"You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick." -Gov. Sarah Palin-
"The media are not above the daily test of any free institution." -Barry M. Goldwater-
"America's first interest must be to punish our enemies, then, if possible, please our friends." -Zell Miller-
"One single object...[will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation." -President Thomas Jefferson-
"Don't get stuck on stupid!" -Lt. Gen. Russel Honore-
"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." -Isaiah 5:20-
On April 29th, 2010, Barack Obama made the following statement:
| I do think at a certain point you've made enough money. |
| Mr. President, why don't you ask your friends to set the example on how much is too much? |
This article pulls no punches and leaves no question as to what is being said.
Basically, it is a call for Al Gore to be stripped of his Nobel Prize which was largely based on politics and junk science. But, the author actually goes further and recommends an investigation into Gore's actions and influence peddling.
From the article:
| With recent events such as the blizzards and record cold weather taking place not only in the U.S. but the world, the admittance by Phil Jones, a climate scientist, that the world has been in a cooling trend for over the past ten years, and no concrete scientific evidence, only computer generated models of future climate scenarios to prove it by, the time has come to strip Albert Arnold Gore of his Nobel Prize on the grounds that it was awarded to a man who knew nothing at all about anything remotely related to climate and weather and had his own financial gains in mind rather than the good of the world when he accepted it. |
| Al Gore is a hypocrite to his own idealism when it comes to his lifestyle of using more energy resources than perhaps anyone in the world. If he were sincere about his own cause, this fact would not be an issue as he would see to it that he lived within the means of his own Global Warming Doctrine of saving as much energy as possible. ... If anything Gore should be sued by every business entity affected by his flawed theory and brought up on charges of fraud and conspiracy for such lies. ... With the prospect of making billions from investments in green energy, Al Gore and his so-called scientists and researchers, which amount to a group of business individuals with similar investment goals, continue to lie to the public in hopes that some form of legislation will be enacted to further their cause of acquiring billions of dollars from a duped public. ... Such GW legislation would have dire consequences for both citizens and businesses here in the U.S. as we are in the worst economic shape since the Great Depression. ... This country simply cannot afford any more taxes, higher utility bills, and overall cost of living rise associated with the false claims of Global Warming. If anyone thinks this country could get along with a permanent unemployment rate of 45%, everything costing three times as much as it does now, lower wages and virtually no industry, you're out of your mind. We are barely able to keep the wolf from blowing the house down now as it is. |
| These individuals such as Al Gore and his band of investors have the devastation of the American way of life in mind and their own financial gains are top priority. |
One of the principles of ethics that should govern politicians and their dealings with the private sector is that politicians should not be voting on legislation that directly involves their own personal investments. Ideally, politicians shouldn't be investing in the market at all since they can vote to influence the market in their favor. If they do have investments in the private sector, then they should recuse themsleves from voting on any legislation that would influence the profitability of those investments.
The Cap and Trace Energy Tax recently passed by the House of Representatives is a good case in point. Several lawmakers will enjoy direct financial benefits from the legislation should it become law. Among these are Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
From Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner:
| How much money will Pelosi make if the measure (Obama-Waxman-Markey (OWM)) becomes law, as seems quite likely? Pelosi, of course, is not the only member of Congress to own significant shares of energy companies. Senators and representatives from all over the country do, not just the "oilies" from energy states like Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. But as House Speaker, Pelosi's ownership of an unknown number of shares in the Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (CLNE) valued at between $15,000 and $50,000, may deserve particular attention. ... Pelosi will profit because OWM will boost the price of natural gas on the market. This is because natural gas burns with significantly less carbon emissions than other fossil fuels. For companies trying to get under OWM limits for greenhouse gases emissions, burning more natural gas instead of, say coal, will be a no-brainer. That will drive up demand for natural gas, which in turn will create upward price pressures. |
Now the truth comes out about why Obama and the Dems are so hot to pass this idiotic cap-and-trade carbon tax proposal. It has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with political payoffs.
