heat and pollutants into the atmosphere. Instead of cutting down the rainforests or destroying fragile wetlands to build another Wal-Mart, the average man was living in a cave, gathering nuts and berries to feed his family while trying hard not to become someone else’s dinner.  How could his actions — and the actions of a limited number of other hunter-gatherers scattered around the world — have so dramatically changed the climate of this planet?

The answer, of course, is: they didn’t.  This mini-episode of global warming was part of a natural cycle that has characterized the Earth since its inception.  The ebb and flow of a wide variety of climactic factors constantly heats or cools the planet, making it naturally warmer or colder at any given moment in time.  Add to this the wobble of the Earth (which over thousands of years affects the amount of heat reaching its surface), and the fact that the sun burns hotter or cooler over extended periods of time, and you have all the elements of a fact-based explanation to account for major climate changes.

Despite building thousands of factories that spew massive volumes of heat and countless tons of noxious elements into the atmosphere, or man’s penchant for paving over wetlands and clear-cutting forests, human beings are merely spectators in the process of global climate change. Interested spectators yes, and spectators who can certainly affect isolated, highly focused environmental changes by building a dam here or setting off a nuclear bomb there, but a spectator nevertheless. One medium-sized volcanic eruption has more impact on the Earth’s climate than a few million SUVs or a thousand or two rust-belt factories operating at full capacity, despite what little Johnny’s teacher told him during last year’s Earth-Day celebration.²  Only his hubris allows man to think that his actions are determinate in shaping the natural process of the planet — with the Earth itself, and the sun that heats it, only incidental factors in this explanation.

2. The new mathematics of global warming: 2+2=5

So, if nature is the real culprit when it comes to global warming (or for that matter, any other cyclical environmental change), why is little Johnny’s teacher, Al Gore, the New York Times, and every tree-hugging environmentalist on this planet so hell-bent on banishing my SUV and every other modern convenience they claim is even remotely associated with global warming?  In other words, to quote the great anchorman and philosopher Dan Rather during one of his court appearances, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it can’t be a turkey. 

If the wit and wisdom of Dan Rather fails to convince, then we might turn to Ockham’s Razor for some additional insight, which says that the simplest, most straightforward explanation is usually the correct one.³  In other words, if there’s a big ball of vibrating, pulsating, fiery gas up in the sky that routinely heats the Earth, shouldn’t we eliminate it first as the cause of this warming before making me trade in my Escalade for a Mini-Cooper?

But somehow, what is obvious to me has escaped the notice of my Left-leaning friends. At first I was confused by their confusion, but I think I’ve finally figured out the reason for their self-reinforcing myopia. It’s a rather simple, straightforward explanation; one that William Ockham himself would undoubtedly approve. But in order to make it understandable, I need to take a few moments to reflect on how we, a supposedly intelligent race that can figure out how to put a man on the moon, could come to such a sorry state of affairs that many people actually believe Hurricane Katrina would have bypassed New Orleans if only George Bush had signed the Kyoto treaty.

It’s a commentary not only about where we are today, but who we supposedly are: rational thinking people, or idiot savants who are particularly strong on the idiot side, while sadly lacking in the savant category.⁴  It begins with a simple question that few people — even rational thinkers — bother to ask when presented with a statement of ‘fact’: “How do you know that?”

3. Sometimes the obvious is just that — and sometimes it isn’t

I had a conversation with an acquaintance of mine not too long ago about the legacy of Pope John Paul II.  This man was not Catholic, but he admired the pope (as did I) for the positive role he played in human affairs.  Religion aside, he said that John Paul II was a great man who was universally admired, and as evidence he cited the fact that “at his funeral, most people in St. Peter’s Square weren’t even Catholic. They simply came to pay their respects to a truly great man.”

I could see that his sentiments were genuine, and I wasn’t trying to pick a fight about an inconsequential matter, but I was very intrigued about his statement regarding the crowds in St. Peter’s Square.  So I asked him, “How do you know that?”

“What?” came the puzzled reply.

“How do you know that most people in St. Peter’s Square weren’t Catholic?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “Well, that’s what the commentator on TV said.”

So I asked, “How did he know that?”

My friend was a little taken aback.  He’s an intelligent, highly educated person — not some bible-thumping fundamentalist who speaks in tongues, has a gun rack bolted to the back of his pickup truck, and votes Republican. He isn’t given to making wild pronouncements about politics or culture, and may even be a Democrat for all I know, though he seemed a little too sincere and consistent in his beliefs to tar him with that accusation.  No, by all accounts he’s the kind of guy you’d take at his word and not think any more about it, so it caught him off guard when I continued to challenge the credibility of his information. 

He thought for a moment longer and replied, “I suppose he, or someone on his staff, spoke to some of the people in the square.” 

“How many people?” I persisted.  “There were over 100,000 people in St. Peter’s Square, not to mention the crowd spilling out into the adjoining streets.  Do you think he interviewed 10, 20, 200, a thousand?  Was it a scientific study with random samples, or just the people along the edge he could get closest to?”

My friend thought again, this time long and hard, and finally said “I don’t know.  I doubt if it was more than a handful of people, and I don’t think it was a scientific study.”

“So why did you believe him?”

His answer, in essence, consisted of two parts.  The TV commentator was a respected figure.  There was no reason to believe that he didn’t have a solid foundation upon which to base his conclusions — whatever they might be.  And, the notion of John Paul II as a universal figure rather than simply a Catholic religious leader was perfectly consistent with his own preconception of the pope.  Therefore the statement made sense. It seemed reasonable, at least on the surface, and it came from an authoritative source, so there was no reason to doubt it. 

The truth is, there was no way short of a scientific study based on a randomly selected, statistically-valid sample of the crowd that this statement could be proven.  It may have been true, or it may not have been.  There was simply no way of knowing. 

But there were no disclaimers accompanying the commentator’s statement to indicate that it was merely an opinion. In the words of the famous Greek philosopher Anonymous, opinions are like the exit point of the human body’s alimentary canal; everyone has one.  Instead of a learned judgment based on all the relevant pieces of information, it should be characterized for what it really was: complete conjecture disguised as fact.

4. When a duck isn’t a duck

It’s my belief that honest people with good intentions fall into this same intellectual trap when buying-into the hyperbole of the Left on man’s supposed responsibility for global warming. Unlike the alarmists who advocate this theory — and who, I contend, deliberately manipulate or misinterpret data to promote their positions — these people have a sincere desire to protect the environment.  They are willing to change any personal “destructive” behavior that is said to harm the environment, and will support policies that will supposedly repair this damage. They don’t question the underlying assumptions that the activists use to draw their conclusions, and they accept at face value the often draconian solutions these activists maintain are the minimum requirement for sound environmental policy.

Why is this?  Why would otherwise rational, intelligent people accept the notion that a car’s exhaust is heating the Earth to a dangerous level, but never once ask how this conclusion was derived, whether there are other factors that better account for this phenomenon, or whether the Earth is really warming at a rapid rate — or getting hotter at all?

The answer, I believe, can be traced to our shared value system, which provides a common frame of reference to address these and other issues. It is the shorthand, connect-the-dot reasoning we all engage in to navigate through daily life.  Critical thought is only needed when the matter at hand is something unique, and we’ve been talking about – and worrying about — global climate change for at least 40 years. 

These values and reference points are not bestowed upon us at birth, like Moses receiving the Holy Tablets.  Rather, they are taught to, absorbed by, and reinforced within each individual through a life-long process that begins with our earliest years and extends throughout the remainder of our life.  For example, we’re all taught from an early age that the environment is fragile.  As children we write school papers on this subject and participate in community projects to “save the environment.”  When we get older, we get our news from journalism school graduates who show us pictures of melting ice caps or drought-stricken farmland and talk about the importance of driving hybrid cars, practicing resource conservation, and signing the Kyoto Treaty. 

As adults we happily segment our garbage to cut-down on environmental pollution, and set our thermometers at uncomfortably high or low levels to “save energy” — thereby reducing the nasty, dirty fossil fuel emissions needed to produce our electricity.  The world, and our role in it, is put clearly in focus, as are the notions of “good” or “bad” behavior regarding our treatment of the environment. 

This common frame of reference allows us, as a group, to make certain judgments that are universally accepted. Windmills are good.  Solar energy is better.  Conservation is best.  The internal combustion engine, to quote Al Gore, is an example of man seeking to “artificially enhance our capacity to acquire what we need from the earth . . . at the direct expense of the earth’s ability to provide naturally what we are seeking.”  By manufacturing “millions of internal combustion engines [that] automate the conversion of oxygen to CO2, we interfere with the earth’s ability to cleanse itself of the impurities that are normally removed from the atmosphere.”⁵

No one laughs at the main theme of this passage which presumes to know intrinsically — just like the idiot savant — what man “needs” from the Earth, and what is an “artificial enhance[ment of his] capability” to acquire natural resources “at the direct expense of the earth’s ability to provide naturally what we are seeking.”  No further justification is required to support these value-laden judgments, because they’re not seen as expressing anything controversial.  They’re just obvious statements about obvious matters that are plainly obvious to any thoughtful, thinking individual.  

From this basis it’s a logical conclusion that cars are “interfering” with the natural state of affairs of Mother Earth, which leads to an equally obvious policy objective to deal with this cancer.  As for the finite-supply of fossil fuels that are mined, drilled, and otherwise gouged from the Earth to feed these poison-producing internal combustion engines, they serve only one purpose: to make Dick Cheney richer, and help George Bush justify an illegal, immoral war against Saddam Hussein whom we’re all glad is out of power, even though Bush lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction and ought to be impeached.

Because our schools, celebrities, TV anchorpersons and other opinion leaders accept these observations as fact, who are we to disagree?  Since 1975 (my earliest memory on this subject) I’ve been told repeatedly that the world is running out of oil.  There’s only so much dead-dinosaur juice in the ground, and it will all be gone in 20 years or less.  Thirty years later, the same 20 year prediction is still being made.  If we don’t switch to hybrid cars, solar powered electricity, or wind-driven generators, we’ll use up all the world’s oil by 2030, or 2040, or 2050, or [pick a date] sometime in the near future. 

And when all the oil is gone, and coal is too dirty to burn, and nuclear power is too unsafe to produce, where will we be?  Ergo, we need to start changing our lifestyles NOW!  

