As scientists in the field of climatology and related fields increasingly concluded that human activity was causing the Earth’s temperature to warm and thus change its climate, major sectors of the capitalist class and their representatives organized to resist this. Foremost amongst these were the oil and coal industries and also the far-right “free” market ideologues. While the industries mentioned had a direct stake in opposing the scientific conclusions, the free marketeers opposed it because the conclusion would be that the “free” market doesn’t work.
Thus it was that an entire industry of deniers developed. Included are such alleged “scientists” as: John Christy, Phillip Stott, Ian Clark, Richard Lindzen, and Patrick Michaels – all of whom are linked with the oil industry and/or such right wing think tanks as the Cato Institute.
Then there are the out-and-out propagandists who do not even have a scientific credential to place behind their names. These include individuals like Paul Driessen, a former environmentalist who is linked with such right wing think tanks as the “Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow”, Patrick Moore, former Director of Greenpeace, who has worked as a propagandist for the Canadian timber industry as well as for plastic companies, and Richard Courtney, technical editor of CoalTrans International, the journal of the international coal trading industry. (Note: An excellent source for background to such individuals is www.sourcewatch.org.)
Summary of the Evidence
It is not my purpose here to provide much of the evidence for the fact of human-caused global climate change; that evidence is overwhelming and easily available on the internet. This evidence includes the shrinkage as well as the break-up of both polar ice-caps (www.nrdc.org/globalwarming), the shrinkage of almost all mountain-top glaciers http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=157), the warming of the oceans’ waters http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=6582&Method=Full), the duration and strength of hurricanes and typhoons has increased ((http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0804_050804_hurricanewarming.html),
and the increased pests in higher altitude forests (threatening forests such as the pine forests of Yosemite and the aspen forests of Colorado from personal observation plus recent news reports such as here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/15/aspen-trees-dying-off-sci_n_322402.html). In addition to these changes in climate is the increased acidification of the oceans, which is due to their absorption of massive amounts of carbon dioxide (http://www.nrdc.org/oceans/acidification/science.asp). This acidification threatens the life of many species, most prominently tiny shellfish and crustaceans whose shells are threatened with being dissolved. (Note: I have listed just one source for most of these undeniable facts. However, entire books have been written documenting them and any google search will reveal tens of thousands of other sources.)
Deniers’ Dishonest, Anti-Scientific Method
The right-wing, corporate-controlled global warming deniers have shifted grounds over the years. First they claimed that nothing significant is changing in the climate. Then they claimed that while there may be some changes, these are not caused by human activity but rather by Sun spots or some other factor outside of human control. Then they shifted once again and claimed that while human activity is causing this change, there is nothing that can be done, and even if there is it will be too expensive.
Their tactics are incompatible with any serious scientific approach. For instance, they focus on a few years in recent decades when global temperatures have decreased, but neglect to mention that this is due to a series of huge volcanoes which sent enormous amounts of ash into the atmosphere and that prior to and subsequent to this effect temperatures were increasing. They point out that in the past, periods of global warming were followed, not preceded, by increased CO2 levels. This supposedly proves that increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere are a result not a cause of global warming. What they fail deal with is the argument that other factors may have slightly warmed the climate, but these were not sufficient for the subsequent warming; that what happened was that a slight warming caused an increased CO2 level in the atmosphere, which then caused a much greater warming.
These deniers simply pick and choose which facts and arguments to deal with while they ignore the answers to their arguments as if such answers don’t exist. This is the method of propagandists, not scientists.
Left Skeptics
There is, however, another wing of those who doubt or deny the reality of human-caused global warming. Those are on the left, the most prominent of whom is probably Alexander Cockburn. They advance two political theories for why this view has become so prominent amongst scientists and others: One is that it is simply advanced in order to justify increased attacks on the working class (as well as on the third world in general). The other is that this is all a plot cooked up by the nuclear industry.
This view is contradicted by how the study of human-caused global warming/climate change developed.
Brief History of Global Warming Theory
The first scientist to propose that human created CO2 could change the climate was a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius in 1896, but his idea was generally rejected at the time. Then, in 1938 an engineer named Stewart Callendar made a similar proposal, and claimed that the Earth was warming due to an actual build-up of CO2. Callendar thought this was a positive effect. However, this view was again generally ignored or rejected.