From Leland Conway of the Conservative Edge:
| The Waxman/Markey Cap and Trade bill makes states like Kentucky, that produce energy through their rich coal resources, into the indentured servants of states like California and New York, who import that energy for their use. Here’s how it works. The bill, as it is currently structured, would impose massive fines on states that produce and export so called “dirty energy”. There would be a huge additional cost to the consumers in those states in order to carry this burden. Most conservative estimates put the additional cost to the average consumer in the Commonwealth at around $1700 per household per year. Meanwhile, states like California and New York actually pollute much more heavily than Kentucky does. They have a higher population, many more industries and many more cars on the highway. They import their energy however, so they will not be subject to the same fine structure that Kentucky and other coal producing states will be. In effect, that means we’ll be paying for the lifestyle and energy consumption of states that pollute much worse than we do. |
| As if this weren’t enough, many on the left side of the political isle stand to make a massive profit off of the lie of manmade global warming. Al Gore’s carbon trade hedge fund investments alone stand to net him somewhere around one billion dollars. Not bad for the prophet of an inconvenient truth who lives in a mansion that uses 21 times the energy of the average American. Many other lobbyists and elected officials in Washington stand to score a major windfall off of this policy as well. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is betting a large portion of her already massive fortune on the passage of this bill. The list of Washington insiders who are heavily invested in companies that stand to make big cash from government subsidies under the cap and trade scheme is endless and continues to grow. |
The central thesis of global warming theory is that as concentrations of atmospheric CO2 rise then so does global temperature. Unfortunately for Al Gore and the AGW alarmist crowd, global temperatures have remained steady or have been declining since 2003 despite the fact that CO2 concentrations have been rising (thanks to the industrial efforts of China and India whom the leftists want to exempt from any type of carbon restrictions).
The city of Chicago is feeling the effects of this period of Global Cooling:
| The cloudy, chilly and rainy open to June here has been the talk of the town. So far this June is running more than 12 degrees cooler than last year, and the clouds, rain and chilly lake winds have been persistent. The average temperature at O'Hare International Airport through Friday has been only 59.5 degrees: nearly 7 degrees below normal and the coldest since records there began 50 years ago. |
Communists don't change. From Stalin to Mao to the current leadership of DPRK (Pronounced Dee-Perk), it has always been the same: Sustain a reign of terror, even if it means trying and convicting innocent people. Evidence and transparency are irrelevent, just make arrests and start tossing people in prison.
According to the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his epic work The Gulag Archipelago, that is how communists work. North Korea hasn't changed one little bit along those lines.
From the Associated Press:
| North Korea announced that two U.S. journalists were about to go on trial — then came the mysterious silence. The day passed Friday with no updates of the criminal proceedings that were supposed to begin Thursday for TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee. |
| The journalists — working for former Vice President Al Gore's California-based Current TV — were arrested March 17 as they were reporting about the trafficking of women. It's unclear if they strayed into the North or were grabbed by aggressive border guards who crossed into China. Although the Americans were accused of illegally entering North Korea and unspecified "hostile acts," Pyongyong has yet to publicly announce the exact charges against them. South Korean legal experts have said a conviction for "hostility" or espionage could mean five to 10 years in a labor camp. |
| Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda described to the human rights group Amnesty International in a written report his experience in a North Korean court that sentenced him to 20 years in a labor camp in 1967. Lameda, a member of the Venezuelan Communist Party, said he was working as a translator in Pyongyang when he was accused of spying, sabotage and infiltration — allegations he denied. No evidence, formal charges or specific allegations were presented during the one-day proceeding, he said. Instead, court officials repeatedly demanded that Lameda confess his guilt. A defense lawyer was assigned to him, but the attorney gave a long speech praising the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung before suggesting his client be sentenced to 20 years. |
Well, so much for "diversity" and trying to bring multiple points of view to the issues. And so much for any post-partisanship the Dems claimed would be their hallmark after the 2006 and 2008 elections. It is all straight-line partisanship now.
It all went out the window when the Dems chose ideology over science and refused to allowed an Anthroprogenic Global Warming (AGW) skeptic to testify before Congress concurrent with Al Gore. The UK's Lord Christopher Monckton had been invited to testify before Congress at the same time as former VP Al Gore, but when the Dems learned that Lord Monckton was an AGW skeptic and was prepared to offer evidence that Al Gore and other Global Warming alramists were wrong in their analysis of climate change, they refused to allow him to testify.
What are the Dems afraid of? That a true scientific debate would make Al Gore look like a fool? If they are so convinced that Al Gore is right, wouldn't they welcome such a public debate to further prove it? Why hide from such a forum?
From Climate Depot:
| Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon. “The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.” According to Monckton, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), Ranking Member on the Energy & Commerce Committee, had invited him to go head to head with Gore and testify at the hearing on Capitol Hill Friday. But Monckton now says that when his airplane from London landed in the U.S. on Thursday, he was informed that the former Vice-President had “chickened out” and there would be no joint appearance. |
You know, when you ignore a very important issue simply because you do not agree with the politics of those driving it, that issue will come back to bite you in the rear-end.