5. But what about that thing over there?

At no point in this conventional-wisdom analysis does anyone stop and say, “but wouldn’t there be plenty of oil if we’re willing to pay $100 a barrel to recover it?” 

The Earth isn’t running out of oil.  It’s running out of easily-acquired $20 dollar a barrel oil.  There’s plenty of oil off the shores of California and Florida, in Alaska, Mexico, the Middle East, the North Sea, Russia, and a whole bunch of other places in the world, including oil locked in shale.  It’s harder to get, and therefore more expensive to acquire.  But it’s there.

This doesn’t argue against practicing conservation or pursuing alternative means of energy production.  A solar power car would be great — if there’s a strong enough market demand to justify the billions of dollars of research and development needed to expedite its arrival.  Windmills are a fantastic source of cheap, clean energy, unless they happen to spoil Ted Kennedy’s oceanfront view, at which point good old fashioned gas guzzling cars will do just fine. 

If Al Gore’s prescription for responsible environmental management makes sense, he should be able to propose it without the intellectual legerdemain of over-hyped, value-laden judgments disguised as impartial analysis.  It’s one thing to illustrate a point with a dramatic example.  It’s quite another to have the example itself stand as a substitute for any further thinking about the matter.  If the issue is real, the evidence will support it.

But to get the evidence, one first has to collect all the relevant data.  When dealing with an issue as monumental as global climate change, 10, 20, 50, even a 100 year “trend” is nothing more than the blink of an eye in geological terms.  If global warming actually exists, and further, if man is the principle cause of its existence, there should be clear, convincing evidence of this before we begin substantially rearranging important chunks of our current way of life.  Why spend thousands of dollars to place your house on stilts so it won’t be flooded if you’re living in the middle of a desert?  Such an expenditure may be perfectly reasonable for those homes along Gulf Coast beaches.  But before I dip into my life savings to retrofit my house, I’d like to see a little evidence that central Utah is about to get inundated with water. 

When confronted with this question, the typical answer we get from the Protectors of the Planet is that we can’t afford to wait until all the data is in.  By then it will be too late, so we must act now!  That’s why it was so important in the 1970s to take strong measures against a fast-approaching ice age — that is, until global warming became the problem.  So, now we’re told that we need to work just as quickly in 2006 to stop the warming of the earth, except recent studies have indicated that we may be in for a mini-ice age after all.⁶

However, the possibility that Britain and France might freeze doesn’t automatically mean that we’re off the hook for global warming.  Concerned scientists have assured us that the Earth is going to simultaneously heat and cool because of global warming, which will produce glaciers and deserts at the same time.  So if a drought doesn’t get you, frostbite will. 

At least we don’t have to pick and choose our environmental disasters any more!  Instead of having to decide between rising temperatures or ice-age conditions, the new improved global warming theory can accommodate both.  And as an added bonus, there’s no need to look any farther than ourselves to both identify the problem and find the solution.  Man is the reason that all of this happening; not the sun, the Earth’s rotation, or any naturally-occurring cyclical phenomenon. 

And man — if he’s willing to take Al Gore’s advice, follow the prescriptions of the New York Times, and listen to the informed pleadings of Ted Danson and other Hollywood celebrities — can fix his mistakes.  That is, if he’s willing to make dramatic changes in his current lifestyle, and pay the proper amount of taxes to the right elected officials who will tell him what to do and how to do it for all the right reasons.

6. Replacing ignorance with truth . . . well, sort of

Therefore, if we believe what the media, special interest environmental groups (and the scientists who support them), and certain deeply-caring politicians tell us, accepting responsibility for our actions and taking the appropriate (albeit draconian) steps to correct our misbehavior will mark a significant step in our evolutionary development as caring, eco-friendly people. Not only will it pay dividends by giving everyone on the planet a superior quality of life [note to file: “superior” does not necessarily mean technologically advanced, and may in fact require us to adopt a more nature-friendly (i.e. primitive) lifestyle], it will help shed a lot of our social problems as well.  It isn’t the normal forces of nature that dried up your lake, made it snow in July, got you fired from your job or persuaded your wife to run off with the milkman.  It’s all due to global warming. 

Right about now someone is shaking their head and is about to accuse me of deliberately distorting this argument to make a cheap point.  Sure man is responsible for global warming, and with it comes both dried up lakes and snow in July. But let’s get serious! We don’t blame global warming for everything that goes wrong in our life.  We’re not that silly or superficial. Unless someone is mentally unbalanced, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, high on drugs or alcohol, eating too much sugar or too many Twinkies, or suffering from some other heretofore unrecognized mental-stress disability brought about by the Bush tax plan or the war in Iraq, man is still responsible for his own actions.  Global warming has nothing to do with it.

Oh really?  According to an article by Craig Anderson, Ph.D. and Brad Bushman, Ph.D. in the February 1998 issue of the American Psychological Association Monitor⁷, “A largely ignored negative consequence of global warming is the expected changes in violent crime. Over the last 10 years, research has shown that uncomfortably hot temperatures directly cause increases in aggressive and violent behavior, including violent crime. Thus, recent improvements in the violent crime rate in the United States may well be lost as global warming occurs.”

And how do they know this?  According to the authors, “We now know that most violent crimes result from hostile thoughts and angry feelings. People get mad at each other, argue, fight and sometimes kill. Any factor that increases anger or hostility will tend to increase violence.”

So the good news is, you’re not to blame for cracking your wife’s head open with a baseball bat when she nags you about taking out the garbage.  Dick Cheney and his evil oil-producing buddies are, for keeping us hooked on global-warming fossil fuels.  As the authors continue, “If global warming progresses as now seems likely, we can expect . . . a steadily climbing rate of violence, along with all the grief, anguish, costs and waste associated with it. Personally, we’d prefer to use less fossil fuel and pay a bit more for cleaner energy and more efficient transportation. How about you?”

There’s certainly no political agenda here coloring this analysis.

With logic like this, I’m giving serious thought to removing the Ph.D. from the end of my own name to avoid being confused with such ‘progressive’ thinking.  I’m reminded at this point of the old joke about little Johnny who was asked by his teacher, “Why did you tell your classmates that your father is an axe-murder on death row?”  Little Johnny looked at her sheepishly and replied, “I was embarrassed to tell them that he’s really a lawyer.”  Suddenly, the lawyer jokes don’t seem all that funny — or unique — anymore. 

Unfortunately, as shallow as some of the educated class are when speaking about this issue, the ‘average guy’ can take us to depths we’ve never imagined.  If they think about the subject of global warming at all, it’s at such a superficial level that one wonders if they have any real grasp of the world.  These are the people who care deeply about the environment, and prove it by purchasing Animal-Friendly license plates or by turning off the living room light to save electricity while watching The West Wing on their 92-inch energy-sucking plasma TV, complete with a Dolby stereo digital surround-sound theater-quality audio system that has more petro-chemicals in its plastic molding than the average ten gallon recycling container.

Consider this write-in question to Chaiyah’s Chronicle by M. Emily Cragg⁸ as an example of the above. She couldn’t comprehend the thought that global warming might be due to the sun getting hotter, rather than be the result of human activity.  “I don't see any MEANS for the sun's heat to INCREASE, offhand. I mean, usually, the car engine doesn't just SIT THERE and start itself up and get hot. So, what's the deal?” 

For kindness sake, and to sleep better at night thinking that the next generation isn’t completely brain-dead, I’m going to assume that Ms. Cragg is an inquisitive nine year old child and not an education major six credits short of graduation.  This way, when I point out that she’s comparing a man-made device to the nuclear furnace of a burning star, I won’t feel so bad when I get a blank stare in return — as if there’s some confusing point I’m trying to convey while deliberately not answering her question. 

Which again brings us back to the underlying theme of this article.  Those who challenge conventional wisdom (such as the belief that man’s actions are the determining factor in global warming) start the debate with a significant disadvantage.  The evidence to the contrary may be on my side, but if it’s rejected out of hand by the person I’m speaking to, I’m not going to make much headway.  Even worse, when they’re not even capable of framing the question, let alone comprehending the answer, there’s no point in going to battle. 

When the microscope first revealed that tiny, single-celled organisms gave rise to the bugs that magically appeared from the ground — not through some mysterious “spontaneous generation” of life as was commonly believed — it took years for people to accept this new truth.  Tiny microscopic organisms developing into large, multi-celled creatures was as ridiculous to believe as the claim that the world was actually round, not flat; or that the continents were drifting apart.  No one asks you to prove that eating healthy food is better than eating cheeseburgers and fries every day; that caring about others is a better way to live one’s life than caring only about yourself; or that it’s better to have a college degree than to be a high school dropout.  These are intrinsically-accepted, commonly shared “facts” every bit as real as the fact that the ocean is deep, the sky is blue, and the ice caps are melting. 

Only the ice caps aren’t melting.  And therein lies the problem.

7. When a fact is a fact, and when it isn’t

Not only is man-made global warming not responsible for melting the polar ice caps, they’re not really melting.  They may be shifting around a little, but they’re still very much intact — and staying that way well into the foreseeable future. 

Consider this October 21, 2005 report from Reuters:⁹  “Greenland’s icecap has thickened slightly in recent years despite concerns that it is thawing out due to global warming, says an international team of scientists.” The report continues.  “Glaciers at sea level have been retreating fast because of a warming climate, making many other scientists believe the entire icecap is thinning.  But satellite measurements showed that more snowfall is falling and thickening the icecap, especially at high altitudes.”  Which means we have just as much ice and snow this year as we did last year.  It’s just distributed in different places.  

And why shouldn’t it be that way?  Just because it was 27 degrees in Minneapolis on January 3, 1963, it doesn’t mean that the same exact conditions need to apply every January 3rd thereafter.¹⁰  The Earth isn’t a stagnant, never-changing planet. It’s a dynamic, constantly changing world. This dynamism was a key feature of the environment long before mankind started walking on two legs, and it will be that way long after humanity goes the way of the dinosaurs.  Factories, urban sprawl, or the internal combustion engine have absolutely nothing to do with the fundamentals of this process.

