For the last several years, when
people have instructed me that human activity
was causing a dangerous increase in global
temperatures, my response has been, "Then tell
me, what should the temperature be?" Should it
be the temperatures that the planet experienced
a thousand years ago, during which Greenland was
settled as a farming community and during which
wine grapes were grown in Scotland? Should it be
the temperatures of three hundred years ago,
when the Little Ice Age ended the inhabitation
of Greenland and the Thames iced over? Should it
be the temperatures of 829 A.D., when the Nile
River froze? No response!
We are told, based on
computer models, that human beings burning
fossil fuels -- and exhaling -- is
increasing the amount of carbon dioxide
(CO2) in the atmosphere. This, in turn, is
trapping heat, which is responsible for the
modest temperature increase between 1976 and
1998. The conclusion is that we must alter
our entire lifestyles to avoid a planetary
catastrophe.
For computer models to be
accurate, inputs must include all of the
factors that can impact climate. Knowing
this, as well as believing it likely that
the majority of factors that do impact
climate are yet unknown, how can we trust
the models?
To begin with, CO2 is not
driving temperature as claimed. We know from
core samples taken from the Vostok glacier
in Antarctica that while CO2 and
temperatures do increase and decrease in
consonance, the temperature changes precede
the CO2 changes by about a thousand years.
We currently have about 388
parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere
by volume. That is at the lower end of the
historical comfort scale. The most fertile
time that our planet has ever seen was
during the Cambrian Period, about 542
million years ago. In a very short period of
time, all of multicellular life that has
ever existed was deposited into the fossil
record. That occurred because the planet was
warm. The CO2 level in the atmosphere was
twenty times higher then than it is today.
The entire planet was green with growth, and
oxygen levels were unusually high.
Likewise, during the period
of dinosaur dominance, CO2 levels were five
times higher than today, enabling the planet
to grow enough greenery to keep those giant
animals alive.
Even today, the most diverse
part of our planet in both plant and animal
life is around the equator -- the warmest
area of the globe.
We are told that the calving
of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula is
proof that the world's largest ice pack,
which comprises about 90% of the globe's
ice, is melting. The Antarctic Peninsula
constitutes 2% of the continent. The
other 98% of the continent has been growing
by about 27 gigatons of ice per year. This
comes not from computer models, but from
thirty years' worth of satellite
measurements. Those same empirical
observations show that the concentration of
sea ice surrounding Antarctica is at a
record high.
What's more, every computer
model shows that greenhouse warming is
associated with a "hot spot" located four to
six miles above the equator. We have been
monitoring that very spot for fifty years.
It doesn't exist. Thus, whatever warming we
see is unlikely to be due to the greenhouse
effect as the models explain it.
We are told that the melting
of arctic ice is endangering the future of
polar bears. There were five thousand polar
bears fifty years ago. There are twenty-five
thousand today. This does not seem like
extinction to me. Additionally, Captain
Roald Amundsen of Norway explored that
entire region in 1905, sailing through the
North-West Passage in a sailboat!
Today, there is usually ice blocking his
route.
In his movie An
Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore says that
sea levels will rise by twenty feet in the
next century, putting much of the world's
oceanfront land and islands at risk. Real
science tells us that the last glaciation
ended about 11,000 years ago. Oceans have
risen since then by about four feet per
century. In the 20th century, sea
levels rose by about eight inches. Indeed,
Dr. Nils-Axel Moerner from the University of
Stockholm, who has written 520 peer-reviewed
articles on sea levels and is considered a
world authority, recently declared that sea
levels have been unchanged for the last
three years.
Years ago, Dr. Richard
Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of
meteorology at MIT, theorized that higher
temperatures over the equator caused the
cirrus clouds to disappear and venting heat
up over the atmosphere. That theory
is now a proven fact, quantified by
NASA. It begins when the surface temperature
of the ocean exceeds 28 degrees centigrade.
This fact is not considered on the
computer models.
This is what this whole
discussion comes down to. In science, only
two conditions exist. One is theory, and the
other is fact. The entire notion of
human-caused global warming is a theory
based on computer models. None of it has
been proven through rigorous empirical
observation to be a fact.
On December 7, 2009,
President Obama will send a delegation to
Copenhagen, Denmark, for the U.N. Climate
Conference. So what exactly is the goal of
this conference? A few months ago, Al Gore
explained the ultimate goal: global
governance. If the climate alarmists
get their way, the U.S. economy would be
subject to the whims of a U.N.-led climate
government, unaccountable to American
taxpayers but most certainly using American
taxpayer funds to operate. Since so many
countries are happy to blame the U.S. for
the vast majority of what they amusingly
claim is a catastrophic slide into global
devastation, I am sure that a new U.N.
Climate Government will be all too eager to
call on the American taxpayer to foot the
bill. In fact, the two-hundred-page draft
document says just that. We will be billed
by an unelected bureaucracy for our "climate
debt." And we will
yield our sovereignty to international law.
I noted earlier that this has
been a discussion. Unfortunately, it has not
been a debate. The alarmists refuse to
debate; they say that the science is
settled. Nonsense! There is no such thing as
settled scientific theory -- only settled
scientists. If Al Gore believes his science
is settled, he should agree to debate and
prove the skeptics wrong. Yet he has been
running from debate for years.
To those who ask who would be
hurt if we were wrong about CO2 and reduced
the amount in the atmosphere, I say only the
1.6 billion most vulnerable people in the
world. They are desperate for more CO2 so
they can grow food. Their lives are brutal
and short. They desperately need what
we have enjoyed over the past hundred years.
Over the last two million
years, this planet has experienced about
twenty glaciations. They last about a
hundred thousand years, and they are
interrupted by warming periods of about ten
thousand years. It has been about eleven
thousand years since the last glaciation
ended. During the last century, we saw one
of the longest periods of high solar
activity since the last glaciation.
Temperatures rose. We have seen less sun
activity in the last eleven years than we
have seen for a very long time. The
temperature has also been either steady or
declining for eleven years. (By the way, not
one of the computer models, which so
confidently predict what will happen in one
hundred years, predicted that cooling.) Let
us pray that all this is not a signal of the
next glaciation -- one that actually kills
people.
There is no need for any
climate treaty at Copenhagen. It is time to
disband the U.N.'s self-serving and serially
dishonest climate panel. Officially
sponsored environmental extremism is a
danger to our national security.
Representative
John Linder (R-GA) sits on the House Ways
and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction
over the Waxman-Markey bill, jurisdiction
over the Boxer-Kerry bill should it pass in
the Senate, and authority over all carbon
taxes generally.