Such is the case with those who embrace the idea that there is "concensus" among scientists that Global Warming is going to kill all of mankind and leave us drowning in a world that resembles a ridiculously bad Kevin Costner movie. They will ignore the issue that science is discovering new evidence that climate change is natural. You will see very little of the AGW debate broadcast over the main networks or CNN for the simple fact that the data is turning against Al Gore and all of his disciples and a leftist-leaning media does not want such information getting out. As such, the issue is starting to come back and bite them in the rear.
There is no concensus and the science isn't even close to being settled. But right now, the majority of legitimate scientists (i.e. those scientists who are not on someone's political payroll) are leaning towards the idea tha climate change is natural and we humans cannot do anything about it nor should we even try.
From Media Newswire:
| The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grow louder in 2008 as a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments challenged the UN’s and former Vice President Al Gore's claims that the "science is settled" and there is a "consensus." On a range of issues, 2008 proved to be challenging for the promoters of man-made climate fears. Promoters of anthropogenic warming fears endured the following: Global temperatures failing to warm; Peer-reviewed studies predicting a continued lack of warming; a failed attempt to revive the discredited “Hockey Stick”; inconvenient developments and studies regarding rising CO2; the Spotless Sun; Clouds; Antarctica; the Arctic; Greenland’s ice; Mount Kilimanjaro; Global sea ice; Causes of Hurricanes; Extreme Storms; Extinctions; Floods; Droughts; Ocean Acidification; Polar Bears; Extreme weather deaths; Frogs; lack of atmospheric dust; Malaria; the failure of oceans to warm and rise as predicted. |
| In addition, the following developments further secured 2008 as the year the “consensus” collapsed. Russian scientists “rejected the very idea that carbon dioxide may be responsible for global warming”. An American Physical Society editor conceded that a “considerable presence” of scientific skeptics exists. An International team of scientists countered the UN IPCC, declaring: “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate”. India Issued a report challenging global warming fears. International Scientists demanded the UN IPCC “be called to account and cease its deceptive practices,” and a canvass of more than 51,000 Canadian scientists revealed 68% disagree that global warming science is “settled.” This new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP Ranking Member is the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition challenging significant aspects of the claims of the UN IPCC and Al Gore. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. [See: Skeptical scientists overwhelm conference: '2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC.'] |
More and more evidence mounts that the idea of man-made global warming is nothing more than hype for the sake of hype. Not only that, but there are political implications here where governments (particularly those controlled by leftist socialists) are using the fear-mongering angle of the issue as an excuse for grabbing more power.
Writing for the Houston Chronicle, Robert L. Bradley shines some light on the issue and looks at the temperature trends of the past 100 years, the prediciations that pseudo-scientists have made concerning global warming and how those predictions fared against reality.
From his column:
| The new century has cooled the case for climate alarmism. Global warming has stalled — not accelerated as expected. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have increased, but temperatures have been flat for the last eight years and have slightly fallen since 1998's El Nino-driven temperature spike. If the cool-off continues until 2015, as could be the case according to a study published in Nature magazine, we will have had a see-saw of global warming (1900-45), global cooling (1945-75), global warming (1975-98), and flatness (1998-2015). Where does all of this leave us coming out of the Little Ice Age that ended in the mid-18th century — and after a century of greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere? Today's temperature is about 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer, and in a naturally warmer climate cycle. Compare this to Al Gore's scary talk about an 11-degree man-made temperature rise this century under business as usual. |
| Of course the climate is changing — always has and always will — and there may very well be a distinct human influence on climate. Carbon dioxide is a warming agent, as are the other greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere from human activities. But the good news is that so far the observed climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases is much less than what some climate models predict. ... The recent temperature reversal comes on top of falsified climate mini-scares. One headline-grabber was that ocean circulation patterns disrupted by global warming would freeze over North America and Western Europe. "False alarm," Science magazine would later declare to little fanfare. Hurricane Katrina was featured in Al Gore's book and movie, An Inconvenient Truth, as if man, not nature, were to blame. But subsequent research has painted a very mixed picture about hurricanes in a warmer world. Most research predicts fewer tropical storms will develop, and changed wind patterns might cancel out the effect of warmer waters on hurricane strength. There is more agreement that extra-tropical storms are lessened from warming because of a diminished temperature gradient between the poles. |
| Gore's scenario about a 20-foot sea-level rise in man's future has also not sat well with science. The modest sea-level rise of recent decades — continuing a trend of the past centuries for reasons that are not well understood — is expected to continue. While Greenland is losing ice, Antarctica is gaining ice. Melting Arctic sea ice, meanwhile, does not affect sea level — nor does the growth of sea ice in the southern ocean — for the same reason that melting ice cubes do not cause a drink to spill. The sea-level debate concerns inches, not feet, for future decades and even centuries. |
And we have another convert on the Global Warming issue, that is convert from alarmist to skeptic. And it isn't just an individual, it is an entire organization.
