John Stossel: The Global Warming Myth?

ABC ^

[Omega Man II]

The Global Warming Myth?

The End Is Not Near -- Instead of Panicking Over Climate Change, Learn to Adjust to It

By JOHN STOSSEL

April 20, 2007 — - The heavy breathing over global warming is enough to terrify anyone.

Last week the Washington Post interviewed a 9-year-old who said the Earth is "just starting to fade away." In 20 years there will be "no oxygen" he said, and he'll be dead. The Post went on to say that "for many children and young adults, global warming is…defining their generation." How sad.

Thirty-six years of consumer reporting have taught me to be skeptical of environmental scares. Much of what the media scares us about turns out to be myths.

Watch "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity" on a special edition of "20/20" Friday, May 4th at 10 p.m. EDT

But is the global warming crisis a myth? Read on.

Excerpts from "Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity," coming out in paperback May 1. (Click here to buy "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity").

MYTH: Global warming will cause huge disruptions in climate, more storms, and the coasts will flood! America must sign the Kyoto Treaty!

This has to be broken into four pieces.

MYTH No. 1: The Earth is warming!
TRUTH: The Earth is warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the global average surface temperature increased about 0.6 degrees Celsius over the 20th century.

MYTH No. 2: The Earth is warming because of us!
TRUTH: Maybe. The frantic media suggest it's all about us. But the IPCC only said it is likely that we have increased the warming.

Our climate has always undergone changes. Greenland was named Greenland because its coasts used to be very green. It's presumptuous to think humans' impact matters so much in comparison to the frightening geologic history of the earth. And who is to say that last year's temperature is the perfect optimum? Warmer may be better! More people die in cold waves than heat waves.

MYTH No. 3: There will be storms, flooded coasts and huge disruptions in climate!
TRUTH: There are always storms and floods. Will there be much bigger disruptions in climate? Probably not.

Schoolchildren I've interviewed were convinced that America is "dying" in a sea of pollution and that "cities will soon be under water!"

Lawyers from the Natural Resources Defense Council (another environmental group with more lawyers than scientists) warn that "sea levels will rise, flooding coastal areas. Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense. Droughts and wildfires will occur more often."

Wow.

But many scientists laugh at the panic.

Dr. John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville said: "I remember as a college student at the first Earth Day being told it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy. Such doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines, but have proven to be completely false." "Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change," he continued, "sound all too familiar and all too exaggerated to me as someone who actually produces and analyzes climate information."

The media, of course, like the exaggerated claims. Most are based on computer models that purport to predict future climates. But computer models are lousy at predicting climate because water vapor and cloud effects cause changes that computers fail to predict. In the mid-1970s, computer models told us we should prepare for global cooling.

Scientists tell reporters that computer models should "be viewed with great skepticism." Well, why aren't they?

The fundamentalist doom mongers also ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas said added CO2 in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season, and might end the droughts in the Sahara Desert.

Why don't we hear about this part of the global warming argument? "It's the money!" said Dr. Baliunas. "Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it."

MYTH No. 4: Signing the Kyoto Treaty would stop the warming.
TRUTH: Hardly.

In 1997, the United Nations met in Kyoto, Japan, and asked the developed nations of the world to cut CO2 emission to below 1990 levels.

And even advocates of Kyoto admit that if all the nations signed the Kyoto agreement and obeyed it, global temperatures would still increase. The difference by 2050 would be less than a tenth of a degree. The fuss over Kyoto is absurd. Even if Kyoto would have an impact, do you think all the signers are going to honor what they signed? China is predicted to out-emit us in five to 10 years. India will soon follow. What incentive do they have to stop burning fossil fuels? Get the shovel.

The fundamentalist greens imply if we just conserved energy, and switched from fossil fuels to wind and solar power (they rarely mention nuclear power -- the most practical alternative), we would live in a nonglobal-warming fairyland of happiness. But their proposals are hopelessly impractical. Building solar panels burns energy, as does trucking them and installing them. Not to mention taking them down again to repair them.

To think that solar energy could stop the predicted temperature increase is nonsensical. EPCOT, a theme park with a solar energy ride, consumes about 395,000 kilowatt-hours per day. The Department of Energy says you'd need around a thousand acres of solar panels to generate that much electricity. EPCOT itself only sits on 300 acres, so you'd have to triple the size of the park just to operate it. (Windmills are no panacea either. They are giant bird-killing Cuisinarts, and we'd have to build lots of them to produce significant energy.)