Maybe I’m belaboring the point a little by continuing to press this issue, but I’m sure there are still people out there who, having read this far, remain convinced that the actions of humanity are responsible for the melting ice caps, regardless of what the satellite measurements actually tell us.  If not completely 100% responsible, than 95% — or some other overwhelming percentage. They heard it on the news, or saw it in the paper, or read Al Gore’s book, and they all say the ice caps are melting.  What’s more, little Johnny’s teachers, their friends and neighbors, and the guy sitting next to them on the bus all say it is too.  They seem like reasonable people, and aren’t mean or rich like Dick Cheney who looked a lot like the Vice President in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, and you saw what happened to the world there when he didn’t believe there was any global warming. And as if that isn’t evidence enough, they distinctly remember it being hotter or cooler when they were a kid.  Things are not the same way today, so it’s got to be global warming!

It’s a funny thing about memory.  As vivid as the images may be, they’re not always the most reliable source of information.  When I was 5 years old I lived in Kansas City on a monstrously steep hill that propelled my wintertime sled down its slopes at breakneck speeds.  In the summer I’d climb a huge oak tree in the front of my house that was so tall, I swear it was part of an old growth forest.  These were fond memories I shared with my daughter, and when the opportunity arose one summer vacation, I took her back to see the old street where I grew up.

I don’t remember the exact date when Kansas City was hit by a nuclear missile, but it must have been quite an explosion since it sheered off the top of that mountain I lived on and left only 10 degree slope in its wake.  It also shrunk the houses along the block that somehow survived the blast, and lopped off at least thirty yards of the old growth tree in front of my former house.  Maybe 10 feet tall at its peak, the tree was now just a shriveled up image of its former glory. “How,” I asked myself, “could the world have changed so dramatically in less than half a century?”

Then it hit me.  It hadn’t really changed at all.  The hill didn’t lose any height, and the house I grew up in hadn’t magically shrunk.  If anything, the tree I used to climb had grown bigger, not smaller.  Only my memory, my unique point of reference, had changed.  Which is why it is absolutely worthless to evaluate current trends based on one’s memory of previous events. To produce accurate evaluations we need to rely on instruments that independently measure the phenomenon we are observing; instruments whose readings produce an unbiased look at the world we are living in.¹¹   

Which returns us again to the ‘vanishing ice caps’ that move around in size and shape, but don’t lose their volume.  As Dennis Behreandt wrote in the November 14, 2005 edition of The New American¹² in his article “Getting Burned by Bad Science,”

In September, a team of scientists from NASA and the University of Colorado announced that the Arctic ice cap measured only 200 million square miles, or about 500,000 square miles less than its average extent during the period from 1979 to 2000. Alarmists quickly used this study for an "I told you so" moment.

The trouble with this study, however, is that it makes the mistake of assuming that the period from 1979 to 2000 accurately depicts the norm for the Arctic. It almost certainly does not. What is "normal" for an area over millennia can't be accurately determined from a slice of time spanning only two decades. This is akin to saying that a 65-year-old person cannot possibly be "normal" because he doesn't look, act, or think like he did between the ages of 0 and 21.

Other scientists have recognized this fact. According to Oregon State University climatologist George Taylor, "Arctic sea ice has undergone significant changes in the last 1,000 years, even before the mid-20th century 'greenhouse enhancement.' Current conditions appear to be well within historical variability."

Lying with statistics isn’t the sole providence of glacier-melting enthusiasts. As Andrew Kenny wrote in The Sunday Mail on July 14, 2002,¹³  “Environmentalists claim that world temperatures have risen one degree Fahrenheit in the past century, but [Piers Corbyn, Director of Weather Action] points out that the period they take as their starting point — around 1880 — was colder than average. What's more, the timing of temperature changes does not appear to support the theory of global warming. Most of the rise came before 1940 — before human-caused emissions of 'greenhouse' gases became significant.”

So what you end up in large part with can depend upon where you started.  If one is intellectually honest, they frame the debate in such a way as to draw out the truth, not merely reinforce a pre-conceived conclusion.  In politics, they call this kind of dishonest research push polling.  Consider a recent event in the news.  “Reports indicate that the U.S. Government is monitoring the telephone activity of millions of unsuspecting Americans much like yourself.  Do you think the government should be wiretapping your phone lines and invading personal privacy without first securing a warrant under the rights bestowed upon all U.S. citizens by the Fourth Amendment?”  Who’s going to say “yes” to that kind of question?

Okay, so it’s never quite as blatant as this exaggerated example, but one is still hard pressed to find a survey question by CNN, CBS, or the New York Times that says, “In the early 1990s, President Clinton signed into law a bill that gave law enforcement officials the right to access records of the telephone calls you placed or received without first securing a probable-cause warrant from a sitting judge — just the numbers called and duration of each call, not any of the actual content of the call.  George Bush has continued this practice in an effort to stop future terrorist attacks on the country.  Do you have any objection to this?”  Somehow I think the data acquired from this line of questioning won’t match up well with the earlier line of inquiry, even though they both purport to examine the same phenomenon.

8. “I see,” said the blind man

What does all this have to do with global warming?  The people who bring you the news of the day about nonexistent wiretaps and hypothetical invasions of privacy disguised as actual events are the same ones reporting on the “scientific evidence” that man is slowly turning Earth into the planet Venus. 

Assuming, for the moment, that a legitimate debate on the subject of global warming could take place without the agenda-driven apologists on the Left branding every doubter a racist bigoted homophobe hell-bent on destroying the Earth in the name of Big Oil, I would begin with a simple question. “You say that man is responsible for global warming, which could be anywhere between 2 and 6 degrees over the next one hundred years.¹⁴  You base this judgment on the claim that global warming has in fact already started — that the Earth has gotten at least one degree warmer over the last 100 years. Putting aside for the moment the question of whether man or nature is primarily responsible for this change, just how do we know that the Earth has actually gotten warmer since the late 1800s?”

This isn’t merely an idle question. If the foundation of global warming theory for the 21st century is actual evidence of global warming in the 20th century, then what happens if this evidence is found to be flawed, inaccurate, or not as severe as it is otherwise purported to be?  Just how do we know what “the temperature of the Earth was” in 1901, 1902, and each year beyond?” What instruments were used to measure it?  How many were there, and exactly where were they located?

We can answer this question fairly accurately in the last 20 years by pointing to a global network of satellites and ground stations, all operating with sophisticated electronic devices capable of measuring a hundredth of a degree or more.  But what about 1900?  There were no satellites. There were no highly sophisticated digital measuring devices.  A fair portion of the United States was still unexplored, uninhabited country, not to mention the depths of the Amazon, parts of Asia, most of Australia, or any number of South Seas Islands to name just a few?  Exactly what was the temperature of Latitude -1.2500 Longitude -78.6167 on February 1, 1903?  I can tell you what it is today for that location (Ambato, Ecuador), and a few million other places around the globe.  But what exactly was it 100 years ago?

The truth is, we don’t know.  At best, we may have a general number for central Ecuador, taken at a monitoring station in Guayaquil a few hundred miles away, and extrapolated from another reading in neighboring Peru. But just how accurate is it for a broad swath of the planet? Maybe Guayaquil and Lima were having a particularly sweltering heat wave that day, but it was nice and cool in the mountainous terrain surrounding Ambato.  Wouldn’t that tend to distort the so-called “average” temperature for that day?  And what about the other, even more remote areas of the planet?  Don’t their actual temperature levels matter too? 

The paucity of weather recording stations around the world in 1900 would give us, at best, a rough estimate of the world’s actual temperature, even if we assume that all their measurements are as accurate then as they are today.  We know that number more precisely today thanks to the vast network of recording stations around the world, but that doesn’t help us much a hundred years ago.  Comparing a digitally produced 87.25 degrees to an eyeballed estimate of 87 degrees doesn’t give us a difference of .25 degrees.  It gives us absolutely nothing of precise, scientific value. That rough estimate (recorded for posterity as a firm number) could be off by any number of degrees due to limited coverage, imprecise equipment, and/or rounding errors.  To say that the world has “gotten warmer by one degree over the last 100 years” is to pretend that the figures of 1906 are just as accurate as those collected in 2006.

Lest anyone think that this little problem was rendered moot by the 1920s, 1930’s, or even the 1940’s, Eisenhower couldn’t get his chief meteorologist to say whether it was going to rain or be dry on Normandy beach just across the English Channel on June 6, 1944, let alone tell him what the temperature was that day in the middle of the Amazon jungle. It wasn’t until the advent of the space age that mankind truly began to get a handle on predicting the weather — and was finally able to come up with a “global average temperature” accurate to a hundredth of a degree as it is today. 

And yet, we “know” that the world has gotten one degree warmer over the last 100 years because we can compare a digital readout taken today to the number we find in the back of some dusty old book?  If you really believe this, I have a time-share condo you need to see, and a certain bridge for sale that I’m willing to give you the deal of a life-time on.

9. Can good intentions equal good results?

In the spirit of trying to make the old temperature data work so we can support a claim of a one degree increase in the Earth’s temperature during the last century, let’s make a heroic assumption and pretend that data collected in 1900 was just as geographically reliable then as it is today in the 21st century. 

In other words, while there might be 2,000 monitoring sites in Ecuador at the present time, supplemented by overhead satellites monitoring the entire continent, we’re going to arbitrarily conclude that they have no intrinsic advantage over the 20 or so sites (another generous assumption) scattered in and around Ecuador in the year 1900.  All other things being equal, the leap-of-faith assumption we're making here is that these 20 locations in 1900 will provide data that is as complete and accurate as the data provided by the 2,000 or so sites in operation in that country a hundred years later.¹⁵

But all things aren’t equal. Even if somehow, some way, these hypothetical 20 sites were strategically placed so as to do the work of 2,000 monitoring stations today (plus satellite observation), it’s not the same equipment!  My cell phone in 2006 has more computing power than the Apollo 11 command module, and it’s only been 37 years since man first landed on the moon.  Imagine the difference in temperature gathering technology in 1906 compared to 2006. 

Actually, you don’t have to imagine. A typical solar radiation thermometer in use in the early 1900s consisted of a stick set in the ground with vacuum tube mercury thermometer-type device set on top of it.  Little niches were carved into the sides of the clear glass tube so an observer could see how far the mercury rose inside the tube.¹⁶

Using this equipment, how one would recognize the difference between 87, 87.13, 87.25, and 87.39 degrees (or anything in between) is somewhat of a mystery.  If the actual temperature was, say, 87.46 degrees, but the observer mistakenly recorded it (or simply rounded it off to) 87 degrees, and if that happened consistently at multiple stations over multiple years, then the historic record would suggest a half a percent increase in global warming over the last 100 years, not a full percent. What would that do to computer model predictions for the years 2000-2099?  Would we still be looking at a 2-6 degree increase in global temperatures?  Would it be half that amount?  Or would the .5 degree difference in the 20th century be statistically insignificant, and we’d simply abandon the whole global warming debate?

