Why ‘Global Warming’ Is a Scam

[ranran]

THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE

19 South LaSalle Street #903
Chicago, IL 60603
phone 312/377-4000 · fax 312/377-5000
http://www.heartland.org


Eight Reasons Why ‘Global Warming’ Is a Scam


Author: Joseph L. Bast
Published: The Heartland Institute 02/01/2003


When Al Gore lost his bid to become the country’s first “Environment President,” many of us thought the “global warming” scare would finally come to a well-deserved end. That hasn’t happened, despite eight good reasons this scam should finally be put to rest.


It’s B-a-a-ck!

Similar scares orchestrated by radical environmentalists in the past--such as Alar, global cooling, the “population bomb,” and electromagnetic fields--were eventually debunked by scientists and no longer appear in the speeches or platforms of public officials. The New York Times recently endorsed more widespread use of DDT to combat malaria, proving Rachel Carson’s anti-pesticide gospel is no longer sacrosanct even with the liberal elite.

The scientific case against catastrophic global warming is at least as strong as the case for DDT, but the global warming scare hasn’t gone away. President Bush is waffling on the issue, rightly opposing the Kyoto Protocol and focusing on research and voluntary projects, but wrongly allowing his administration to support calls for creating “transferrable emission credits” for greenhouse gas reductions. Such credits would build political and economic support for a Kyoto-like cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

At the state level, some 23 states have already adopted caps on greenhouse gas emissions or goals for replacing fossil fuels with alternative energy sources. These efforts are doomed to be costly failures, as a new Heartland Policy Study by Dr. Jay Lehr and James Taylor documents. Instead of concentrating on balancing state budgets, some legislators will be working to pass their own “mini-Kyotos.”


Eight Reasons to End the Scam

Concern over “global warming” is overblown and misdirected. What follows are eight reasons why we should pull the plug on this scam before it destroys billions of dollars of wealth and millions of jobs.

1. Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate. More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” (Go to www.oism.org for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism.

2. Our most reliable sources of temperature data show no global warming trend. Satellite readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to within 0.01ºC, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error.

3. Global climate computer models are too crude to predict future climate changes. All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers’ expectations, modelers resort to “flux adjustments” that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says “climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”

4. The IPCC did not prove that human activities are causing global warming. Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC’s latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about predicting the future climate: “The Earth’s atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.”

5. A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization. Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD), which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland, were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the “climatic optimum,” was even warmer and marked “a time when mankind began to build its first civilizations,” observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study for Consumer Alert. “There is good reason to believe that a warmer climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today.”

6. Efforts to quickly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions would be costly and would not stop Earth’s climate from changing. Reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990’s levels by the year 2012--the target set by the Kyoto Protocol--would require higher energy taxes and regulations causing the nation to lose 2.4 million jobs and $300 billion in annual economic output. Average household income nationwide would fall by $2,700, and state tax revenues would decline by $93.1 billion due to less taxable earned income and sales, and lower property values. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocol by all participating nations would reduce global temperature in the year 2100 by a mere 0.14 degrees Celsius.

7. Efforts by state governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are even more expensive and threaten to bust state budgets. After raising their spending with reckless abandon during the 1990s, states now face a cumulative projected deficit of more than $90 billion. Incredibly, most states nevertheless persist in backing unnecessary and expensive greenhouse gas reduction programs. New Jersey, for example, collects $358 million a year in utility taxes to fund greenhouse gas reduction programs. Such programs will have no impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. All they do is destroy jobs and waste money.

8. The best strategy to pursue is “no regrets.” The alternative to demands for immediate action to “stop global warming” is not to do nothing. The best strategy is to invest in atmospheric research now and in reducing emissions sometime in the future if the science becomes more compelling. In the meantime, investments should be made to reduce emissions only when such investments make economic sense in their own right.

This strategy is called “no regrets,” and it is roughly what the Bush administration has been doing. The U.S. spends more on global warming research each year than the entire rest of the world combined, and American businesses are leading the way in demonstrating new technologies for reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions.