The American Physical Society which once proclaimed Global Warming evidence to be "incontrovertible" is now saying that many of it's members "disbelieve human induced gloabl warming."
That's quite a statement given Al Gore's claim that there was supposedly a "concensus" of scientists on the issue. But why the change?
From DailyTech.com:
| In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution." The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity -- the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause -- has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate. Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors" |
| In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, "I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central 'climate sensitivity' question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method." According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, "in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low." Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain's Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth's recent warming. "In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years ... Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth." |
I remember back only a few years ago when the left-wing liberals were all about helping those in need, especially those who did not have enough to eat. Well, the tables have turned these days. Today, the libs are causing starvation, not aiding those who are afflicted by it.
How did this happen? One word: ethanol. Ethanol has been driving up food prices here at home and around the world. Additionally, it has also driven up the price of gasoline and in a year or two, we will see ethanol drive up the cost of maintaining an automobile. But let's look at the food angle right now.
Jerry Bowyer gives some excellent insights about how food prices are going up and people like Al Gore are getting rich off of seeing other people starve. From TownHall.com:
| Foods seem to be rising in price in direct proportion to their proximity to ethanol subsidies. Feed grain is up an amazing 41% in the past year. Fruit and nuts are down 3% over the same period. Why? Because we turn corn into ethanol, but we don’t do the same with walnuts or bananas. |
| They say that very little of the jump in food prices comes from ethanol, that it’s mostly energy prices, or a weak dollar, or general inflation. ... Why would general inflation cause corn to a rate of doubling every two years, and yet leave meat, fruit, nut and some vegetable prices dropping? How could high energy prices do that? Don’t vegetable farmers use tractors? Don’t sugar farmers fuel their tractors with the same diesel? Don’t the trucks and trains which deliver almonds run on the same kinds of fuel as the ones which deliver grains? |
| It’s not a general inflation problem; it’s a problem of political corruption. America’s first presidential primary happens to be in Iowa. That gives ethanol first dibs at the pork barrel. Add Republican farm voters to Democratic environmentalists, shake vigorously and you get a brew called ethanol. The farmers get rich on taxpayer subsidies, the venture capitalists who focus on alternative fuels (I’m looking in your direction, Mr. Gore) get fat on profits. |
| Foreigners are not starving because the dollar lost value. In fact, the drop in the dollar helps them. ... The problem isn’t the dollar – the problem is that we’re burning food. We’re taking carbohydrates which would have gone into someone’s stomach, chemically altering them and putting them into our gas tanks instead. One SUV fill-up is roughly the same amount of calories as it takes to sustain a man, woman or a child – for a year. I believe that future generations will look back in history at the hungry of this world, and the preening self-satisfaction of the ethanol lobby and call it what it is, a crime against humanity. |
Whew! It's been a week since I last posted? Well, that will happen sometimes. As I have mentioned many times before, I do have a real life outside of blogging and that life takes a higher priority than trying to keep up with and make sense of current event issues.
So, what do I have today? A little more debunking of the Human Induced Global Warming Theory, some PC madness from the Muslims and a strong case for supporting John McCain for President.
Let's start with Global Warming. Our first item comes from Down Under. Why is that significant? Because the author, Phil Chapman, was the first Aussie to become an astronaut for NASA. Pretty solid credentials there. He has a few things to say about the objective scientific view of what is really going on with our climate and why.