Again, as Andrew Kenny wrote in July 14, 2002 edition of The Sunday Mail, “There are two facts in the [global warming] scare. First, it is true that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, one which traps heat on Earth.  Without it, the Earth would be too cold for life. Second, it is true that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. The rest is guesswork. The global warmers said the most accurate measure of climate change would be air temperatures. For the past 20 years or more, air temperatures have been measured with extreme accuracy. They show no warming whatsoever.” [emphasis added]

10. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

We’ve raised questions about the accuracy of the 20th century temperature data.  And, we’ve challenged the notion that the Earth is growing steadily warmer with each passing decade.  Since the previous “warming” of the planet provides the foundation for predicting additional, catastrophic temperature increases in the 21st century, there’s no longer any solid foundation to make that claim.  So the debate is over.  Right?

Wrong.  When confronted with inconvenient facts, advocates of the man-made global warming theory turn to an alternative method of proving their claims.  If air temperature data isn’t working out the way you wanted, there’s always the sea.  Do you know why hurricanes have been so frequent and so powerful the last few years?  The temperature of the sea is warming. All that melting polar ice is lowering the water’s temperature . . . no wait a minute, wouldn’t that make it colder, and doesn’t cold water inhibit hurricanes? No, the cold water is getting colder, and the warm water is getting warmer, because the oceans don’t mix.  No, that can’t be right either. 

Maybe it’s got something to do with water layers, or ocean currents, or things like that, because everyone knows there’s never any natural change in the ocean.  If I dropped a measuring device twelve miles off the coast of Bermuda in 1927 at Latitude X and Longitude Y, then whatever reading there was in 1927 should be the same in 1942, 1961, 1988, and every other year up to and including today.  No, that’s not believable either.  So let’s just take an average measurement combining all these sites and all these factors without thinking about what those factors really are, or how they actually got that way, then come up with a single number and compare it to today.  Sounds like a plan.   

While I’m obviously making fun of a much more involved and methodical evaluation than I just described, I don’t think my conclusion is that far off. If you start with flawed assumptions — no matter how passionately they’re expressed — at the end of the day the best data in the world will still give you a big pile of crap. And if both the assumptions themselves and the data that’s collected are seriously flawed, then we start to give a real meaning to the phrase George H.W. Bush is said to have coined: “deep-doodo.”

So how do we approach this issue, and evaluate it for what it really is?  Whenever I’m looking for a quick read to take my mind off the troubles of the day, I turn to the History of the Exploration of the Norwegian Sea,¹⁷ and by an astonishing coincidence, that seems to be a great place to start. 

It’s amazing what you can learn when you peruse the exploits of early 20th century scientists who tried to take the “deep sea’s” temperature in 1900.  For example, 

For the determination of deep-sea temperature . . . we regret to say that the first attempt was to some extent a failure, as a great part of the deep-sea temperatures determined during the first cruise (1900) can hardly claim such a degree of accuracy, the reasons being that our Reversing Thermometers were not sufficiently well made, and that the Insulated Water-Bottle, in which we placed most confidence at that time, is incapable of giving accurate temperature determinations for great depths, owing to the disturbing effect upon the indications of the thermometer produced by the dilatation of the solid parts of the water-bottle . . . when being hauled up [emphasis added].

Later efforts proved equally unsuccessful, despite a variety of different methods and materials.  I’ll spare you the details (which go on for several pages) citing failure after failure to secure a reliable measurement.  The equipment either malfunctioned, failed to register properly, or never worked in the first place.  One telling remark indicative of the primitive manufacturing process of this time is worth repeating however, since it goes to the point of an earlier observation.

The best instruments of this type, selected from a stock of 26 thermometers, which had been used for several years, proved to register very well. One of these thermometers was used in 1900; and when read off with a specially constructed Reading-Microscope (see later), it actually gave an accuracy which might have approached the limit of ± 0.01° C., if it had not been for the rough graduation of the scale [emphasis added].

To put this in layman’s terms, we finally got the damn thing to work, but we couldn’t figure out what the temperature was.  Eventually, the Norwegians got their thermometers to perform with sufficient accuracy, and if they followed precise, carefully detailed procedures to dispatch and recover the instruments, they believed they had a fair degree of success in assessing the water’s temperature. 

Okay, so taking them at their word, they got the system to work accurately enough in later years to provide reliable data on the sea’s temperature. Unfortunately, the world is a bit larger than the Norwegian Sea, and I’m still searching for similar studies of Boston Harbor, the Gulf of Mexico, the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean, anywhere near Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, the Arctic Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, or any one of a thousand other areas around the world so I can be assured that the temperatures we observe, and highly accurately record in 2006, will have a true basis of comparison with experiments conducted 40 years ago, let alone 100.

I think I’m going to be looking for a long time.  Taking the temperature of water anywhere below the surface is infinitely more difficult than sticking a thermometer in one’s back yard and checking to see how hot it’s getting from time to time. And if we couldn’t even do that accurately and comprehensively enough in the early to mid-1900s, what makes anyone think that taking the temperature of the sea is a better indicator?

11. So what’s the big deal about 100 years — give or take a few decades (or more)?

When my five-year old daughter turned six, she spoke about the time when she was “just a little baby a few years ago.”  I remember laughing at the innocence of her logic.  She had, in fact, added another 20 percent or so to her time in this world, but I knew that extra year was the blink of a moment and represented no real change at all.  “Wait until you turn forty,” I thought to myself.  “Then you can reflect back on your youth, and all the years that have passed in between.”

I remember my elderly father smiling at me when I told him that story. “Wait till you’re seventy,” he told me. “Then you can really look back on the life you lived, and see it in its full perspective.”  I told that story the other day to a neighbor’s father who was celebrating his ninety-fifth birthday.  He looked at me and smiled . . .

So what is the point of this story, other than to tell you there’s always someone older and more experienced than you waiting to put you in your place?  No, the real lesson is that we make a very serious mistake when we think of the passage of our time on Earth, and confuse it with the passage of time on the Earth itself.

One hundred years of highly accurate, impeccably recorded temperature data — even if they were to exist — would be absolutely meaningless in discerning true knowledge about the “larger trend” in our planet’s climatology.  One hundred, three hundred, a thousand years or more could be nothing more than a geological hiccup, not a true change in direction. At one time Africa and South America were joined together. India was a floating island and the Himalaya Mountains didn’t exist until it crashed into another land mass.  Even then it took millions of years to create that mountain range. Eons from now, those mountains will become grassy plains again, and the shape — as well as location — of the seven continents will be completely unrecognizable.

But knowing this, we can still somehow tell that the world’s temperature will be significantly warmer in 2100 than it is today (even though we can’t predict the weather for Chicago more than a few hours in advance)?¹⁸  And we somehow know that despite the historic record of numerous Ice Ages and greenhouse-type warmings millions of years into the past, and our present-day understanding of the physics behind the expanding and contracting cycles of the sun, that somehow man, and man alone, is uniquely responsible for an impending environmental disaster?

If you think I’m being facetious by over-emphasizing man’s impact on the environment in light of all the contrasting evidence just to make the radical environmentalist position seem foolish, think again.  It isn’t that these people acknowledge a range of factors from human and natural, and place slightly more emphasis on human actions than I do.  It isn’t that we both see the same picture, just focus on a different element of it.  No, these people are completely, totally, and unmitigatedly dishonest in their approach to the subject.  Either that, or they are just plain stupid.  And I can back that claim up.

12 What color is the sky on your world?

I’ve already dealt with the subject of ignorance in the previous pages, so I won’t belabor the point any longer. The sun is not anything like a car engine, and just because there’s a number in a book written 100 years ago doesn’t mean that the figure is anywhere close to being compatible with the results produced by modern day technology.

Though I’ve touched here and there on the duplicity of environmental activists as they promote their theory about global warming, this matter bears further exploration because it provides the missing piece of the puzzle to understand why opinion leaders on the Left act the way they do; denying the obvious and/or ignoring contradictory evidence to promote the fiction that man, and man alone, is primarily responsible for global warming. 

Three interrelated reasons explain why they do this:  power, prestige, and money.

Power:  As Defenders of the Environment, these individuals occupy a unique position of power and importance.  Their words shape the public debate, and through that debate they try to influence public policy.  The more their policies are put into practice, the more power they garner.  They don’t need to be an elected official, because if they are successful, elected officials will look to them for their policy direction. 

But the quest for power doesn’t automatically mean that an individual must lie (or to be more generous, refuse to put forward a completely honest view) in order to occupy this position of influence.  I will argue, however, that the unique nature of the global warming debate requires them to promote a singular world view regardless of the evidence to support it, and in spite of the growing evidence against it.  The decision tree looks something like this:

If global warming is only a theoretical concern, and not a concrete, existing problem, then there is no reason to make new policy and/or divert current resources to this crisis.  Thus, it must be an existing problem that is significant, and growing, or other competing problems will take center stage.

Moreover, the solution to this existing, significant, and growing problem must involve a restructuring or redirection of society’s resources.  If existing policies, processes and/or institutions can take care of the problem, there is no need for an outside entity to lead the effort or participate in any meaningful way.  Thus, the solution must, by definition, demand a “new way” of doing business, led by individuals who are closely attuned to the unique new dynamics surrounding that issue.  In short, their view must be that the very nature of the problem, as well as the unique features of its solution, requires individuals like them to play strong central roles.

If the facts at hand don’t conform to this scenario, then they must be massaged, distorted, or disregarded all together in order to preserve, protect, or expand their power.¹⁹

Prestige:  Closely related to the quest for power is the importance of prestige.  It is certainly possible to define a problem and/or manufacture a solution that is entirely within the political mainstream.  Rather than supplant existing processes and institutions, a group or individual could seek to “reinvent” them in a more efficient form.  The goals and objectives might remain the same, but the manner in which they are pursued would be altered.  Or, the process and/or institution could remain unchanged, but the goals could be tweaked so that resources are divided differently among its constituent parts.  In either case the effort is designed to strengthen the existing system, not replace it.