Time for Common Sense

The global warming scare has enabled environmental advocacy groups to raise billions of dollars in contributions and government grants. It has given politicians (from Al Gore down) opportunities to pose as prophets of doom and slayers of evil corporations. And it has given bureaucrats at all levels of government, from the United Nations to city councils, powers that threaten our jobs and individual liberty.

It is time for common sense to return to the debate over protecting the environment. An excellent first step would be to end the “global warming” scam.

Joseph L. Bast is president of The Heartland Institute.

[ranran]

The global warming scam
By Derek Kelly, PhD

Scam, noun: a swindle, a fraudulent arrangement.

A chronology of climate change
During most of the last billion years the Earth did not have permanent ice sheets. Nevertheless, at times large areas of the globe were covered with vast sheets of ice. Such times are known as glaciations. In the past 2 million to 3 million years, the temperature of the Earth has changed (warmed or cooled) at least 17 times, some say 33, with glaciations that last about 100,000 years interrupted by warm periods that last about 10,000 years.

The last glaciation began 70,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. The Earth was a lot colder than it is now; snow and ice had accumulated on a lot of the land, glaciers existed on large areas and the sea levels were lower.

15,000 years ago: The last glaciation reaches a peak, with continental glaciers that cover a lot of the sub-polar and polar areas of the land areas of Earth. In North America, all of New England and all of the Great Lakes area, most of Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota and the North Dakotas, lie under ice sheets hundreds of meters thick. More than 37 million cubic kilometers of ice was tied up in these global sheets of ice. The average temperature on the surface of the Earth is estimated to have been cooler by approximately 6 degrees Celsius than currently. The sea level was more than 90 meters lower than currently.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1350746/posts

[adt_33]

Controversy is great. It stimulates minds, or at least those minds that are open to accepting new modes of thought.

I must say that today, with suspicious news in print, on TV, and on the Internet, I can never tell who is most believable. True, sometimes a particular piece of evidence seems tenuous, but usually I can't help but agree with the facts listed because I'm not a scientist.

Therein lies the completely expected folly. No one is a scientist, except your brother-in-law's best friend's sister's acquaintance. We all are prey to the news-predators. Who knows what is science, or pseudo-science, or blatant lies? Someone greater than I, I suppose. Global warming is under increasingly greater scrutiny these days, and that's great. Controversy invites new studies, although it also invites those who wish to jump on the "look-at-me!" bandwagon.

When all else fails, I rely on a carefully-crafted common sensibility, and with that I still can't tell whether pollution affects the long-term weather or not. As of now I lean away from global warming, but just wait five years when we have more agenda-bearing evidence, and maybe I'll consider a permanent ground.

[Automatic Monkey]

Originally Posted by adt_33

Controversy is great. It stimulates minds, or at least those minds that are open to accepting new modes of thought.

I must say that today, with suspicious news in print, on TV, and on the Internet, I can never tell who is most believable. True, sometimes a particular piece of evidence seems tenuous, but usually I can't help but agree with the facts listed because I'm not a scientist.

Therein lies the completely expected folly. No one is a scientist...

When I'm not playing blackjack, I really am! BJ gives me an opportunity to exercise my subversive nature, to my profit rather than detriment.

Originally Posted by adt_33

except your brother-in-law's best friend's sister's acquaintance. We all are prey to the news-predators. Who knows what is science, or pseudo-science, or blatant lies? Someone greater than I, I suppose. Global warming is under increasingly greater scrutiny these days, and that's great. Controversy invites new studies, although it also invites those who wish to jump on the "look-at-me!" bandwagon.

When all else fails, I rely on a carefully-crafted common sensibility, and with that I still can't tell whether pollution affects the long-term weather or not. As of now I lean away from global warming, but just wait five years when we have more agenda-bearing evidence, and maybe I'll consider a permanent ground.

