Warming Fires

We’ve raised the hysteria to a new level. With all signs pointing to a major global recession our president elect wants to impose a carbon tax. Democrats have thrown out a long time chairman of the House Energy Committee in favor of an environmental nut case at a time when the auto industry is imploding. The gubernator himself is blaming California wild fires on global warming. This is getting out of hand.

There is plenty of room for skepticism. One global warming icon after another has been debunked. Polar bears aren’t drowning. Whales are trapped in suddenly thicker Arctic sea ice as the northern hemisphere appears headed into another bitterly cold winter. Greenland’s ice pack is melting a lot more slowly than Al Gore would have us believe in his version of Little House of Horrors. The Snows of Kilimanjaro aren’t melting, they are ablating, being eaten away by dry winds. For years a few scientists have taken the politically incorrect view that sun spots have a far greater impact on our climate that CO2 does. Sure enough, the solar cycle peaked in 1998 and the planet has been cooling ever since. After retreating for 200 years, Alaska’s glaciers are growing again. This week the Goddard Institute for Space Studies was forced to retract a claim that October was the hottest on record. The retraction wasn’t widely reported but it also wasn’t the first time NASA got caught with cooked books. Last year the agency had to revise its data to show the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s. They’ve been wrong enough often enough to lose a lot of credibility.

And so it goes. The often cited consensus among climate scientists turns out to be no consensus at all. A growing number dissent, despite threats of lost research funds. Dr. William Gray, famous for his accurate hurricane season forecasts calls the whole thing a fraud. He predicts a new period of cooling saying the warming backers have fudged numbers in their computer models with too much water vapor, a much more potent green house gas than CO2. He is regularly vilified by his colleagues and almost lost his job at the University of Colorado over it. Only his prestige saved him. Other skeptics (Gore would call them deniers, as in holocaust deniers) include Weather Channel founder and eminent meteorologist John Coleman who insists there is no significant manmade contribution to global warming. Roger Revelle, sometimes called father of greenhouse warming for his work correlating CO2 levels with atmospheric temperatures, taught Al Gore as a freshman. Gore refers to him as his mentor. The late oceanographer was skeptical about just how much effect CO2 has, expected it to work to temper weather extremes, not exacerbate them, and argued against drastic steps to reduce green gasses because they would be ineffective and have serious consequences for world poverty.

Another prominent meteorologist, Anthony Watts, points out that US temperature measurements have a built in warming bias in part because the instruments are typically located at fire stations, surrounded by concrete. British science journalist Lord Monkton shows the worlds oceans have been getting cooler which would cause sea levels to fall, not rise as predicted by warming models. He sees no cause for alarm. German atmospheric scientist GR Weber criticizes extremist and alarmist views as having no rational basis. A lot of this is out there. These guys have credentials, they have done their homework, and they think it’s a mistake to spend public money on something that isn’t a serious problem. We probably ought to be paying attention. I can just see them rolling their eyes at California’s Governor.