Hot Air
This time of year it’s hard on us Southern Californians to bear the slings and arrows of our friends and family living almost anywhere else, watching not one but two Rose Bowl games played in glorious warm weather while they shiver and sulk, shovel and skid through an unusually harsh winter.
I’m feeling pretty smug about the weather, but not because of where I live. The Climategate scandal was our Christmas present du jour and wasn’t it a beaut?
Just before the Al-Gore crowd was to assemble in Copenhagen it came out that major weather “experts” on both sides of the pond had been systematically excluding data that questioned their so-called “settled science” that the earth was warming alarmingly and that human activity was to blame. Editors had been fired and careers destroyed. The intent of the Denmark conclave, which required 1200 limousines and innumerable private jets to populate, was to transfer billions of dollars in wealth from rich nations (us) to needy nations (the other 190) in the name of controlling CO2 emissions. (Of course India and China are too busy becoming prosperous to be bothered). Didn’t we learn in school that CO2 was what plants breathed in? I guess that went the way of school prayer and dress codes. Anyway, Al Gore won some awards for a movie ironically called “An Inconvenient Truth” that our schoolchildren have to suffer through, and CO2 got a bum rap, especially since everything we enjoy doing (driving, eating, farting, breathing for example) added more CO2 to our atmosphere. And if Mr. Gore’s mansion in Tennessee produced 20 times as much as your house, well HE is saving the planet and you’re not.
Age has its benefits, one of which is remembering when the script was different. Back in the 70s the earth was cooling dangerously. Time’s cover blared “The Coming Ice Age.” Some clown with a PhD predicted that we’d run out of food by the 80s. He’s still around, getting fat fees for lectures and books paid for by the hardy few who survived. The intellectuals instinctively blame all our ills on ourselves – there are just too many people, we’re running out of everything, blah blah blah. Unfortunately the western world seems bent on demographic self-destruction; most countries have barely half the necessary birth rate to maintain themselves.
My interest in so-called global warming started in earnest several years ago when I read “The Skeptical Environmentalist” by Danish statistician and Greenpeace member Bjørn Lomborg, who showed with meticulous research that money spent on reducing carbon emissions would have no measurable effect on climate change and would better be spent on meaningful reforms like sanitation. It is still his mission through the Copenhagen Project to influence the rich countries to spend wisely, and his impact is growing. Since then I have pursued the subject with growing concern because of the clear political poisoning of the debate. Should you choose to do so you can read or watch such works as “Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 15,000 Years”, which show that the earth is always warming or cooling, that industrial activity was nonexistent when the greatest warm periods occurred, that the Little Ice Age did far more damage than could conceivably occur with a degree or two of warming, and all sorts of other good news. An Arctic melting is happening but the polar bears will survive; meanwhile the opening of the Northwest Passage will save the environment enormous amounts of pollution by shortening shipping routes in the summertime. More food can grow; less fuel will be needed to heat homes. Did you know that Greenland was once green? Vikings farmed there for a few hundred years! There are fossils of palm trees in Siberia. Antarctica was almost surely once free of ice. The planet, like our own bodies, has an amazing capacity to regulate itself, When oceans warm, clouds increase and more sunlight is reflected away from earth. Water vapor, not CO2, is the primary greenhouse gas (excluding what emanates from the mouths of politicians).
In my first blog I cautioned not to confuse science, the pursuit of truth, with truth. Too many scientists have swallowed the Kool-aid and allowed their principles to be compromised. The nineteenth-century philsopher G. K. Chesterton famously warned, “When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. This failure of faith often leads men to overestimate their own power. “Man-made global warming” is such a conceit.
January 19th, 2012 at 9:28 am
Hi Dr. Maller! Its your favorite patient Renee!!! Glad to see you are still doing well! Where are you located now?