The rejection of this view stemmed from several sources. First and foremost was simple general ignorance of the changes in the planet’s climate since its inception as well as the general disbelief that human activity could affect it. As one writer put it: “Hardly anyone imagined that human actions, so puny among the vast natural powers, could upset the balance that governed the planet as a whole. This view of Nature – suprahuman, benevolent, and inherently stable – lay deep in most human cultures. It was traditionally tied up with a religious faith in the God-given order of the universe, a flawless and imperturbable harmony. Such was the public belief, and scientists are members of the public, sharing most of the assumptions of their culture. Once scientists found plausible arguments explaining that the atmosphere and climate would remain unchanged within a human timescale – just as everyone expected – they stopped looking for possible counter arguments (Spencer Weart, “The Discovery of Global Warming”, pp. 7-8)
By the 1920s and ‘30s, however, this view was decisively smashed by the development of paleontology – the study of fossils, and in those decades a new theory developed – that increased Sun spot activity had caused the climate changes. However, this was largely discarded in the ‘30s which all predictions based on this theory failed to be borne out. Then another view, that small changes in the Earth’s rotation and axis caused the climate changes, was put forward, also to be discarded.
Following WW II, two developments helped shape the present view of global climate change. First was the cold war, which led to a huge increase in funding for military-related research. A part of this research was studying of global weather patterns, which had a military function as the increased knowledge would help in battle planning, aircraft flight plans, etc.
In addition, by the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, it became inescapable that human activity was affecting the planet’s environment. A signal event in forming this conclusion was the publication of “Silent Spring” (1962) by Rachel Carson. Carson’s book helped shatter the belief that the environment was immutable, and this then led to a further openness to the issue of human-caused climate change. Thus it was that by the 1980s advances in paleontology coupled with other scientific advances led scientists to (reluctantly) conclude that human activity could, indeed, affect global climate.
Corporate Cover-up
This conclusion was not welcomed by the capitalist class; quite the contrary. In 1981, for instance, James Hansen, a scientist employed by the US Department of Energy, sent the NY Times a report he was about to have published that reported that the world’s climate was warming. The result was that the Department of Energy reneged on promised funding for Hansen, who then had to lay off a number of employees.
Both Bush administrations further repressed the study of human-caused climate change. Shortly after G.W. Bush came into office, a representative of ExxonMobil, Randy Randol, sent a memo to Bush seeking the removal of the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr. Robert Watson. They cited Watson’s comment that “The United States is way off meeting its targets (for CO2 emissions).” They sought Watson’s replacement by either Dr. Richard Lindzen or Dr. Richard Christy, two global warming deniers. Christy’s and Lindzen’s claim to fame was some research they’d done which purported to show that global warming had not really occurred. Their arguments collapsed when it was shown that they were based on incorrect calculations of satellite orbits. Perhaps the fact that Lindzen was also receiving $2,500 per day as a “consultant” for the coal industry had something to do with his views also.
In any case, they succeeded in getting Watson removed, although getting Lindzen or Christy appointed in his place would have caused too great of a scandal and this was not accomplished.
Following this, scientific reports by administration scientists were edited and changed for political reasons by Bush aide Philip Cooney, a political appointee. When this came out in the open, Cooney was forced to resign. He then went to work lobbying for ExxonMobil. (http://realclimate.org/index.php?p=442#comment-52583)
It should be emphasized that neither Bush administration was exactly an opponent of the nuclear industry. It should also be emphasized that the Democrats were also complicit in this cover-up that lasted for decades.
Mass Media
The corporate-controlled mass media has also been reluctant to explain about human-caused global warming. To this day, reports about unusual weather occurrences (unusual rain and storm patterns, droughts and heat waves, extreme forest fires, etc.) are reported as inexplicable phenomena. The suspected link between these and global climate change is almost never raised. As one author writes: “A few years ago, a top editor at a major TV network was asked why, given the increasing proportion of news budgets dedicated to weather disasters, the network news broadcasts did not make this connection (with global warming). The editor said, ‘We did that – Once. But it triggered a barrage of complaints from the Global Climate Coalition (a fossil fuel funded denier group) to our top executives at the network.’…. In the end, he confided, the industry basically intimidated the network into dropping this connection from its coverage.” (Ross Gelbspan, “Boiling Point,” p. 80)
Until recently, whenever the media did cover the issue, they tended to give equal coverage to the deniers, using the excuse that they had to be “balanced”. This is like giving the flat-Earthers equal time, and in any case, when has the mass media ever seriously concerned itself with “balanced” reporting?