For radical environmentalists, however, such an option would never be seriously considered.  In addition to seeking power, they are also part of a social fabric that views itself as separate and distinct from the individuals managing current institutions and processes.  Gaining the respect, approval, or admiration of these current leaders would alienate them from their peers and call their own motives into question.  If Big Oil, supported by mainstream Republicans and other ROWG’s (rich old white guys) embrace their ideas, then there is either something intrinsically wrong with their proposals — or worse, their peers will conclude that they’ve compromised their principles and joined the enemy.²⁰  Big Oil, Republicans, and ROWG are the problem.  Bringing them down as they save the environment will not only enhance these activists’ power, it will elevate their personal prestige within the only group that matters; their fellow Left-wing radicals, and the Hollywood groupies who hang on their every word.

Money:  Last, but certainly not least, is the issue of money.  Those without power don’t get the funding. That is the ultimate, self-reinforcing goal. 

It takes money to run a think tank, operate a website, travel around the country or pay one’s own personal bills.  Those with power can persuade (read: extort) elected officials to help subsidize their activities with federal funds, either in an attempt to buy off more aggressive opposition that could threaten these officials’ own power base, or as a way of stoking the flames if the party in power is sympathetic to their cause and wants to create political mischief for their opponents. 

Also, the more perceived power and prestige an organization has, the more likely it is to attract private donations from like-minded individuals or sympathetic foundations.  Either way, money is the fuel that keeps things going, and raising more money is always a primary concern of every social activist on either side of the political spectrum.

For those who seek power and prestige but have not yet attained it, money becomes the driving force in shaping their message.  To illustrate this point by borrowing from the political arena, if a group arises in opposition to the policies of President Bush, it will not serve its own best interests by conceding major points in that debate even if the evidence is overwhelming.  The Bush tax cut policy has swelled the public coffers beyond even the most optimistic projections, just as the Administration said it would.  Organizations formed in opposition to Bush cannot concede this point, or they will alienate the red meat radicals who viscerally hate the president and will tolerate no praise for him whatsoever. Their funds will then go to another competing group that remains true to the message that everything Bush does is corrupt, incompetent, or stupid,²¹ and they’ll be left panhandling for dollars to pay the light bill.

Which brings us back to the issue of global warming.  To illustrate my point about the inherent dishonesty of the Left-wing activists who address this subject, I have to look no further than a document from the Natural Resources Defense Council that was last revised on January 9, 2006.²²  As Defenders of the Environment, they had access to the same NASA, U.S. government, and other material I previously cited — and more. The information they convey on their website is, in their opinion, the most accurate and balanced view of the global warming issue presently available. 

Below is a sample of their work in the form of questions and answers they posed, accompanied by my observations.  The questions and answers are direct quotes from the NRDC; the observations and occasional “translations” are entirely mine.

Q: What causes global warming?

A: Carbon dioxide and other air pollution that is collecting in the atmosphere like a thickening blanket, trapping the sun's heat and causing the planet to warm up. Coal-burning power plants are the largest U.S. source of carbon dioxide pollution — they produce 2.5 billion tons every year. Automobiles, the second largest source, create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually.

Here's the good news: technologies exist today to make cars that run cleaner and burn less gas, modernize power plants and generate electricity from nonpolluting sources, and cut our electricity use through energy efficiency. The challenge is to be sure these solutions are put to use.

Observation: What causes global warming, according to the NRDC?  Not the sun.  Not the Earth as it moves through its natural cycles.  The only factor worth mentioning is coal burning power plants and cars.  But not just any power plants or cars — only those operated in the good old U.S. of A.  China, India, Western Europe, Latin America, Russia and the remainder of the world don’t rate a mention. One can only conclude that their power plants and cars must be cleaner and more efficient than the smokestack belching, gas guzzling monsters blighting our country, making them the model technology the NDRC challenges us to adopt.

Q: Is the earth really getting hotter?

A: Yes. Although local temperatures fluctuate naturally, over the past 50 years the average global temperature has increased at the fastest rate in recorded history. And experts think the trend is accelerating: the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990. Scientists say that unless we curb global warming emissions, average U.S. temperatures could be 3 to 9 degrees higher by the end of the century.

Observation: Not only is the data ignored showing that average temperatures have actually stabilized over the past few decades rather than increased, we are now threatened with the possibility of a 3 to 9 degree temperature increase by 2100.  If a one degree increase doesn’t get the public’s attention, make it 3-4 degrees.²³  If 3-4 degrees isn’t scary enough to foster the desired policy changes to curb global warming, suggest that 6.5 degrees is a real possibility.²⁴  If a 6.5 degree temperature increase doesn’t do the job, toss out 9 degrees to get your point across. 

And, when you make this claim, don’t tell anybody where you got that number.  You’re the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Like the anchorman in Rome commenting on the crowds at Pope John Paul II’s funeral, if you say it’s 9 degrees, then I’m sure you must have a real good reason for making that statement.  Otherwise, you’d just be pulling a number out of the air.

This might be a good point to resurrect a July 18, 2004 article from Telegraph.co.uk²⁵ that points out a tiny little fact that somehow has continued to elude the NDRC in the months and years that followed.  According to the article, “Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.”  The article continues by making note of the following:

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes. Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years."

. . .

The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sun-spots signalled a cold period – which could last up to 50 years – but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer . . . The research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist. "Global warming – at least the modern nightmare version – is a myth," he said. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policymakers are not. "Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide – the principal so-called greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock."

Continuing with the Q&A from the Natural Resources Defense Council, another question is asked and answered.

Q. Are warmer temperatures causing bad things to happen?

A: Global warming is already causing damage in many parts of the United States. In 2002, Colorado, Arizona and Oregon endured their worst wildfire seasons ever. The same year, drought created severe dust storms in Montana, Colorado and Kansas, and floods caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in Texas, Montana and North Dakota. Since the early 1950s, snow accumulation has declined 60 percent and winter seasons have shortened in some areas of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington.

Of course, the impacts of global warming are not limited to the United States. In 2003, extreme heat waves caused more than 20,000 deaths in Europe and more than 1,500 deaths in India. And in what scientists regard as an alarming sign of events to come, the area of the Arctic's perennial polar ice cap is declining at the rate of 9 percent per decade. 

Observation:  It might come as a bit of a shock to the “Dust Bowl” survivors of the 1930s that droughts are a unique phenomenon associated with early 21st century global warming.  Traveling a little farther back in time, there are a number of Central and South American civilizations that completely collapsed in the face of prolonged, severe drought. I guess the Mayans brought it on themselves by building all those coal-burning factories to help build the SUVs they drove that put so much CO2 into the atmosphere it killed all the rainforests.

As for the non-melting melting ice caps, I’m reminded of Ted Danson’s predictions in the mid-1980s that the oceans would die within 10 years if we didn’t do something drastic — and do it now — to clean them up.  Well, we didn’t undertake a deep-water Manhattan Project, and 10 years later the ocean was still alive.  Just as it is today.

So what do you do, as a good liberal environmentalist concerned about man’s incessant ravaging of the planet when your ludicrous prediction is exposed for the fraud it really is?  Reevaluate your data?  (No. Who needs data when you speak from the heart?)  Rethink your position?  (What’s to re-think?  It’s how I feel, who I am, and I need to be true to myself.)  No, you simply make another one that’s virtually identical to the first, but just leave off the date-certain for the apocalyptic event so your enemies can’t pin you down.

Q: Is global warming making hurricanes worse?

A: Global warming doesn't create hurricanes, but it does make them stronger and more dangerous. Because the ocean is getting warmer, tropical storms can pick up more energy and become more powerful. So global warming could turn, say, a category 3 storm into a much more dangerous category 4 storm. In fact, scientists have found that the destructive potential of hurricanes has greatly increased along with ocean temperature over the past 35 years.

Observation: What scientists have also found is that a lot more people live along the coasts in 2006 than they did in 1971.  So when a hurricane struck the Gulf coast in 1971, there were fewer people and less property to kill or destroy.  ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN aren’t in the habit of sending reporters to a deserted beach to lament the toppling of a half-dozen trees, unless George Bush personally cut them down to make way for another Wal-Mart.  But put 20,000 people there 35 years later, and someone is likely to get killed, just as a lot of buildings will lose their roofs. Ergo, the storms of 2006 are “more destructive.”

Furthermore, the claim that the ocean is getting warmer (an affirmative statement) is based on the assumption that we have a thorough, multi-decade database²⁷ upon which to make this comparison.  There is no such database detailed, accurate, and comprehensive enough to make this claim.  Nevertheless, having stated emphatically that the ocean is “getting warmer,” the NRDC dutifully lists the possibilities that maybe, might, and could perhaps happen because of this rock solid foundation upon which they base their judgment — all of which are dire and extreme.²⁸

There’s never been a hurricane as destructive as Katrina in 2006, except for the one that wiped out Galveston Texas in 1900, killing 6000 people, and a few dozen others here and there over the past several centuries. These freakish, abnormally powerful storms couldn’t be part of the natural cycle of sunspot and wind current activity.  No, that wouldn’t make any sense.  Global warming is responsible for it all, even the ones that happened before the Industrial Revolution. 

Q: What country is the largest source of global warming pollution?

A:  The United States. Though Americans make up just 4 percent of the world's population, we produce 25 percent of the carbon dioxide pollution from fossil-fuel burning — by far the largest share of any country. In fact, the United States emits more carbon dioxide than China, India and Japan, combined. Clearly America ought to take a leadership role in solving the problem. And as the world's top developer of new technologies, we are well positioned to do so — we already have the know-how.

Translation:  In case you missed the point in our opening question, the U.S. is to blame for all the bad things that are maybe going to possibly happen. We could solve the problem tomorrow if we wanted to, but Dick Cheney and his oil buddies don’t want you to drive cleaner cars.²⁹  And, as far as our assertion that “the United States emits more carbon dioxide than China, India and Japan, combined,” please don’t look too closely at our methodology in making this statement.  China has been a backwards, largely agrarian society for the past 60 years.  A few years ago it began to undertake a massive industrialization effort that has already driven up the worldwide price of oil to feed its voracious energy appetite, and this trend is going to continue — and accelerate — in the decades to come.  They aren’t building state-of-the-art, emission-reducing factories, so their growth will be accompanied by significant increases in the same nasty pollution that U.S. factories routinely clean through sophisticated scrubber technology. 

