Rosen: Hot air from Al Gore

Friday, June 9, 2006

The principal source of global warming attributable to human activity is coming from all the hot air spewed by Al Gore's propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth. It's a Hollywood production of Gore's campaign slide show brought to the silver screen by Laurie David, the wife of Larry (Curb Your Enthusiasm) David. The only documentable "truth" that can be known is that mean global surface temperatures increased about a half-degree Celsius between 1850 and 1940 and by another 0.3 degrees since then. Most of the warming in the 20th century was in the period between 1900-1940, when man-made greenhouse gases were considerably less influential.

Guesses about future temperature increases are just that, guesses, in an area where we aren't even close to understanding all the variables that affect climate change. A computer model biased with overstated assumptions isn't reality; it's only a manipulated computerized guess.

Although you wouldn't know it from the one-sided treatment of this issue in the liberal media - like the Time magazine cover story, "Special Report on Global Warming: Be Worried. Be Very Worried" - there's a vigorous debate among scientists about what our climate future holds.

Disputing the alarmists and scaremongers are expert climatologists, meteorologists and astrophysicists like Richard Lindzen, William Gray, Sallie Baliunas, Fred Singer, Hugh Ellsaesser and Roy Spencer, or the 17,000 signatories to Dr. Arthur Robinson's Petition Project, who said of the Kyoto Accord: "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."

These cooler heads on global warming are largely ignored by the liberal media who have declared that the science is "settled." It most certainly is not, the alleged "consensus" notwithstanding. Tell Galileo and Copernicus about the infallibility of scientific consensus. It was just 30 years ago that Newsweek magazine warned of the last scientific consensus on climate change: "The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinary mild conditions, the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists . . . are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century." Of course, that didn't happen. Ironically, global warming, the current scare, would improve agricultural productivity.

Another dissenter is Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who notes that the effects of atmospheric water vapor on global temperatures overwhelm the impact of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activity.

Trendy global warming theory suffers from the great conceit that human activity has a significant impact on climate change. The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates human activity is responsible for just 7 billion metric tons of global carbon dioxide emissions out of a total of 157 billion tons released annually. That's just 4.5 percent, with 57 percent coming from oceans, 19 percent from decaying vegetation and 19 percent from plant and animal respiration.

Economist Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, concluded in 2001 that, "implementing Kyoto will cost $150 billion to $300 billion globally every year, merely to postpone the temperature rise by six years from 2100 to 2106. It's a very expensive way to achieve very little." So much for the impact of human activity.

Climate change is as old as our planet and predates human life. They named it Greenland not Iceland for a reason. The ice sheet was melting there for the Vikings 1,000 years ago. The Great Ice Age covered much of the Earth more than a million years ago when SUVs weren't much of a factor. We've had several lesser ice ages since. We've been warming since the Little Ice Age that started in the 15th century and ended in the 19th.

The dominant cause of climate change, dwarfing human activity, is solar activity. Another Russian scientist, Khabibulo Absudamatov, predicts that a decrease in the sun's radiation, beginning in 2012, will cause global temperatures to decline into the middle of the 21st century. If that happens, expect "Internet" Al Gore to take credit for it.

Political science has taken on a new meaning in recent years, as scientists have linked arms with politicians to advance political causes. And this one has all the elements that get liberal juices flowing. Global warming remedies attack the "evils" of automobiles, urban sprawl, fossil fuels, oil drilling, economic growth, capitalism - you name it.

I'm not a scientist. I don't how the climate will change in the future. But neither do scientists. After all, it's the future. All I can do is read the literature and decide whom to believe. And I don't believe Al Gore and his crowd.

Mike Rosen's radio show airs daily from 9 a.m. to noon on 850 KOA. He can be reached by e-mail at mikerosen@850koa.com.