2 posts tagged “global warming”

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Is the threat of global warming propaganda?

Jul 1, 2007
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First, some favorite pictures that often adorn my desktop:

Ely, Minnesota

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For some reason, I've always loved wolves.

Sahara

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One day, I'm going to try traveling across this desert, via the old way - camels.

Crocodile

I'm always so amazed at how dry the ground can become in some places, and how it
cracks up. On the other hand, this dryness also disturbs me. I do not want to be stuck here.

“No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate changes observed to date to anthropogenic (man-made) causes.”
- Professor Frederick Seits, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in the Wall Street Journal on June 12, 1996.

So I just finished the British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is quite a match against Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I really enjoyed the former, though I can see why Al Gore's is way more popular: 1) he's quite a well-known politician; and 2) he has emotional appeal, practice from all the political speeches he's had to do. Anyway, now I'm going to list out the main arguments of The Great Global Warming Swindle. I urge anyone who has watched Al Gore's film to watch this documentary as well, before you decide upon your own stance. That way, you'll have heard arguments from both sides of this controversial topic.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

1. Most of the rises in global temperature occured before the 1940s, when industrial production was still weak. Then during the four decades of the Post War Economic Boom, global temperature actually cooled. In fact, global temperatures kept cooling during these 40 years that people began to panic. In the BBC show "The Weather Machine," from back then, showed the disastrous effects of climate on harvests, tornadoes, etc around the world, much like the propaganda of global warming today. However, the BBC show wasn't talking about global warming. It was talking about global COOLING, and the threat of a possible new ICE AGE.

2. Scientists have found that global temperatures are rising on the ground, and not in the troposphere; which does not support the theories of climate models, that is, if the surface warms, the atmosphere also warms.

3. CO2 is not causing global warming. It is a relatively minor greenhouse gas, constituting only 0.054% of all greenhouse gases. As Al Gore argues, ice core surveys in the Antarctic show a link between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature change. The problem is that Al Gore fails to mention that the ice core surveys show that CO2 FOLLOWS temperature change and not vice versa. The thing is that the ice core surveys show that whenever temperature goes up or down, it takes a few hundred years later before CO2 follows accordingly.

4. CO2 is not a pollutant. Life consists of CO2. The biggest reservoir of CO2 is the ocean. The warmer it is, the more CO2 the ocean emits; conversely, the cooler it is, the more CO2 that the ocean dissolves. This helps explain the relationship of CO2 and temperature as shown by the ice core surveys in #3. The time lag occurs because of the vastness of the ocean. It simply takes a lot longer to warm up or cool down the ocean. This also results in the ocean having a memory of temperature changes that can run back 10,000 years. The changes that we see in oceans today are just a reflection of causes that occurred years, decades, or even centuries before.

So, if CO2 is NOT the culprit of global warming...what IS??

5. Scientists have found that the sun affects temperature change directly. Whenever there have been sun spots in the sun, the earth was warmer. During the Little Ice Age of the 14th/15th century, there were literally no sun spots. In graphs, scientists have found a strikingly close correlation between temperature and solar activity in the past 400 years.

6. The sun also indirectly affects global temperature through clouds. Temperature is controlled by clouds (the more clouds, the cooler it is, because of the higher amounts of sunrays being reflected back to space by the barriers; and of course, if there are no clouds, then the sun can warm us up); the clouds are controlled by cosmic rays (the more cosmic rays, the less clouds, and vice versa); and cosmic rays in turn, are controlled by the sun.

7. When looking at the graphs of CO2 & Temperature, it seems that CO2 has risen steadily just as temperature has. The problem is that the lines of temperature zigzag up and down even as temperature goes up, while CO2 levels just move up like a slide. However, when looking at the graph comparing the sun and temperature, the two match very closely, both zigzagging up and down together, even as both rise gradually.

So why all the emphasis on CO2 causing global warming? Or even the big deal OVER global warming?

8. The fact is, global warming is already an industry in itself. Cut out the threat of global warming and literally hundreds, even thousands of people will become jobless, from scientists, to campaigners, and even to environmental journalists.

9. It's also political. The example given by the British documentary is Margaret Thatcher and energy security. She didn't trust the Middle East for oil, and she certainly didn't trust the National Union of Mine Workers (coal) who had pulled down the previous government. But she was interested in nuclear power. Since nuclear power doesn't emit CO2, she funded the Royal Society to prove that CO2 causes global warming, so that there would be support for nuclear power. The resulted in the IPCC.

10. In other words, research on global warming with an emphasis on CO2 and temperature brings money to scientists. Prior to the administration of Bush Sr., funding for climate and climate-related sciences was US$170 million. Later, it jumped to US$2 billion. Climate science and global warming may be small in the area of sciences, but funding for it is huge, and everyone is fighting for funds. For scientists going against mainstream beliefs, they usually get no funding. Research relating to manmade global warming is now one of the best funded areas of science, with the funding at least $4 billion yearly today. Funding is mostly political/governmental.

11. There is a very powerful bias within the media, making dramatizing more popular within the scientific community. They have to make there data interesting so that it will be printed. Even the graphs and models that are shown to us may not be entirely accurate:

"Models predict what the temperature might be in 50 or 100 years time. It is one of their peculiar features that long range climate forecasts are only proved wrong long after people have forgotten about them. As a result, there is a danger, that modelers will be less concerned in producing a forecast that is accurate than one that is interesting." - Professor Carl Wunsch

Other notes...