Since China’s industrialization will add significantly to worldwide, global-warming pollution, let’s force the U.S. to cut back on their use of these same natural resources, since our 25% gluttony is only benefiting 4% of the world’s population. (We’ll conveniently ignore the fact that not everything produced in the U.S. stays in the U.S., and is in fact sent as aid or trade to the rest of the world).  Besides, it isn’t fair for the U.S. and the greedy capitalists who run it to be so powerful. 

Even though Marxism has failed every time it’s been tried, China deserves a chance to make its Marxist government work. And it would work just fine if the U.S. didn’t hog all the world’s resources. (Again, we’ll ignore the other possible explanation that its inherently-repressive, socialist centralized government stifles their ability to compete with the American capitalist system).  So, in keeping with the spirit of the Kyoto Treaty that exempts China and other third world countries from the same restrictions it seeks to impose on the U.S., we’ll reinforce, once again, the belief that the U.S. is to blame for global warming, so the draconian prescriptions we offer to solve the “problem” will seem reasonable and fair.

I think that about sums it up, except to reiterate that George Bush wants you all to die, and you would too if it wasn’t for Bill Clinton and the NRDC.  While noting that the Bush Administration has supported some environmental initiatives, in the eyes of the NRDC they continue to fall short in a number of key areas.  As one illustration, the NRDC says that, “Stricter efficiency requirements for electric appliances will also help reduce pollution. One example is the 30 percent tighter standard now in place for home central air conditioners and heat pumps, a Clinton-era achievement that will prevent the emission of 51 million metric tons of carbon — the equivalent of taking 34 million cars off the road for one year. The new rule survived a Bush administration effort to weaken it when, in January 2004, a federal court sided with an NRDC-led coalition and reversed the administration's rollback.”³⁰

Which brings the NRDC to the main thrust of its public education efforts.  Having established that man is the principal agent of global warming, and that the U.S. in particular is the principal culprit, and that the Bush Administration and Big Business are the chief obstacles to sensible environmental policy, the NRDC tackles the ultimate question:  

Q: What can I do to help fight global warming?

A: There are many simple steps you can take right now to cut global warming pollution. Make conserving energy a part of your daily routine. Each time you choose a compact fluorescent light bulb over an incandescent bulb, for example, you'll lower your energy bill and keep nearly 700 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air over the bulb's lifetime. By opting for a refrigerator with the Energy Star label — indicating it uses at least 15 percent less energy than the federal requirement — over a less energy-efficient model, you can reduce carbon dioxide pollution by nearly a ton in total.

But most of all, the Natural Resources Defense Council pointed out that you can “join NRDC in our campaign against global warming.”

Translation: give us money, and add to our numbers to enhance our power, and we’ll keep fighting the fight for responsible environmental policy that ignores a solid, scientific basis for believing that anything other than U.S. citizens are chiefly to blame for warming the planet anywhere from 1 to 9 degrees.

It’s easy to conclude that the only reason the NRDC — and other equally myopic self-proclaimed environmentalist groups — hold tight to their apocalyptic vision that global warming essentially arises from coal burning factories and automobile emissions, is that without these scares, they’d have to leave their think tank and go find a real job.

After all, who’s going to give them money to fight a problem that may not exist, and if it does, is the result of natural processes beyond our control?

13. And now for the rest of the story

But there’s another important element at work here, one that I understand all too well from my past university life.  It applies to Ph.D. candidates, deep thinkers, and genuine (or pseudo) intellectuals of all standing.  It fits the archetypical tree-hugging, world-saving environmentalist to a “T”, particularly those in leadership positions within the movement.  I don’t know if anyone has ever given it an official name, but I like to call it the Clap Trap (“Can’t Lose Any Power”).  It goes something like this.

Once you’re admitted into the Ph.D. program, you need to choose a subject for your dissertation.  Your thesis must be an “original contribution to knowledge,” not just an extended research paper.

You think, worry, study, worry, think, study, and worry for a long time about your topic.  Suddenly one day it hits you.  I’m going to do my dissertation on the mating habits of the South American fruit fly.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to identify the subject matter.  You need to have a unique, distinctly original explanation for that event or phenomenon.  You decide after much thinking, worrying, studying, thinking and worrying again, aided perhaps by a few beers or other more powerful stimulants now and then, that you’ll explain their mating habits by pointing out the unique relationship between three legged dwarves who inhabit a neighboring island, and semi-annual sunspot activity.  Sex, basic instinct, and the need for procreation are relegated to secondary factors, or dismissed all together. That’s the traditional explanation, and to be a unique contribution to knowledge, you have to come up with something outside the box.

So, you collect some data, run a few regression analyses, and massage the findings until viola! — you’ve supported your thesis. You write it up and successfully defend it, and you’re given your Ph.D. (which you now learn stands for “Piled High and Deeper”). You interview for a teaching job or apply for a position at some prestigious think tank, and get hired.  You’re now successfully employed in your profession.

At least 4 years have passed from the time you entered the Ph.D. program until the time you received your degree.  Once you finished your classes, the bulk of that remaining time was spent conceiving, researching, writing and defending your dissertation.  You’d like to relax but you’ve just gotten a new job, and even though it’s not in some private sector hell-hole where you’ll slave away to make Dick Cheney richer while barely making your own ends meet, they still expect to see results.  And fast!  And this pressure will stay on you until you get tenure, or are firmly ensconced in your position.  And that might take years.

Fortunately, unlike the private sector where success is measured by how much you contribute to the bottom line, in the university/think tank world it’s a function of how much you publish.  You just started your new job Tuesday and already they’re asking you when your first book is coming out. Do you start on some new, innovative research project that may take you 18 months to finish?  No.  You take your dissertation, restructure it a little, and get it published. Instant book, instant recognition, instant results.

But there’s one small problem.  You had to push and pull and massage your data to come up with those “unique findings.”  And you had to do it as a wet-behind-the-ears kid still learning his craft, so it was a little weak on analysis and sloppy at points. It was good enough to demonstrate your scholarship and indicate your future potential, so you know you legitimately earned your Ph.D.  But was it really tight enough and adequately supported to publish for all the world to see? 

The answer is “No,” but you’d need another 9-12 months of data collection to really get it in shape.  And with this new data some of your conclusions are bound to change (if not entirely, then placed in a much broader perspective).  But you don’t have 9-12 months, so you go ahead and rush your decent, but flawed dissertation into publication.

To your pleasant surprise, the new book is well received by other intellectuals who marvel at how you were able to make your data sing and stand conventional wisdom on its head.  The deep flaws in your work you have come to recognize after months and months of reflection remain well hidden from most readers, who aren’t going to go back and independently re-work your numbers.  After all, you have a Ph.D. from a great university, and there’s no reason to suspect that you’re deliberately manipulating your findings, so the same professional courtesy is extended to you that they expect others to extend to themselves.  Besides, everyone knows that a true intellectual will grow over time, so any current deficiencies in your methodology or conclusions will be worked out in the years to come.

It’s now a couple of years down the road.  You’ve long abandoned any notion of “fixing” the shortcomings (or outright errors) in your dissertation/book.  Not only are you knee-deep in other projects that consume all of your time, you’ve made a national reputation for yourself arguing the fruit fly/sunspot/three legged dwarf hypothesis.  Your fellow intellectuals have embraced you as a “deep thinker,” and maybe, just maybe, you were being too hard on yourself in micro-analyzing your own work.  On reflection, it wasn’t such a bad piece of work after all.  Any lingering doubts about the accuracy of your data or the wisdom of your finding are buried once and for all.

That is, until some snot-nosed Ph.D. candidate releases a book challenging your data and attacking your assumptions. That’s his own original contribution to knowledge, and because of it you’re about to have your world come crashing down upon you.

Unless you fight back. 

Instead of admitting to any of the flaws he identified in your original work, you attack him and his scholarship.  You do everything you can to belittle his work and, in so doing, support your original thesis.  There’s no debate, no search for common understanding.  There’s only all out pseudo-intellectual combat. If you lose and he wins, he’ll be the new golden boy.  He’ll get the job, and the funding, and the public recognition while you’ll be washed up before you hit 40.  Too old to start over in the private sector, and too deficient to hold onto that Ivy League job or cushy think tank position, you have visions of wasting away the next 25 years as a senior lecturer at East Podunk Community College.

I could go on and on for a few more pages, but I think you get the point. The dissertation process isn’t the first step in a person’s life-long intellectual development.  It’s the process by which his professional conclusions will become etched in stone for the remainder of his life. If he actually puts a well-reasoned, well-researched, intellectually honest dissertation together that fudges nothing, and presents a genuinely credible set of conclusions, the experience is a good one.  Or if the flaws are minor — and can be conceded publicly without calling the entire book into question — he can survive and prosper in the years ahead.  But if the defects are more serious, and he’s now produced several books and articles based on that shaky foundation, his professional life is over if he concedes anything.  He will go to his proverbial grave insisting that sunspots and three legged dwarves are the controlling factor, not sex-drive and instinct — that explain fruit fly reproduction.

Which is another reason why the pseudo-intellectuals at the Natural Resources Defense Council refuse to concede that the sun, or Earth, have anything to do with global warming, other than maybe make it hotter here and there for a day or two somewhere along the continuum.  If they acknowledged even half the evidence I’ve been able to access through a cursory search of the Internet, they couldn’t keep making their outrageous claims.  So they just ignore any counter-veiling data and stick to their original story.  Man creates global warming, which can be measured precisely from 1900-1999, and based on these assumptions we can control the Earth’s temperature through the correct social, political and economic actions.  Oh, and as a nice little side-benefit, we get to keep our cushy jobs, and expand our power and prestige by convincing concerned citizens to join our cause.

The last notch in this sorted tale, and one that finally brings the discussion full circle, is the added component that I’ve alluded to throughout this article and discussed in a bit more detail above. Not only is it a matter of money, personal prestige and personal power, but modern day pseudo-environmentalists (as contrasted with a genuine environmentalist like Teddy Roosevelt) are equally concerned about one over-arching consideration.  They are True Believers.  And like all True Believers, ultimately it’s not about data, but faith.  Only those with extra baggage like scientists and academicians need to justify their positions– or at least, match data and analysis with counter-data and counter-analysis. Not everyone in the movement has been burdened with a set of professional credentials they must defend. Many are simply blessed with the greatest gift of all; the certainty of their position because they know, in their hearts, that it’s the right thing to believe.

