The public will no doubt be stunned to find that a report introduced by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director—and well known climate catastrophe cheerleader—John Holdren along with other Obama administration officials would suggest that we are moving toward global warming and a “projected rapid rate and large amount of climate change over this century.”
Even more biased than the “Unequivocal Warming Report” (an apparent curtsy to Al Gore’s favorite word) is the news article itself. It was authored by Lauren Morello and “ClimateWire”—a left-leaning climate alarmist group. One might imagine similar objectivity in an article on the finest mid-west steak houses co-authored by PETA. Typical of the style of the climatic duo is this sentence fragment in the original: “Forest shifts, crops suffer, diseases move north.” They neglect to point out that forests would be moving north in our hemisphere into territories that are too cold to support them today. The crops obviously suffer since we all know that jungles are an inhospitable location for plant growth while the more luxurious areas of the Polar Regions are flourishing with lichens. And they continue to push the lie that diseases (read “malaria”) are partial to warmer climes when the largest malaria outbreak of modern times occurred in Siberia in the 1920s when 13 million were infected, 600,000 died — 30,000 of which lived as far north as Arkhangelsk on the Arctic Circle.
It is far easier to point out the accuracies in the article than the errors and propaganda. Indeed there is a world-wide crisis in agriculture – though not for the reason given by Ms. Morello and friends. June brought heavy snow across large parts of Western Canada while North Dakota had its first June snowfall in 60 years. Sunday Telegraph reporter Christopher Booker writes that crop yields in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine are well-below average and Britain’s oilseed rape crop is 30 percent below it’s 2008 level. Low temperatures along with millions of acres being switched from food crops to biofuels, ironically to stop the warming, may put a strain on our taken-for-granted world food supply. Booker opines: “One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven’t noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.”
There is also some truth that the winters today are warmer and shorter than they were 30 years ago, but those who have followed the climate debate remember the late seventies as a period where there was considerable concern over the threatened beginning of a new Ice Age as the temperatures had dropped for over a decade even though carbon dioxide had continued to accumulate in the atmosphere during this decade.
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| Top Photo: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Richard Lindzen (left) and Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, discuss climate change during the second International Conference on Climate Change held in New York in March.
Above: A standing-room-only crowd listens to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute debunk several global-warming myths. Photos courtesy of the Heartland Institute/David Rosenzweig |
While the New York Times writers can be excused of ignorance of the facts about global warming, they cannot be pardoned for ignoring opposition to the government’s position, much of which comes from government scientists who are leaving the alarmist camp at the risk of their jobs. Certainly Morello et al are aware of the two Heartland Institute International Conferences on Climate Change, one of which drew 800 mostly scientists from 40 countries held in March in Manhattan, and one last month in Washington where 250 economists and scientists looked at the fearsome consequences of cap and trade legislation.
Surely the NYT writers are aware that over 700 dissenting scientists from around the world are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN’s IPCC and Al Gore. A Senate Minority Report gives names, bona fides, and dissenting opinions of each of scientist, many of them former UN IPCC supporters who have now turned against the UN given the wealth of evidence showing a clear disconnect between rising levels of CO2 and the continued warming since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-1800s.
If these writers feel competent to write on the subject they should certainly be aware of the “Global Warming Petition Project” where over 31,000 American scientists including 9,000 PhDs have gone on record as opposing the shoddy science that is the feeble spine of the climate alarmist movement. And if they wanted to authenticate the claims of the politicized science on which they are reporting, they might have spent a few minutes on one of the many non-political websites such as scienceandpublicpolicy.org where they would have learned (1) while the IPCC predicts warming between 2.4 and 5.3 degrees Celsius per century, the observed trend over the last 8 years is 1.0 oC per century in the opposite (i.e.,cooling) direction. And the oceans—where 80 percent of the heat was to end up—have been cooling also based on 5+ years of data since the deployment of 3,300 automated bathythermograph buoys throughout the world’s oceans.
And about that catastrophic rise in sea level that alarmists worry children (and childlike liberals) about: It ain’t happening. Your 2,400 miles of Gulf Coast highways and your 250 miles of freight lines will do just fine over the next hundred years. Al Gore predicted in his sci-fi horror movie “An Inconvenient Truth” a sea level rise of 20 feet. In ruling against blanket permission for the film to be shown to English school children, Mr. Justice Burton of the United Kingdom’s High Court bluntly stated: “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view.” Instead it appears now that sea level will rise about 8 inches in the 21st century just as it did in the 20th century.
So Ms. Morello, the next time you write on facets of the climate change controversy—which is very much alive even though you might be asleep—why not pick a writing partner who is not a shill for the Obama administration and others who want to bring about bigger government through taxing our access to energy using the fiction of climate change as a clearly devious excuse.
This article originally appeared at the John Birch Society website and is reprinted here with permission.