The trouble is that we are relying on data insufficient in both its precision and quantity. When we do BJ research we simulate billions of hands to get answers reliable enough to stake our money on. The proponents of global warming call on iffy data that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and which does lend itself to differentiating between cause and effect. Extremist political causes which have embraced global warming do not help its credibility, for sure!

It takes some very precise equipment to measure global temperature. Most of the data again relies on averages of old measurements taken at research centers in western Europe and the northeastern US (i.e., where the white people live) that has been proclaimed "global." In reality we have only been able to measure the temperature of the whole planet since the 70's when NASA started doing it with a satellite from orbit. And guess what it shows- no global warming! Global temperature bounces around randomly within the measurement error of the equipment. Variance!

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by Automatic Monkey

It takes some very precise equipment to measure global temperature. Most of the data again relies on averages of old measurements taken at research centers in western Europe and the northeastern US (i.e., where the white people live) that has been proclaimed "global." In reality we have only been able to measure the temperature of the whole planet since the 70's when NASA started doing it with a satellite from orbit. And guess what it shows- no global warming! Global temperature bounces around randomly within the measurement error of the equipment. Variance!

Yes - people, even scientists, saying "look how warm it is, its global warming!" is like someone watching a random betting poor player at BJ and saying "look, he's winning, his system works!" zg

[ranran]

Originally Posted by adt_33

Controversy is great. It stimulates minds, or at least those minds that are open to accepting new modes of thought.

I must say that today, with suspicious news in print, on TV, and on the Internet, I can never tell who is most believable. True, sometimes a particular piece of evidence seems tenuous, but usually I can't help but agree with the facts listed because I'm not a scientist.

Therein lies the completely expected folly. No one is a scientist, except your brother-in-law's best friend's sister's acquaintance. We all are prey to the news-predators. Who knows what is science, or pseudo-science, or blatant lies? Someone greater than I, I suppose. Global warming is under increasingly greater scrutiny these days, and that's great. Controversy invites new studies, although it also invites those who wish to jump on the "look-at-me!" bandwagon.

When all else fails, I rely on a carefully-crafted common sensibility, and with that I still can't tell whether pollution affects the long-term weather or not. As of now I lean away from global warming, but just wait five years when we have more agenda-bearing evidence, and maybe I'll consider a permanent ground.

Question-

Since the 80's, we've heard threats of "If we don't do something, NOW, the earth will die in 20 years." Well, it's been 20+ years and life goes on. How can this be?

If global warming is SOOO bad, how come NO country on Earth has banned the use of oil/gas, and begun using alternative fuels?

Just a while ago, it was reported that the hole in the ozone has closed. If this is so, and this same hole was a major problem, doesn't this mean that things are getting better?

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by ranran

Just a while ago, it was reported that the hole in the ozone has closed. If this is so, and this same hole was a major problem, doesn't this mean that things are getting better?

CFCs, the culprit blamed for the ozone hole, are a "miracle molocule" - when Dupont's patent ran out they were blamed - and PLUS the elimination of CFCs caused a breakdown in the 'cold-chain' that increased the deathrate - a double win for the industrial kingpins of genocide. zg

[adt_33]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

CFCs, the culprit blamed for the ozone hole, are a "miracle molocule" - when Dupont's patent ran out they were blamed - and PLUS the elimination of CFCs caused a breakdown in the 'cold-chain' that increased the deathrate - a double win for the industrial kingpins of genocide. zg

zg- I would love some evidence on that one! Please supply.

[ranran]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

CFCs, the culprit blamed for the ozone hole, are a "miracle molocule" - when Dupont's patent ran out they were blamed - and PLUS the elimination of CFCs caused a breakdown in the 'cold-chain' that increased the deathrate - a double win for the industrial kingpins of genocide. zg

What?

They also blame certain trees and aminal farts.

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by ranran

What?

They also blame certain trees and aminal farts.

No, thats global warming. As fore ozone depletion, the oceans and volcanoes belch out 1000x more chorline than what might be released by CFCs... that is IF CFCs actually floated up into the stratosphere... BUT they DON'T - CFCs are HEAVIER THAN AIR! zg