Pentagon-Commissioned Study
In the early part of this century, a study was commissioned by the Pentagon and conducted by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall. This study was meant to analyze the possible “security threats” posed by global climate change. Entitled “Imagining the Unthinkable”, an executive summary of this report is available on the internet, including here: http://www.climate.org/PDF/clim_change_scenario.pdf. The original report was not for public consumption, but rather for the strategists of the capitalist class to help understand the potential dangers. The report depicts a possible scenario in which global climate disruption destabilizes huge portions of the world. It concludes that the US may “find itself in a world where Europe will be struggling internally, large numbers of refugees washing up on its shores, and Asia in a serious crisis over food. Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.”
It has only been with the greatest of reluctance that the reality of human-caused global climate change/disruption has been accepted by the majority of the capitalist class. This reluctance has been generated by several factors: First is the particular interests of particular sectors of the capitalist class, most especially the fossil fuel extractive industries and related industries (such as the auto industry). Secondly, this reality leads to a challenge to the worship of the “free” market, which threatens the capitalist class’s most basic propaganda. In suppressing this scientific reality and in avoiding it, they have played to some of the most basic prejudices. Most particularly is the view that the experience of our species over the last few hundred years more or less sums up the experience of the planet throughout its history. This includes the human experience with the planet’s climate. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.
Limitations of Mainstream Environmentalists
A special mention must be made of the left environmentalists and others who have explained many of the dangers of human-caused global climate change. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the British author and columnist George Monbiot, who has written a book that on the subject (“Heat”) that is generally excellent in many respects. His book decisively proves the reality of this human-caused threat, but then it continues to offer a solution in terms of restructuring much of society in order to massively reduce carbon emissions. In one field of consumption after another, Monbiot shows how such emissions could be reduced by some 80%.
However, there are two key aspects that he ignores: The first is the emissions from the military; the second is emissions from production (vs. consumption). Alongside of this, Monbiot ignores a central question: Are the huge changes he advocates possible without a central plan for the economy, and if not, then which class will exercise power over the drawing up and execution of this plan? Monbiot ignores these questions despite the fact that he is a very thoughtful writer who carefully researches his subject.
The only reasonable conclusion is that Monbiot ignores these issues because he does not see an alternative outside of the capitalist system. This goes for almost the entire global warming industry – the non-profits, the scientists and other writes on the subject, and of course the corporate-controlled politicians. There could hardly be a greater condemnation of capitalism and its “free” market than the plunder of the planet’s environment caused by this system. Any serious study, including that of human-caused global warming/global climate disruption, must conclude that the only solution possible is through a democratically controlled and managed plan for the world economy – in other words socialism on a global scale.
What a biased piece of nonsense. You bring back the tired old line that everyone who knows Al Gore and company are full of it are tied to the oil
and/or coal industry. You are a hypocrite for not exploring the funding behind
the global cooling deniers. Fortunately, someone else has already done it for you.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf
You present many theories as if they are facts. Nothing is this piece is worth reading or believing. Good luck getting more people to drink Al Gore’s Kool-Aid.
Love that line “his book decisively proves”. Give me a break. In your easily persuaded opinion perhaps.
Frankly, the non-alarmists have never received equal time with the left stream media. I can’t imagine what would make you think differently.
This piece is so laughable. Your arrogance is surpassed only by your ignorance.
You speak with such false authority when suggesting what theories have been accepted and discarded. I’m sure certain theories have been discarded by global warming alarmists, but as you’ve noticed, the general public can smell the BS and isn’t buying into it.
This nothing more than a piece written by an alarmist for alarmists. You should all get together and pat each other on the back.
