When did the global warming hoax die? Historians are likely to pinpoint 2007.
It will take another decade to ensure it cannot be revived, but the avalanche of scientific studies and the cumulative impact of scientists who have publicly joined those who debunked the lies on which it has been based will be noted as the tipping point.
Hoax Not Unique
It took some 40 years to unmask the Piltdown Man hoax that began in 1912, alleging the skull of an ancient ancestor of man had been found in England. Any number of British anthropologists unwittingly contributed to the hoax by confirming the authenticity of the skull–until it was found that the jaw of an orangutan had been cunningly attached.
The unmasking of global warming has taken less than half that time.
Kyoto History
The hoax has mainly been a creation of the United Nations Environmental Program. It took off in earnest with the 1992 Earth Summit and culminated in 1997 with the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas said to be the cause of an accelerated warming of the Earth.
By 2005, 140 nations had ratified the pact, agreeing to reduce CO2 emissions. Notably exempt from the pact were fast-developing nations such as China and India. Few if any nations have ever met the required reductions in CO2 production, attributed to the use of fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal.
The United States refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and, at one point, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution rejecting it. This has not kept the United States from spending billions on research intended to address climate change with the aim of reducing or capturing CO2 emissions.
Had that money been devoted to maintenance of the nation’s infrastructure, tragic events such as the collapse of the Minnesota bridge over the Mississippi River might have been averted.
NASA Data Errors
In August of this year, NASA scientists admitted they had been reporting erroneous temperature data since 2000. The warmest year on record in the U.S. suddenly became 1934, note 1998.
As Dr. David Wojick recently noted, “The real significance is that such a small correction can make such a big difference. The reason is that the much-touted warming of the last three decades is merely a return to earlier warm times, after an equally long period of cooling. … There is no way this pattern constitutes a warming trend. … In short, there is no evidence for human-induced global warming in the U.S. temperature record.”
CO2 Effect Exaggerated
“Anthropogenic (manmade) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing a new study authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz and accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
A former Harvard physicist, Dr. Lubos Motl, said the new study has reduced global warming fear-mongers to “playing the children’s game to scare each other.”
The new research concludes Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as a series of reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has asserted for years.
Distorted Data
The IPCC reports have been increasingly dismissed as deliberate distortions of data that amount to little more than propaganda to advance the global warming hoax.
Having testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped. There has been little, if any, warming since 1979, a period during which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 17 percent.
Thus, the connection between CO2 and “global warming,” the key to the claims that it is occurring and will increase, has been proven wrong.
Dr. Roy Spencer, another critic of the global warming hoax, has noted, “At least 80 percent of the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.” The computer models used by advocates of global warming have been unable to account for the actions and impact of clouds, thus rendering them seriously flawed.
Skeptical Studies Mounting
Immediately prior to and during 2007, one research study after another revealed the central premise of global warming lacks any scientific merit. One by Dr. Tim Patterson concluded, “The Earth temperature does respond to the solar cycle as confirmed by numerous studies.”
The solar cycle is known to be about 11 years in length and reflects increased or decreased sunspot (magnetic storms) activity. It is the sun that largely determines the Earth’s temperature, which is never the same throughout the planet over time, given seasonal and solar changes.
In 2007, meteorologist Anthony Watts led a team of researchers who determined, “The U.S. National Climate Data Center is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster.”
It had been discovered that many of the measuring stations were placed in locations such as on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, and even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills. ( See story on page 1.)
Further Refutations Arise
Bjarne Andresen, a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, collaborated with two other professors on an article in Science Daily concluding, “It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of the Earth.” Indeed, they wrote, “differences in temperature drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate.”
In May 2007, Dr. Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, dismissed fears of increased manmade CO2 in the atmosphere. He called the global warming argument “absurd.”
As to any increase in the Earth’s temperature, Bryson said, “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting carbon dioxide in the air.”
On August 15, 2007, meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo, the first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, said, “If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our annual anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.”
Media Blitz Planned
There will be dying gasps to this hoax, not the least of which is a planned $100 million media blitz by Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, but the public is already far more concerned about instability in the Middle East, the forthcoming national elections, and shocks to the U.S. economy to accord such an effort much credibility.
Hoaxes have a life of their own, and “global warming” is now coming to an end. Mark 2007 as the year it began to seriously bleed to death.
Alan Caruba ([email protected]) writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs,” for the Web site of the National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com. His latest book, Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy, is published by Merril Press. This article first appeared on The National Anxiety Center site and is reprinted with permission.