Posted on 07/23/2007 3:42:46 AM PDT by Clive
If you haven't been following Lawrence Solomon's brilliant, reader-friendly Financial Post series on the scientists who are skeptical of the coming global warming crisis, you really must check it out. It's called Climate change: The Deniers, and there is a link to the 29 profiles he as written so far on the National Post's homepage. (Go to www.nationalpost.com, and scroll down to the "Current Features" section.)
In one instalment -- Forget warming -beware the new ice age -- published in June, Lawrence reminds readers that as recently as the 1970s, the scientific consensus was that earth was entering a new ice age.
If geological history is any guide, we're long overdue for one. And in the 1970s, the world was in the throws of a 30-year phase of especially cold weather. So naturally, scientists put two and six together and came up with impending disaster.
Politicians appointed high-level international commissions to determine when and how bad the coming peril would be. Extensive reports were funded citing this or that disaster as proof of an approaching deep freeze. The popular press was quick to run alarming stories about the disaster that awaited mankind.
In 1975, Newsweek ran a feature story entitled The Cooling World, the first sentence of which insisted: "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production -- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."
Extreme weather would increase. Drought would grip huge regions of the planet. Crops would fail and tens of millions would starve. Wars would be fought over diminishing resources.
And the evidence for all this? Well, according to Newsweek it had "begun to accumulate so massively" there was no denying it. The scientific world had spoken. Don't bother to voice alternative theories.
Sound familiar?
Reading Lawrence's piece, though, I was struck by another similarity between the alarmism then and now: The proof for each was/is almost entirely circumstantial.
In theory, both global cooling and warming are possible. But all we can see are potential effects. We then look backwards to determine if we can discern a cause.
The scientists and activists who believe the globe is currently warming dangerously don't have any direct proof that carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases are the cause. They merely have a stack of potential consequences that they have convinced themselves amount to incontrovertible proof.
Today, effects such as big hurricanes, spring heat waves, rising levels of atmospheric CO2 and melting polar ice are pointed to as proof that a single cause (man-made carbon emissions trapping solar energy in the atmosphere) exists. As Lawrence reminds, in the 1970s the effects that were used to "prove" the cause included a killing winter freeze in 1972-73, followed by a severe summer heat wave in the United States, "anomalously low precipitation in the U.S. Pacific Northwest during the winter of 1972-73," the failure of the Soviet wheat crop in 1972, the failure of the Peruvian anchovy harvest the same year, even changes in Pacific ocean currents that scientists had never before seen.
So why, in the absence of direct proof, is the UN, along with thousands of scientists and environmentalists worldwide, currently so adamant that our activities -- humans' --are causing a climate meltdown?
British filmmaker Martin Durkin, whose documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle has already aired in the U.K. and Australia (and will soon be available here on DVD), thinks it is because "global warming is first and foremost a political theory."
Those who buy into it -- including most scientists who back it -- have a particular worldview that Durkin believes can be "summed up in the oft-repeated phrase 'we consume too much.' " He calls this "backward-looking bigotry," and claims it has "found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalization) into a single unquestionable truth and cause."
In other words (mine, not Durkin's), global warming has become the new locus for those who believe government is the solution to all ills, and central planning the preferred tool.
When they look back through the stack of global warming consequences, they don't want to see any natural explanations. The sun, cosmic rays, cloud development and so on, cannot be controlled by Ottawa or the UN.
So they have grasped (and cling tenaciously to) a theory that might explain the science and favours their bias toward big-government solutions.
-
Is it just me, or has anybody else noticed that the History Channel has clambered on to the “Man Made Global Warming” bandwagon??
It seems like just about every other show on the channel (not counting the 10-year-old reruns) devotes the last 5 minutes to a GW sermon....
It’s becoming almost as unwatchable as PBS or Discovery....
I like History Channel. (Got that out of the way)
I’m watch the channel fairly often, but am not sure which program you may be referring to.
I do remember a show about the ‘Greatest Threats to Human Existence’ (I’m paraphrasing), and remember that it did have the M.M.G.W. as #1, but other than that, I can’t think of any other.
Are you sure they actually refer to it as “Man-made Global Warming”? or is it just “Climate change”, which if taken literally, doesn’t mean the same thing. (although some would have me believe it does)
Looks like an excellent series of articles this column mentions...
” I like History Channel. “
I do too — it’s my fallback when FNC degenerates into total cotton-candy... (Which is why, probably, I’m a bit hypersensitive to its failings...)
-
-
“ which program you may be referring to “
For example — last night’s “Little Ice Age” ended with the “most climatologists agree” homily...
The whole “Universe” series, which could have really been good, has the “Man Bad” message intertwined through it — prime example: in the program about Venus, there was a bold statement (repeated a couple of times) that we are in the process of turning the Earth into another Venus with our evil greenhouse gasses.
As I said right up front, this could be just me being hypersensitive — but.........
aaaaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeeee
Is seems like 30 years ago, I was reading liberal hooey that proposed spreading soot across vast parts of the Arctic and Antartcic to combat global cooling. The soot was supposed to stop the solar radiation from being reflected back into space and offset the global cooling effect. Now the same fruit and nut cake liberal loonies want to put sulfur aerosols and other such nonsense into the atmosphere to reflect the solar radiation and prevent global warming.
When will they ever learn that its just our natural climate changes and that it has been doing this since forever?
Nah--any "man-made" solution to the problem (other than moving back into caves and subsisting on nuts and berries) is anathema to those liberal loonies.
The ones suggesting actual FIXES if the problem(s) turn out to be REAL, are conservatives.
The number one reason why scientists finally dropped their dire predictions of the Coming Ice Age:
It couldn’t be linked to any blame-on-capitalism and any associated Government Solution. So they had to drop it.
But now they’ve found GW and it’s the gift that keeps on giving. You don’t have to prove ANYTHING! Just point to the damage that is SURE TO COME IN 100 YEARS and you get to regulate EVERYTHING!
What a WONDERFUL theory!
Well now if they did that they would lose there grant money and wouldn’t get paid to perform their worthless theory.
” I like History Channel. “
Me too, did anyone watch “The Little Ice Age” program on last night ?
It was a great show until the last 15 minutes when they jumped on the global warming because of human activity bandwagon.
Also, I grew up in the Buffalo, NY area.
I lived through the Blizzard of ‘78 and the ice storm that next spring.
I remember the fear mongering press talking about the impending ice age we were entering. I still remember that my high school science teacher said the idea was BS because the glaciers were actually retreating.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.