I’ll leave you with a few facts on hurricanes. Where you got the idea they are strenthening is beyond me since the hurricane energy index is at a 30 year low and all those big cat 5 hurricanes predicted by alarmists after Katrina and Rita hit haven’t materialized.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Y2iF99kOY&feature=player_embedded
My article above was not written from the perspective of one who simply accepts what the majority of scientists say just because they are the official “experts”. For instance, I think that the health reasearch industry and the health industry in general are very mistaken in their view that often a virus is the single cause of a disease. As Theo Colborn showed in her excellent book “Our Stolen Future”, even when a virus does “cause” a disease or even death, the question lying behind this is why is the body (human or otherwise) unable to cope with this virus?
Colborn shows that this is directly related to the pollution of our planet’s environment. This has been covered up to protect the economic interests of Corporate America, i.e. the capitalist class. This ranges from the plastics and chemical industries to agri-business. In addition, the pharmaceuticals make giant profits off of this point of view.
This relates to the skeptics and deniers of human caused global warming/climate disruption. They are unable to put forward a reasonable explanation of why this has become the prevalent view amongst scientists.
Some claim that it’s simply because a global warming industry has developed and it pays well. But why did this industry develop in the first place, vs. some othe school of climate science? As my article above shows, it was not due to the backing of the capitalist class who spent over a decade trying to suppress it (most particularly in the Bush years).
The argument of the left skeptics – that it was encouraged by the employers to justify their attacks on workers – also collapses when the history of the development of this science is considered. Clearly, the Bush administration – which was not exactly friendly to workers’ – would have encouraged this science rather than repress it. Clearly the media would have done the same.
The argument that it’s all a plot of the nuclear power industry also doesn’t hold water. After all, the same political forces that supported nuclear (e.g. Bush) opposed the theory of global warming.
Therefore, there is no politically credible argument as to why the overwhelming majority of scientists today hold to this view. I continue to insist that the evidence is overwhelming, as even much of the denial/skeptic forces now admit, since they have gone from absolute denial that anything is changing in the climate to saying that it’s too expensive to do anything about it.
Talk about underreported news! Criticism of the global warming theory is suppressed news. While portraying the criticism as an oil industry conspiracy, the Al Gore elite want to burden us with a feudal tax of carbon credits. Industrial growth will be suppressed and global unemployment will remain high. Class warfare.
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/38574742.html
KUSI NEWS San Diego, California
Print this article
The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam
Originally printed at http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/38574742.html
By John Coleman
January 28, 2009 (Revised and edited February 11, 2009)
The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax us citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way: the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have led to a rise in public awareness that there is no runaway global warming. A majority of American citizens are now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprints, resulting from our use of fossil fuels, are going to lead to climatic calamities. But governments are not yet listening to the citizens.
How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government to punish the citizens for living the good life that fossil fuels provide for us?
The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle obtained major funding from the Navy to do measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting post war atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute’s areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago. Suess was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle co-authored a scientific paper with Suess in 1957—a paper that raised the possibility that the atmospheric carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. The thrust of the paper was a plea for funding for more studies. Funding, frankly, is where Revelle’s mind was most of the time.
Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of Carbon dioxide. In 1958 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels. These two research papers became the bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could have any significant impact on temperatures.
Back in the1950s, when this was going on, our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution left by the crude internal combustion engines and poorly refined gasoline that powered cars and trucks back then, and from the uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. There was a valid and serious concern about the health consequences of this pollution. As a result a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action.
Government heard that outcry and set new environmental standards. Scientists and engineers came to the rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed, as were new high tech, computer controlled, fuel injection engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer significant polluters, emitting only some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. New fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced as well.
But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a continuing crisis issue. Roger Revelle’s research at the Scripps Institute had tricked a wave of scientific inquiry. So the concept of uncontrollable atmospheric warming from the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels became the cornerstone issue of the environmental movement. Automobiles and power planets became the prime targets.
Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants flowed and alarming hypotheses began to show up everywhere.
The Keeling curve continues to show a steady rise in CO2 in the atmosphere during the period since oil and coal were discovered and used by man. Carbon dioxide has increased from the 1958 reading of 315 to 385 parts per million in 2008. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. The percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about 3.8 hundredths of one percent by volume and 41 hundredths of one percent by weight. And, by the way, only a fraction of that fraction is from mankind’s use of fossil fuels. The best estimate is that atmospheric CO2 is 75 percent natural and 25 percent the result of civilization.