Even if these people were to recognize a serious flaw in their reasoning, it wouldn’t be cause enough to change their conclusions.  Like the idiot savants I wrote about earlier, they know intuitively that global warming is caused by man, particularly those living in the United States.  That research hasn’t actually proven this to be true is beside the point. We can’t afford to wait another 100 years to validate the “obvious.” We need to take action now or the oceans will die, farmland will dry up, and depending upon your decade and personal preference, another ice age will overtake the planet too. There’s nothing to prove, nothing to debate. The only issue is how to persuade (or force) policy makers to implement their programs. 

You do this in any number of ways.  Keep raising the global warming increase from 2 to 9 degrees — or higher if necessary — until it hits the appropriate public nerve and the people demand change.  Pretend that temperature readings taken in 1900 have the same degree of specificity and reliability as those captured with 21st century technology.  Talk about the weather today as if nothing like this has happened in the history of the planet, let alone the last hundred or so years. 

And when all else fails, forget about the fact that Al Gore thought $4 a gallon gasoline was a wonderful way to force conservation and thus help achieve some of his environmental objectives, and suggest instead that U.S. companies already have the technology to make the environment cleaner, but Big Oil wants to gouge the little people by forcing them to buy their filthy, polluting fuel at $4 a gallon.³¹

14. To sum it all up

So what can we reasonably conclude, based on this review of actual facts regarding the claim of man-made global warming?  Let me pose my own set of questions and answers:

Q.  Does “global warming” exist?

A.  The collection of annual worldwide temperatures from 1900-1999 doesn't prove its existence, unless we’re willing to say the data gathered in 1900 is just as detailed, and credible, as the data gathered in 1999 (i.e. that a reading of 87.25 degrees in 1900 is as accurate a reflection of reality as a similar reading in 1999).

To be fair, I need to precisely define my own terms here, so as not to prove my point with the same tortured logic I’ve criticized throughout this article. Technology improves every year.  Unless we’re still using 100-year old measuring devices, by definition there can be no “identical comparisons.”  

But this isn’t what I mean when I talk about compatible data.  Can we say, instead, with any assurance that the technology of 1900 is at least minimally acceptable?  That is, while the instruments we design and manufacture today could carry out a reading accurately to, say, the .0001 mark, we only need to make comparisons to the .01 level.  We know 1900 equipment cannot reach the .0001 level, but was it capable of accurately measuring temperatures to the .01 level if that is all that is being used to construct the global warming computer models? 

From everything I’ve read on the subject, the answer is doubtful, at best.  In the pre-digital era, one relied on eyesight to take a reading.  Anytime you require a human being to produce a number instead of having that number generated independently, mistakes will occur. So I don’t think that one could really make the claim that all the data from 1900-1999 is equally reliable.  And further, I don’t believe there is anything to suggest that this minimal level of accuracy was achieved until well into the latter half of the 20th century.  At best there might be 30-40 years of accurate temperature figures, not 100.

Of course, even if someone was to argue that this minimal level of technological proficiency existed from 1900 forward, they would still have to argue that the average of say, 20 readings for a given area in 1900 is as statistically significant as the average of 2,000 or so readings a century later. The lack of a genuine, in-depth, worldwide data collection system would invalidate any 1-1 comparison simply on that basis.

Q.  If 20th century global warming could be shown to exist, would man be the cause of it? 

A.  Man can influence weather patterns by building cities that retain heat and divert wind patterns, damming rivers that create lakes or dry up other land, clearing forests, and building highways.  These influences can last for long periods of time, and may make local conditions wetter or dryer, and somewhat hotter or cooler, than they otherwise might be in their pristine condition. 

But unless we pave over the entire world (literally, not figuratively), we’re not really altering Earth’s climate.  Heating one spot isn’t the same thing as heating the entire planet, and before we measure the influence of that one variable, we need to understand whether it produces offsetting effects someplace else.  We can’t just pick out one variable, take its temperature, and forget about everything else.  It’s all related and all interconnected, and to make an honest assessment we have to take a large number of additional variables into account — just like the Energy Information Administration counseled.  And when we think we have an answer about man’s collective impact on the environment, someone needs to factor in a dynamic, changing Earth and sun to see what they contribute.  And when we do this, we need to look at more than 30, or a 130, or even a 1,300 year period of time, because the Earth and sun have their own timetables that don’t always correspond to the length of one human’s lifespan. 

With this caution in mind, current studies appear to indicate that the sun is presently going through a phase where it is burning hotter.  Whether this phase started in 1900, 1940, 1980, or just last week, there seems to be some evidence that it does exist now³², and therefore the Earth will continue to get hotter well into the foreseeable future.  In this case, we can say that it seems that global warming does indeed exist.

Unfortunately for the NRDC, Al Gore, and other radical environmentalists, since man didn’t cause it, man can’t cure it.  And if man can’t cure it, there’s no reason to put in place the draconian policies they insist will remedy it.  So they ignore the facts, and press on with their agenda of more money, more power, and more prestige to solve a problem they can’t control, but will keep them financially solvent, socially “relevant”, and politically powerful as they spend your money and dictate your lives.  

That’s all that was needed.  Two questions, not fifty.  Answer these clearly and objectively, and every other question about what to do, and how to do it, will magically fall in place.

Endnotes

1. “Ice Cubes and Ice Ages”, The New York Times August 22, 2000. Although the earth began to warm 19,000 years ago, it took longer than 300 years to reach the point of glacial retreat we are in today.  Most scientists mark this date around 12,000 years ago.  Much of the Midwest United States was still under ice 16,000 years ago, for example, and it wasn’t until 10,000 BC (12,000 years ago) that the interglacial period is officially recognized.  Even with that, a “little ice age” occurred from roughly 1300 to 1850. In fact, the Thames River in London froze over so solidly in the 1600s that there were ice fairs during the winter time.  All of which goes to illustrate the impact nature itself has on the Earth’s climate apart from man’s intervention.

2. “[N]ature produces far more greenhouse gases than we do.  For example, when the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, within just a few hours it had thrown into the atmosphere 30 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide—almost twice as much as all the factories, power plants and cars in the United States do in a whole year. Oceans emit 90 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, every year. Decaying plants throw up another 90 billion tonnes, compared to just six billion tonnes a year from humans.” Against Nature—Part I of III (Broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK, 1997) http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/prog1.htm#suspend

3. “Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham [that] advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity in scientific theories. Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates to entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Furthermore, when multiple competing theories have equal predictive powers, the principle recommends selecting those that introduce the fewest assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities.” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

4. The term ”Idiot savant” is not an insensitive slur, but is actually a technical term used to describe a particular subgroup of people with an IQ of about 25.  “The word idiot usually refers to a simpleton, in contrast to the word ‘savant’ in French that means ‘learned one.’  Idiot savants … do not acquire knowledge by learning as the average human does. They mysteriously 'know' explicit, exact, correct information. One may wonder: ‘How do idiots savants know certain information or possess certain skills?’ … Modern science cannot explain this phenomenon.”  Dr . Lee E. Warren, B.A., D.D. November/December 1996 PLIM REPORT 

5. Earth in the Balance, by Al Gore.  Houghton Mifflin Books, p. 207

6. According to November 30, 2005 report on NewScientist.com (http://www.new scientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8398); Journal reference Nature (vol 438, p 655), “The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age [emphasis added]. This slow-down is seen as “a possible consequence of global warming, [and] will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.  Harry Bryden of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, whose group carried out the analysis, speculated that the phenomena was part of a global temperature increase brought about by ‘man-made greenhouse warming’”.

7. Volume 29, Number 2; http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb98/global.html

8. http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v108/show_article/_a000108-000011.htm  July 1, 2002

9. http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1485573.htm.   

10. “Now who would really think this way?” you might ask.  My guess is that most people do.  When a record temperature is reached, particularly at an inappropriate time of the year, the first tendency is to say “I wonder what’s going on?  It’s supposed to be 40 degrees in February in Dallas, not 70.  Must be global warming.”  Or, it’s summertime and supposed to be hot—but not that hot!  “Another 100 degree day in Dallas, breaking a record set back in 1936.  Must be global warming.”  We’ve been trained by conventional wisdom to expect that temperatures in mid-July are always X, give or take a degree or two.  Not noticeably cooler, or significantly hotter.  The same thing applies for every other day of the year.  When our expectations are not met, something must have gone wrong.  And since nothing ever happens by itself, something (or someone) must have interfered with the natural order of things.  Since we’re taught in our schools that global warming is real, and furthermore, that man is responsible for making it happen—and this notion is constantly reinforced by the talking heads on television, liberal political activists, and The New York Times—then cause, effect, and consequence all meld together.  The fact that a high pressure area in Northern Canada may have temporarily diverted or accelerated some cold artic wind, thus accounting for the temporary temperature flux, isn’t an explanation.  It’s just the mechanism by which man screwed up the environment.  If we only drove less in the 1950s, or used two cans of hairspray a month instead of three in the 1960s, we wouldn’t have punched a hole in the ozone layer that I’m sure somehow, some way, caused that abnormal high pressure system to appear in 2006.

11. One caution here, though. While it’s always better to measure temperature change with a thermometer than to rely on our memories of the past 50 to 75 years, the measurements that these instruments produce are not completely free of human bias.  Data is just data until it is analyzed, and this requires the analyst to make certain basic assumptions about a whole range of issues associated with the activity.  If the analysis is honest, as I’ve tried to do with this effort, one’s methodology will be clearly laid out, and all sources of information accurately documented.  The truth is the truth only if it’s subject to testing and verification.  Otherwise, it’s simply one man’s conjecture disguised as an objective assessment.

