This is a follow-up to a post about global warming that I wrote awhile back…
I just saw a segment on the CBS News Sunday Morning show that caught my eye. It referenced a scientist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), who conducted a study and discovered that about 13,000 years ago, the Earth’s temperature rose a startling 18° in a span of only 50 years – a change 100 times faster than we have experienced in the past 100 years. The TV report sort of glossed over that last statement by stating that the reason for the dramatic change was “unknown.”
My position is that periods of warming and cooling are a natural part of the Earth’s “life cycle” and that the Industrial Revolution and human intervention have an infinitesimal effect on those cycles. Just because the cycles are thousands of years long sometimes doesn’t mean that if we’re in the midst of a change in the current cycle, that we caused it. The seasons change, and we accept that as being normal. Well, the seasons of the Ice Ages change, too – we’re just not around to see the entire Ice Age cycle because it’s too long.
There have been several Ice Ages, as a matter of fact – and what do you suppose defined those Ice Ages? That’s right – a period of global warming! How else would you know when the Ice Age ended, except that it got warmer and the glaciers melted? If there were no interglacial warming periods, it would just be one long, uninterrupted Ice Age, now wouldn’t it?
I just love this web page. It gives an easy-to-understand history of the Earth’s warming and cooling cycles, including something I had never heard of before, called the “Holocene Maximum” which, as its name implies, is the hottest period in human history. The problem for people who believe industrial development is the cause of global warming is that the Holocene Maximum occurred 4,000-7,500 years ago – long before humans were operating those nasty, polluting factories! (BTW, this refutes all this hype about several recent years being the “hottest on record” — the “record” only refers to the last hundred years or so that changes have been recorded by modern instruments as they occur.)
Please scroll about 2/3 of the way down this page, to the group of quotes listed there. The quotes are prefaced by this statement:
The case for a “greenhouse problem” is made by environmentalists, news anchormen, and special interests who make inaccurate and misleading statements about global warming and climate change. Even though people may be skeptical of such rhetoric initially, after awhile people start believing it must be true because we hear it so often.
So true! An opinion becomes “fact” by incessant repetition. Here are a few of the more telling quotes:
“We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Stephen Schneider in an interview for Discover magazine, Oct 1989
(leading advocate of the global warming theory)
“In the United States…we have to first convince the American People and the Congress that the climate problem is real.”Former President Bill Clinton in a 1997 address to the United Nations
“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are…”Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview with Grist Magazine
May 9, 2006, concerning his book, An Inconvenient Truth
(Gore is now chairman and co-founder of Generation Investment Management,
a London-based business that sells carbon credits)
“Researchers pound the global-warming drum because they know there is politics and, therefore, money behind it. . . I’ve been critical of global warming and am persona non grata.“Dr. William Gray in an interview for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, November 28, 1999
(Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado and leading expert of hurricane prediction )
That last quote sums up one of my strongest suspicions – that certain people have discovered that there’s a ton of money to be made in the business of global warming. The selling of carbon credits (Al Gore), alternative energy sources (wind, ethanol, solar), hybrid and electric cars (Prius, Volt), and various other “green technologies” will undoubtedly make some people multi-millionaires, while imposing taxes and levying fees at the expense of others.
The bottom line is always money, and the biggest proponents of global warming have the greatest potential to profit from it. It’s a brand-new global market, created literally out of thin air, and it just makes me sick.
