• Article Tools
• Print
• RSS

Candor and Climate Change

The Ongoing Debate over the Science Behind Global Warming Policy

by Mark DeYoung

This week, the nations of the world are wrapping up a massive global conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

During the opening ceremony, a powerful video was presented to the conference delegates. In it, a young girl has a horrifying nightmare. In her dream, she awakes to a dusty, deserted, barren wasteland. As she explores, she comes upon an abandoned swing set. Suddenly, the ground cracks beneath her feet. She drops her stuffed animal as she sprints from a burgeoning earthquake, only to turn and see the sky covered in darkness, and a swirling tornado heading her way. She jumps for the branch of what seems to be the world’s last dying tree, just in time to avoid the rushing waters that consume the earth’s remaining land. The girl awakens from her nightmare with a piercing scream. The short film closes as the girl raises a video camera in front of her face, and implores, “Please. Help the world.”

With the recent “climate gate” revelations that suggest a climate research center in Britain with close ties to the most prominent global body of experts on climate change, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may have destroyed records, manipulated data to hide declines in temperature and deliberately silenced critics, it is disturbing to see the world’s nations coming together to create far-reaching policy to address man-made global warming, an unproven scientific theory. With the U.S. Congress also considering a cap and trade bill with strong implications, it is time to truly question the prevailing wisdom that assumes scientific agreement on global warming.

Back in 2007, the U.N.’s IPCC delivered an assessment report to world policymakers. They declared that global temperature rises are primarily due to human influences, and that there is unanimity on this point. Shortly thereafter, 400 prominent scientists (including current and former members of the IPCC) voiced major objections to this so-called consensus. This number has now grown to over 700 recognized international scientists (in contrast to the 52 scientists who authored the original IPCC report) who are very skeptical about the “agreed” science of man-made global warming. IPCC scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh put it clearly when he said, “Warming fears are the worst scientific scandal in history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” And Nobel Prize winner Igar Giaever declared, “I am a skeptic… Global warming has become a new religion.”

Former vice president Al Gore and many in the popular media insist that the debate on anthropogenic global warming is closed. The science is settled. Gore has even compared global warming skeptics to those who believed that the earth was flat and those who insist that the moon landing was a hoax. In his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore tells dramatically effective stories about the decreasing polar ice cap. This fear-mongering is challenged by scientists who insist that while there is melting in the Arctic, the temperature in Antarctica (which houses 90 percent of the Earth’s ice)  has cooled over the last 50 years, with ice coverage growing to record levels.

Gore continued to press this line of reasoning at the Copenhagen conference last week, where he offered fresh figures claiming that, “there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”  The scientist upon whose work Gore made this claim quickly recanted and told the media that they never agreed to this figure.

To further challenge the consensus that man-made global warming is agreed science, the Global Warming Petition Project (organized by a group of American scientists) has gathered the signatures of over 31,000 scientists (including 9,000 with doctorate degrees) who flatly reject anthropogenic global warming. The petition states that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate.” Not surprisingly, this petition has received little coverage in the popular press, and several attempts have been made to discredit it.

As global leaders close out the Copenhagen conference, often described as the world’s last chance to save the world from environmental ruin, it is wise to wake up to the reality that there is great dissent in the scientific community. Diplomats are advocating policy changes that would have stultifying consequences for emerging economies, could stall industrialization in developing nations, and would have far-reaching financial impact on Western countries.

While debate will continue to rage over whether man-made or natural causes drive global warming, we also need to face the inconvenient truth that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, with some scientists even suggesting that we may be entering a new global cooling period.

It is time to stop the hysteria. Now is the time to thoroughly investigate the “climate gate” scandal. Now is the time to look honestly at all the scientific data and give every credible scientist a platform from which to speak.

Now is not the time to create binding global policy based on decades of scientific alarmism.

 

---

(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)