From his column:
| The scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity. What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot. |
| Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously. All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over. |
| The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers. It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon. The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790. Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots. |
| It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850. There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it. |
| A coalition of American Muslim groups is demanding that presumptive Republican nominee John McCain stop using the word "Islamic" to describe terrorists. The Washington Times reports Islamic Society of North America's secretary general wants McCain to use something he calls "more acceptable to the Muslim community." "You want to call them terrorist criminals, fine. But adding the word 'Muslim' or 'Islamic' certainly doesn't help our cause as Americans... It paints an entire community of believers, 1.2 billion in total, in a very negative way." But McCain strategist Steve Schmidt says there will be no changes. "The reality is, the hateful ideology which underpins bin Ladenism is properly described as radical Islamic extremism. Senator McCain refers to it that way because that is what it is." |
| Of all the issues confronting the United States today, none is more important than our nation's security. Although these issues don't dominate our news as they once did, we cannot forget that without a safe and secure country, all other issues don't matter. McCain is clearly the candidate with the capacity, judgment, experience and will to confront America's enemies. He's served our country honorably - heroically - in war. I served eight years with him on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and I can assure you he knows our military. Importantly, he also knows our enemies. He understands their capabilities and their aims. He will not sugarcoat the human or financial commitment and cost needed to defeat this enemy. The most important social issue is life. Yes, I often wished McCain would have joined me on the Senate floor in debating Barbara Boxer on issues like the partial-birth-abortion ban. In the end, with the exception of embryonic stem-cell funding, he always voted for life and stood for the culture of life. In short, he's been a reliable vote on life issues, which are critical to conservatives. Many conservatives have given McCain poor marks for his involvement in the Gang of 14. I was in leadership pushing hard for a showdown with the Democrats on using the "Constitutional Option" to end their filibuster of judicial nominations. The Gang of 14 broke the impasse, and it probably was for the best. I was the one counting votes on that issue, and I was much less certain of success than others. In the end, the Gang deal resulted in numerous confirmations of qualified conservative jurists. On judges, McCain has repeatedly made clear that he will, as his Web site states, "only nominate judges who understand that their role is to faithfully apply the law as written, not impose their opinions through judicial fiat." Sounds good to me. Yes, I disagreed with McCain's opposition to President Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. But I give him credit that he now thinks we must make those tax cuts permanent to boost our now-struggling economy. And, yes, McCain has been a thorn in the side of many of us who supported important appropriations earmarks for our states. But he's always objected with principled consistency. This is but one example of McCain's character - the kind of character I want in the person who answers 3 a.m. phone calls at the White House. |
Even though we are heading into a Presidential campaign here, we should not forget some of the more relevent issues we have been studying over the past several years. One of those issues is Global Warming and the human (non) influence factor.
William F. Jasper of The New American magazine interviwed Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Some excerpts follow:
| THE NEW AMERICAN: Flip on any channel, open any newspaper or magazine, and it’s clear we are being bombarded with the message that the Earth is warming. Is there any merit to this claim? Dr. Arthur Robinson: Yes, but the temperature is only going up 0.5° C per century. Moreover, this increase is not being caused by human activity. TNA: Those who blame mankind for causing global warming would respond to that point by saying that the Earth is the warmest it’s been in 400 years, and that’s significant. Dr. Robinson: They’re right, but they only show you the data from the last 400 years. If the data for a longer time interval is considered, temperatures today are seen to be not especially warm. The current temperature is about average for the past 3,000 years. It was much warmer during the Medieval Climate Optimum 1,000 years ago (see Figure 1). The climate, as we know from historical records, was just fine during that warm period. In fact, it was a little better. So, yes, it is the warmest in 400 years. |
| TNA: Scientists who are not intimidated to speak out about this are typically charged by the enviros as being paid by the oil companies. Dr. Robinson: Well, we’ve never been fortunate enough to receive any money from them, and I mean in any way, personally, professionally in our laboratory, or anything. We have never received a dime from anybody who has a specific economic interest in this issue. However, UN power to control and ration world energy — the real goal of their activities — would have a terrible, negative impact on the lives of all Americans. In that sense, all of our supporters have an economic interest. TNA: Al Gore also makes a big deal about glacier recession. Dr. Robinson: But he only shows the data for the limited time intervals that seem to support his claims. Here is the world glacier curve (see Figure 2) based on an average of all the world’s glaciers for which there are good records. Some glaciers are actually increasing, but on average the glaciers are decreasing — toward the more normal lengths that are typical of long-term average world temperatures. This curve is offset by 20 years because there is about a 20-year lag between the temperature increase and the shortening of the glaciers. So the temperature increase reflected in the glacier lengths begins in about 1800. The glaciers have been shortening for 200 years. They started shortening a century before significant amounts of CO2 were produced by human activity. Notice also that the shortening is linear. Hydrocarbon use increased six-fold and the glacier melting rate did not change at all. |
| TNA: So what is causing the Earth to warm? Dr. Robinson: A good clue is contained in data showing arctic air temperature vs. solar activity (see Figure 3). There is a good correlation. Surface temperature vs. solar activity data also correlates well (see Figure 4). TNA: What about Gore’s demonstration in his movie, with those very large graphs, that CO2 tracks right along with temperature and is, therefore, the cause of that warming? Dr. Robinson: In those curves, the temperature goes up before the CO2 and goes down before the CO2. The CO2 lags the temperature. And the reason it does is that the CO2 rise is caused by the temperature rise rather than vice versa. As temperatures rise, carbon dioxide is released from the oceans, just as the carbon dioxide is released from soft drinks when their temperature rises. Gore shows the curves with poor resolution, so that this cannot be seen by the viewer. His film is filled with dozens of other deliberate errors and misrepresentations. |