Several hypotheses emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause a significant warming. But they remained unproven. As years have passed, the scientists have kept reaching out for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on building up.
Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation’s bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meetings.
Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations—a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC). This was not a pure, “climate study” scientific organization, as we have been led to believe. It was an organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists who craved UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels.
Over the last 25 years the IPCC has been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, it has made its points to the satisfaction of most governments and even shared in a Nobel Peace Prize.
At the same time Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950’s as he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla. He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the first Chancellor of the new campus.
He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It was there that Revelle inspired one of his students. This student would say later, “It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!” The student described him as “a wonderful, visionary professor” who was “one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming.” That student was Al Gore. He thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book “Earth in the Balance,” published in 1992.
So there it is. Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his road to his books, his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from the carbon credits business.
The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause célèbre of the media. After all, the media is mostly liberal, loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us “the sky is falling, the sky is falling.” The politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too.
But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of Congress. He wrote, “My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways.” He added, “…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer.”
And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine. They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain, and curbing the use of fossil fuels could have a huge, negative impact on the economy, jobs, and our standard of living. Considerable controversy still surrounds the authorship of this article. However, I have discussed this collaboration with Dr. Singer and he assures me that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon dioxide was not a problem.
Did Roger Revelle attend the summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in 1990 while working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore on this wild goose chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong? The answer to those questions is, “Apparently.” People who were there have told me about that afternoon, but I have not located a transcript or a recording. People continue to share their memories with me on an informal basis. More evidence may be forthcoming.
Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam. He might well stand beside me as a global warming denier.
Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s mea culpa as the actions of a senile old man. The next year, while running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more debate. From 1992 until today, he and most of his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when asked about us skeptics, they insult us and call us names.
As the science now stands, the global warming alarmist scientists say the climate is sensitive to a “radiative forcing” effect from atmospheric carbon dioxide which greatly magnifies its greenhouse effect on atmospheric warming. The only proof they can provide of this complex hypothesis is by running it in climate computer models. By starting the models in about 1980 they showed how the continuing increase in CO2 was step with a steady increase in average global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990’s and claim cause and effect. But, in fact, those last two decades of the 20th century were at the peak of a strong 24 year solar cycle, and the temperature increases actually may have been a result of the solar cycle together with related warm cycle ocean current patterns during that period.
That warming ended in 1998 and global temperatures (as measured by satellites) leveled off. Starting in 2002, computer models and reality have dramatically parted company. The models predicted temperatures and carbon dioxide would continue to rise in lock step, but in fact while the CO2 continues to rise, temperatures are in decline. Now global temperatures are in such a nose dive there is wide spread talk from climatologists about an impending ice age. In any case, the UN’s computer model “proof” has gone up in a poof.
Nonetheless, today we have the continued claim that carbon dioxide is the culprit of an uncontrollable, runaway man-made global warming. We are told that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint. And, we are told we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists for this sinful footprint. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US Congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.
We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by the prohibiting of new refineries and of drilling for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that, the whole issue of corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies, which also has driven up food prices. All of this is a long way from over.
Yet I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.
Global Warming: It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history.
To email John Coleman, click here.
For more info on the global warming scam, check out Coleman’s Corner.
It is a very mistaken method to pick out one or two incidents and individuals and build an entire view of a development around that. The first ones to propose the theory of human-caused global warming were those I mentioned in my article. The general theory’s development was not due to one or two individuals, nor to a plan or plot; in fact it was stumbled upon almost accidentally and in a roundabout way:
It developed through the research of paleontologists and others in related fields – those who were studying dinosaur bones and the like. The question they asked themselves was why those creatures became extinct. Arising from this was the question of climate change all those many millions of years ago. How did it change and what brought about the change? There were a great many scientists (and others) and a great many expeditions and studies involved in trying to solve these riddles.
That doesn’t prove that the current theory is right, but it does show that John Coleman’s view of how the theory developed is wrong.
Its funny to hear the deniers screaming “bias” when their own bias is all too evident. All the vitriol directed at Gore designed to avoid a discussion of the facts.
Its just sad that the weak minded are doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry for free. At least get paid like a regular prostitute (no offense to sex workers intended.)
[...] Is global warming a corporate fraud? from Project Censored [...]