12. http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/ article_2496.shtm

13. “The Ice Age Cometh” http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/iceage.htm  and http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/prog1.htm#suspend

14. “… climatologists estimate a range of global warming possibilities … from 2 degrees Fahrenheit to 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100 …” (Craig Ander-son, PhD and Brad Bushman, PhD, February 1998 issue of the American Psychological Association); “… most researchers expect greenhouse gases to warm the planet by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 100 years.” (Associated Press as reported in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal 9/27/97 http://www.lubbock online.com/news/092897/study.htm); “A hundred years from now, we may have caused a three- or four-degree Fahrenheit rise in average temperatures.” (Environ-Minute Climate Script, produced in cooperation with the National Safety Council and made possible by the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, broadcast 11/28/97  http://www.nsc.org/ehc/MINUTE/em971128.htm)

15. Since I’m relegated to La-La-land in attempting to build a scenario where the science of the 1900s is somehow compatible to the science of the 21^st century, it would be distracting at this time to introduce yet another variable that global warming proponents would have to explain away, so I’ll mention it in a footnote as another obstacle that must be overcome to produce reliable temperature data.  Specifically, even under the best of conditions today, weather monitoring stations are not spread out evenly across the planet.  Instead, “weather stations where temperatures are monitored are typically located in and around cities. The growing concrete and asphalt jungles of today's big cities warm faster, hold the heat of the day, and release it in the evening, raising temperatures. Moreover, ‘Cities tend to grow up around their weather stations,’ notes climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels in his recent book Meltdown. ‘Bricks and concrete retain the heat of the day and are especially adept at warding off late spring and early fall chills.’ This accounts for the perceived lengthening of the growing season in metropolitan areas. According to Michaels, this urban heat effect ‘means that an urban growing season will increase its length whether or not the 'globe' is warming.’”  “Getting Burned by Bad Science,” Dennis Behreandt, November 12, 2005 The New American http://www.thenew american.com/artman/publish/article_2496.shtml   

16. Science and Society Picture Library scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image =10311907&wwwflag=2&imagepos=10  Compare this to present day methods where a pyranometer is used to make the same measurement.  It consists of “a blackened disk containing temperature measuring sensors. The disk is protected from the environment by two domes of glass. When exposed to the sun, the disk heats up. The glass domes prevent cooling by the wind. The temperature of the disk is a function of the amount of solar radiation hitting it. Calibration against more sophisticated radiation measuring devices gives a repeatable multiplier to convert the pyrano-meter's output to units of solar radiation.” http://www.logger.fsec.ucf.edu/ met/About _Met.htm

17. http://web.gfi.uib.no/The%20Norwegian%20Sea/TNS-0320.htm

18. No, I’m not mixing apples and oranges by talking about tomorrow’s weather and global warming predictions.  Nor am I taking a cheap shot at the global-warmers as a substitute for addressing objective facts. Have a glance at a question submitted to  NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center “Ask an Astrophysicist” on February 18,   1998 (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980218c.html)

Question: “I was wondering what would happen to our solar system when the sun goes into the next phase in its life cycle.”

Answer:  “[As the sun begins to burn out, it will lose some of its gravitational cohesion and expand in size, becoming a Red Giant.  The larger sun will fully engulf the planet Mercury, and make Venus and Earth uninhabitable.  But a larger sun, going through its death throws, will actually begin to heat Mars.  Instead of an unbearably cold, inhospitable planet,] Mars will definitely become more comfortable. (Of course that is a relative term, for me comfortable is about 20 degrees F, with snow falling at a rate of 12 inches per hour) but it will be warmer. To actually guess actual conditions is pretty tough since predicting the exact weather 1 week in advance is still pretty hard here on earth where we have a lot of information [emphasis added].”

19. To give a related example, several days after a USA Today article appeared in May 2006 concerning an alleged U.S. government program to secure the telephone transaction records of phone calls made to and from the United States, Democratic Senator Patrick Lahey was still waving the newspaper around in a public hearing condemning the Bush administration for illegally wiretapping the phones of innocent American citizens.  There is nothing particularly insidious about this, since members of opposing parties routinely criticize one another’s actions.  In this case, though, Lahey’s actions followed several days of public discussion where the newspaper itself insisted that it never alleged any illegal government wiretapping, either directly or indirectly, and where at least two of the carriers named in the article denied the story with one demanding a printed retraction from USA Today.  Not one to let the facts get in the way of a good smear, Lahey pressed forward with the original charges, practicing the same kind of selective analysis I referenced above.

20. To draw again from contemporary American politics to illustrate this matter, Hillary Clinton has refused to repudiate her vote to support the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq.  This is part of a deliberate calculation to soften her Left wing image and make her more acceptable to middle American voters should she run for president in 2008.  While understandable as a strategic move, it has alienated her more radical supporters. Susan Sarandon, a Hollywood actress and out-spoken critic of the Iraq war, has become so incensed at Hillary Clinton’s refusal to repudiate her vote that she is actively supporting an opposing candidate in Ms. Clinton’s 2006 Senate re-election bid.  Hillary had left the ‘progressive’ side in Sarandon’s opinion, and joined the enemy.  It’s now important for Sarandon to distance herself from her previous laudatory support for Hillary to preserve her (Sarandon’s) progressive image, and remain in good standing with her anti-war peers.

21. The same calculation applies to the political officials who in turn depend on these organizations for financial and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) support.  For example, if forced into a corner where they cannot deny the obvious that the Bush tax cut has worked, they will do exactly what the Democrat minority leader Nancy Pelosi did.  Paraphrasing her remarks, she said something to the effect that ‘Yeah, sure, the government took in more money.  But it all came from the poor, and will only benefit rich old white guys.’

22. http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/f101.asp#1

23. See the 1997 EnvironMinute Climate Script that was, produced in cooperation with the National Safety Council and made possible by the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation.

24. See the February 1998 issue of the American Psychological Association report by Craig Anderson, PhD and Brad Bushman PhD.

25. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/ixnewstop.html Telegraph.co.uk “The truth about global warm-ing – it's the Sun that's to blame” By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah  Filed: 18/07/2004

26. Source: http://www.ecop.info/english/e-call-oth-orgs.htm#Our%20oceans 
Subject: Our oceans are at risk
From: "Ted Danson @ Oceana" Ted.Danson
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002
As you know, the threat to our oceans affects EVERYONE. Our oceans are at risk, and with them our food supplies, our coastal economies, and even ourselves. I need your help to get the word out. With enough public support, we can protect our oceans and preserve the earth's web of life for future generations. 
Thank you again.
Ted Danson

27. Which should actually be “multi-century” to discern any real trends, but since we don’t have any real data that precedes the latter half of the 19^th century, man will simply announce by fiat that history begins in the late 1800s and use that as the basis for reaching definite conclusions.  One final note.  Don’t let anyone tell you that we can drill core samples in polar ice and get an accurate record going back thousands of years.  Core samples can tell us a lot of extremely useful information about the environment, but they can’t tell us that the average worldwide temperature in the year 907 was 78.2 instead of 77.65 degrees.

28. From this same NRDC Q&A:  “Recently, researchers — and even the U.S. Defense Department — have investigated the possibility of abrupt climate change, in which gradual global warming triggers a sudden shift in the earth's climate, causing parts of the world to dramatically heat up or cool down in the span of a few years. In February 2004, consultants to the Pentagon released a report laying out the possible impacts of abrupt climate change on national security. In a worst-case scenario, the study concluded, global warming could make large areas of the world uninhabitable and cause massive food and water shortages, sparking widespread migrations and war. While this prospect remains highly speculative, many of global warming's effects are already being observed — and felt. And the idea that such extreme change is possible underscores the urgent need to start cutting global warming pollution.”  Translation: while we’re not stupid enough to predict the date these things will happen like Ted Danson did, consultants to the U.S. Government know it’s true, and so do we. You should have voted for Al Gore in 2000. George Bush didn’t sign the Kyoto Treaty, and now we’re all going to die.

29. From the same NRDC Q&A: “Q: Why aren't these technologies more commonplace now?  A: Because, while the technologies exist, the corporate and political will to put them into widespread use does not. Many companies in the automobile and energy industries put pressure on the White House and Congress to halt or delay new laws or regulations — or even to stop enforcing existing rules — that would drive such changes. From requiring catalytic converters to improving gas mileage, car companies have fought even the smallest measure to protect public health and the environment. If progress is to be made, the American people will have to demand it.”

30. The reasoning behind the Bush Administration’s “effort to weaken” the law was a bit more complicated than the NRDC’s facile analysis suggests, as reported by the Energy Information Administration: Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/eff/aircond.html). Rather than a cut-and-dry battle between big business profits and the little guy’s welfare, they state “In evaluating the effectiveness of any energy policy on future energy market trends, there exist uncertainties that can greatly impact the conclusions derived from the analysis. Future macroeconomic growth, energy crises, and rate of technological advances can significantly alter the conclusions of any analysis of energy policy. Other energy policies can also have a big impact on the results presented from this analysis. If, for example, a policy aimed at incorporating the social costs of energy and the impacts on the environment were introduced simultaneously to those presented here, the results could change dramatically. When comparing the analyses provided in this report with other analyses performed on the same subject matter, it is important to keep in mind that different input assumptions and future growth patterns can significantly affect the projected results of the policy in question. In evaluating the air conditioner and heat pump standards, for example, input assumptions, economic growth forecasts, and modeling techniques all contribute to the variability in estimates of policy effectiveness across different analyses. In the NEMS residential energy demand module, factors such as increasing square footage in new construction and increasing saturation of central air conditioning over the forecast horizon both contribute to increasing demand for electricity for space heating and cooling. Variations in these factors, as well as changes in energy prices, can have a significant impact on the amount of energy demanded in the future.”

But of course, little details like ‘does the policy actually make sense?’, or ‘will these regulations actually produce the desired outcome?’, shouldn’t interfere with one’s good intention to save the environment.  Besides, the Supreme Court agreed with the NRDC, and this shows that the Bush Administration was wrong.  Everyone knows that the Supreme Court is the final, unbiased, arbiter of the truth—except when they acted in a highly partisan way to steal the 2000 election from its rightful winner, Al Gore. 

31. To put it more clearly, $4 a gallon gasoline is a good thing when the government collects 90% of that money to help fund environmentally-correct organizations and agencies, but $4 a gallon gasoline is bad for the country when the companies that search for, drill for, transport, refine, and distribute the product get to keep most of the money. 

32. http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002242.html Future Pundit July 18, 2004.  According to the article “Sun Energy Output At Over 1,000 Year Peak” by Randall Parker, “Sami Solanki, Professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich Switzerland, says the Sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years than over the previous 1090 years. ‘We have to acknowledge that the Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago, and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years. We expect it to have an impact on global warming.’ The sun's brightness hasn't changed much over the last 20 years. But it has been brighter for the last 60 years than it has been at any time in the last 1,150 years.