12. It is now extremely popular to blame global warming for every natural disaster, storms, hurricanes, etc, to man-made global warming. But it is propaganda. There is no sound scientific support or basis for this.

13. The meltdown of the polarcaps is a popular image in the media today. But earth's climate history show that 7000 to 8000 years ago, Russia’s permafrost had the biggest meltdown that has been seen ever since, and nothing dramatic happened. The International Arctic Research Centre says that, over time, the ice caps have been expanding and contracting over time. Ice is always falling and moving, just as seasons change. Sea levels also change all the time as well, because of land rising and falling.

14. Another scare that is often told by the media is that as the world warms up, tropical diseases, such as malaria, will be able to, with the help of mosquitoes, spread northward to the previously colder countries. However, mosquitoes thrive in very cold temperatures as well. They even thrive in the arctic. As for the northward movement of tropical diseases, in the 1920s, there was a great malaria epidemic in the Soviet Union, with 13 millions cases reported each year.

I'm not done :( And I've been sitting here typing for ages. There is one last point. But I’m going to type that later or tomorrow, because this last point is also the one that jumped out to me most from the documentary.

---Edit---

In my last entry regarding Al Gore's film, I wrote how it doesn't really matter whether global warming is a real threat or not, and that people should just be environmentally friendly by cutting carbon emissions, recycling, etc. Well, it turns out that there is an official term for this kind of thinking, known as the Precautionary Principle. Basically, suppporters of this believe that it does no harm to be on the safe side, even if the theory of man-made climate change is wrong.

And now, for the last, and most interesting fact that the documentary pointed out...

The film argues that the global warming campaign is a threat to third world/developing countries such as those in Africa. Many of these countries still do not have the basic amenities and infrastructure that we are used to, such as electricity and plumbing. Electricity is a biggie. I seriously can't imagine life without electricity. Hot water, lights, air conditioning, means of production, refrigerators, hospitals, etc. The week or so following the Taiwan 921 Earthquake, we had absolutely no water and electricity. Trust me, three days of life without water and electricity is a nightmare. Survivable, but such a hassle.

Anyway, the point is that, just without electricity can lead to a deluge of economic and health problems. The UN and other NGO's are pushing developing countries to use solar and wind power, instead of the more conventional coal power, perhaps so that these countries may start off cleaner and more environmentally friendly? I'm actually guilty of this sort of thinking myself. While I was a representative at a Model United Nations meeting, I actually voted in support for this sort of policy. Why not just have these developing countries start off properly, now that we know how polluting coal power plants are, etc, etc. This is why I was immediately hit when the documentary asked, if we all know how notoriously unreliable solar and wind power are (the sun may not always be shining, and the wind may not always be blowing in the right direction), and that they are both at least 3x more expensive than conventional forms of electrical generation, making these two expensive even for the US and European countries, then how can we expect third world/developing countries to be able to afford this kind of technology? Plus, the amount of electricity that solar and wind power can produce is so little considering how much it costs. It's ok if you want to power a house or small building, but what about factories? These developing countries need the factories to start developing.

"The idea that the world's poorest people should be restricted to using the world's most expensive and inefficient forms of electrical generation is the most morally repugnant aspect of the global warming campaign." - Paul Driessen

There. I'm finally done. This global warming stuff has taken up far too much of my time. Personally, I am not going to dig up data and fact check whether Al Gore or this British documentary is correct. I guess only time will tell what really is the truth. Though I must confess, prior to representing Germany on the environmental panel in the Model United Nations, I was quite the advocate for global warming campaigns. After I had dug through mounds of UN and other scientific data, I was no longer so sure. This was because I never found hard evidence that global warming is such a big deal. Sure the earth is warming up, etc, etc, but there was no scientific finding showing whether this is a problem or not, or even whether it is a caused by humans or not.

Two things that I liked about the film: 1) I had NO idea that during the post-war years, there was actually a time when people believed that another Ice Age was going to descend upon us. 2) Pointing out the pressures that global warming campaigns have put on third world/developing countries.

An Inconvenient Truth - Global Warming

Jun 29, 2007
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AnInconvenientTruth

"The Era of Procrastination, of
Half-Measures, of Soothing and
Baffling Expedients, of Delays,
is Coming to its Close.

In its Place We are Entering a
Period of Consequences."

- Sir Winston Churchill (November 12, 1936)

"It's just human nature to take time to connect the dots...I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wish that you could have connected the dots more quickly." - Al Gore

Regret. Often times we make mistakes in our lives, big or small, and never realize it until it is too late. Only when we look back do we see more clearly what we should have done. Scientists have been warning again and again about the consequences of global warming. Opponents argue that this phenomenon that's taking place right now is being exaggerated, that it is just a period that Earth is going through, like the Ice Ages from before.

So, which side is right?

Does it really matter though? We all know that many of our habits, our wasteful way of life, is hurting nature. So why not just change, and whether this global warming is a crisis or not, if we take action, humans will have done something for the better. We will have helped protect the earth and environment for future generations to come.