In 2000, a group called Cape Wind proposed to erect 130 windmills in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Massachusetts. I think the drawings make them look interesting, but -- horrors! -- they would be visible from the Kennedy family vacation compound in Hyannis Port. Robert Kennedy Jr., grand poo-bah of the environmental zealotry movement, is leading a campaign to ban the windmills from Nantucket Sound. The group he leads, the Waterkeeper Alliance, said it supports wind farms -- but Kennedy fights the one near his home. What a hypocrite.

Eighty percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. Kyoto would decimate just about every Third World country's economy, and deliver a catastrophic blow to our own.

So what should we do about the threat of global warming?

First, calm down.

Second, if the world is warming, it is much more reasonable to adjust to it, rather than try to stop it. If sea levels rise, we can build dykes and move back from the coasts. It worked for Holland.

Farmers can plant different crops or move north. Russian farmers farmed northern Siberia for centuries. When the area became cold and desolate, the farmers moved south.

Far better to keep studying global warming, let the science develop and adjust to it if it happens, rather than wreck life as we know it by trying to stop it.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

[Scotswife]

I’m gonna guess that Stossel must not get along well with Sam Champion.

[kitchen]

One of the environmentalists ... took off on a little rant about how "there is no reason, absolutely NO REASON, that there shouldn't be native brown trout there"...

Except that brown trout are "native" to Europe and not North America. At least since the last ice age.

[sig226]

Is that a web page? I would love a link to it to send to some friends who believe in consensus science. I’d love to let them see who is on their side. If it’s not a web page, can you cite a reference?

[AFPhys]

How many times have we heard liberals say that Bush uses fear of terrorism to get his way, but there is no more fear-mongering element in society today than the global warming cultists...
-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—

Great observation! I’ll be using this here in my liberal university mecca.

[AFPhys]

Many wonderful “Earth Day” #1 quotes. I remember hearing some of these at that first rally. Dolts. I didn’t believe them then, I don’t believe them now.

[Kay Ludlow]

And they are really beginning to push this carp in the schools, showing Algore's environmental scarefest

Being from a progressive school district, and near the end of the baby boom, I can tell you they started back then. We were shown a lot of stuff, woven into both english class (through sci-fi lit), science and social studies about how by 2000 there wouldn't be any good air to breath - anyone left would be wearing gas masks to survive. We were shown Future Shock about every year in Jr High. Rachel Carson was quoted as nearly a messiah. We were the test subjects - getting every flaky new education idea coming out of the University College of Education. During the X-er years they were deploying it across the country.

My kids though, in the same progressive school system and getting all the same kind of agenda driven stuff are part of a generation that is savvy to spin. They and their classmates really didn't take any of the indoctrination seriously - they saw it as part of the game you play to make it through the system without getting in trouble. I think that's one of the reason the educators keep raising the volume - it's having less and less impact over time. I remember hearing about kids 50 years ago not understanding that the point of commercials is to part you from your money - today kids not only see the point of commercials, they talk among themselves about the strategy behind it! Between the increasing savvy of the kids, the proportion of kids in conservative homes, and the move toward more family centered education, I'm not too worried about the future. They don't buy everything they see or hear, and if they wonder about something they hear the resources are at their fingertips to find out more, and that gets them all sides. That's why 'Google" has become a verb as well as a noun ;-)

[sig226]

How jernalszym works:

Step 1: Form a conclusion.
Step 2: Interview researchers in the field of your conclusion.
Step 3: Discard or downplay any evidence that does not support your conclusion.
Step 4: Rely on evidence that won't stand scrutiny from a clever ten year old.
Step 5: Generate public hue and cry.
Step 6: Report when there is significant evidence to dispute your conclusion.
Step 7: Never admit that your new conclusion is diametricly opposed to your old conclusion.
Step 8: Lather.
Step 9: Rinse.
Step 10: Repeat.

[Kay Ludlow]

Environmentalists think man has no right to manage Nature and tame the wilderness.

Now that's an interesting statement, because I think that depends on which environmentalists you're around. There are those (the Dave Foreman/Re-Wilding side) who believe just that; then there are the 'steady state of nature' environmentalists, who believe that there is on perfect state of nature that can be quantified, we've messed it up, and they can fix it by making sure there are exactly the right number of the right species in each spot. The groups have worked together for years to increase governmental control of our activities, but the more power and control the get, the more they come to realize their goals aren't the same. There's a big crack in the environmentalist front, and it will tear them apart. Yet another reason I have a lot of hope for the future.

[M203M4]

Yes (I first saw this particular compilation in 2001/2002):

EcoFreakQuotes (see also Right Wing News ).

Some more ecofascist nonsense:

Quotes from Pentti Linkola:

"A minority can never have any other effective means to influence the course of matters but through the use of violence."

"Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth."

"The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth. Its priests believe until their death that material prosperity bring enjoyment and happiness - even though all the proofs in history have shown that only lack and attempt cause a life worth living, that the material prosperity doesn't bring anything else than despair. These priests believe in technology still when they choke in their gas masks."

"That there are billions of people over 60kg weight on this planet is recklessness."

"Alternative movements and groups are a welcome relief and a present for the society of economic growth."

"We will have to...learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves."

"Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed."

"A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life are been organized on basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her...Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole...In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of the mankind...In democratic countries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most...Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromizing control of the individual citizen."

"If the present amount of Earths population is preserved and is reduced only by the means of birth control, then:
- Birthgiving must be licenced. To enhance population quality, genetically or socially unfit homes will be denied offspring, so that several birth licences can be allowed to families of quality.
- Energy production must be drastically reduced. Electricity is allowed only for the most necessary lighting and communications.
- Food: Hunting must be made more efficient. Human diet will include rats and invertebrate animals. Agriculture moves to small un-mechanized units. All human manure is used as fertilizer.
- Traffic is mostly done with bicycles and rowing boats. Private cars are confiscated. Long-distance travel is done with sparse mass transport. Trees will be planted on most roads.
- Foreign affairs: All mass immigration and most of import-export trade must stop. Cross-border travel is allowed only for small numbers of diplomats and correspondents.
- Business will mostly end. Manufacture is allowed only for well argumented needs. All major manufacturing capacity is state owned. Products will be durable and last for generations.
- Science and schooling: Education will concentrate on practical skills. All competition is rooted out. Technological research is reduced to extreme minimum. But every child will learn how to clean a fish in a way that only the big shiny bones are left over."

(see also his wikipedia page). Some greens (deep ecology movement) are beginning to court the label of ecofascist, while others have extended their amoral nihilism to the point where they seek to forge alliance with Islamic extremism (since they face a common enemy in western civilization, especially capitalism):

See this FR article (with source found at this website).

[dave k]

I just read the Wikpedia entry for Stossel...how ironic that when the entry gets to his special on global warming, the narrative shifts more to what his critics have to say about why they think he is wrong. Typical liberal spin...

[ChessExpert]

John Stossel is the best thing _BC has going for it.

[Thermalseeker]

Geraldo was hit by a chair on the set of his talk show by a neo-Nazi

I was thinking it was Geraldo that got flattened. Maybe just wishful thinking on my part.... ;-)

[Ditter]

I LOVE Stossel!

[SierraWasp]

"Robert Kennedy Jr., grand poo-bah of the environmental zealotry movement"

And chief EnvironMental advisor to CA's Gubernatorial pretender, both during the historic Recall election, and now!!!

[Cacique]

BTT

[sig226]

Good Lord. I will forward these links to my friend, in order for him to examine some of the lunatics in his movement. It might open his eyes a little. Thank you.

[Leonard210]

Good catch. Wikipedia is a rather liberal site, but conservatives don’t seem interested in developing stuff like that. They are an “open source” project I believe. Maybe you can edit it. I don’t know what the posting criteria is. Have your secretary call my secretary on Monday. I’ll tell my secretary to contact the secretary at Wikipedia. My secretary will yawn and head out to work. I better check myself.

[The Iceman Cometh]

Sorry, it was Stossel...Stossel lost hearing in the ear he was bitch slapped. I always joked about Stossel in that if you were going to question someone about “fake” wrestling, why would you pick a guy named Dr. Death to ask that question?

[Patriotic1]

bump to read later

[TBP]

The climate is always changing. It’s a constant process. It warms, it cools. Not a problem, and the global warming crowd knows it.