Just The Cold Hard Facts
Dr. Tim Ball, Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, is a Victoria-based environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. He published an op-ed in today's Canada Free Press, entitled Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts? Below are some choice excerpts.
"Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification . . . The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on . . . I am not alone in this journey against the prevalent myth. Several well-known names have also raised their voices. Michael Crichton, the scientist, writer and filmmaker is one of them. In his latest book, "State of Fear" he takes time to explain, often in surprising detail, the flawed science behind Global Warming and other imagined environmental crises . . . Another cry in the wildenerness is Richard Lindzen's. He is an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, renowned for his research in dynamic meteorology - especially atmospheric waves. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. Linzen frequently speaks out against the notion that significant Global Warming is caused by humans. Yet nobody seems to listen."
In just April of 2006, an open letter was published to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It was signed by SIXTY scientists who urged that climate-science be kept open for debate. "Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada's climate policies are based . . . While the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups may provide for sensational headlines, they are no basis for mature policy formulation. The study of global climate change is, as you have said, an "emerging science," one that is perhaps the most complex ever tackled. It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth's climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary."
Richard Posner has decided (for all of us, apparently) that the debate on primary human causation of global warming is over because we're hearing less and less resistance to the idea from the scientific community -- "a scientific consensus" he calls it, as if the scientific method is akin to a voting booth and the the majority opinion rules! Yay!
Yet we've seen throughout history how facts are stubbornly resistant to consensus. In Dr. Ball's op-ed, he declares that we're hearing less and less scientific resistance to human causation of climate change, not because of an overwhelming preponderance of fact that can no longer be ignored, but because many scientists are afraid of what they'll encounter should they question the prevailing wisdom. They're cowed into silence over what they might lose -- jobs, grants, friends, reputations.
"Well, good, then," I can hear some people saying. "Anyone who denies global warming is a fool, and he/she is no longer fit to be a scientist." Because, like, we all possess every jot of data recorded, and are all experts at interpreting it correctly, infallibly and indubitably. I mean, we may as well hash out String Theory in blog comment sections while we're at it, cuz science is so EASY! Where's that plasma drive, anyway? I heard that a consortium of high-school teachers worked out the bugs just last week . . .
It seems that people are forgetting that there are very big actors with a lot of very big agendas behind the Climate Change curtain, and that when science becomes politics, we can all kiss any semblance of objectivity goodbye. What? You think the oil companies are the only ones with money? Add to that the weird "Denier" label (with its deathly and holocaustic connotations) that's being slapped on anyone who voices skepticism that humans have more of an impact on the global climate than nature does itself, and we have all the makings of a modern inquisition, replete with mob hysteria and arguments that stress emotional appeal over rational thought.
Yet heretics are precisely what we need at this point in time. We rarely get it completely right when it comes to science, especially when it's a very recent scientific endeavor, such as climate science. Answers generally emerge over centuries of patient, dedicated study, with one group disproving selected notions of the group that came before. So when I hear CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL shouted from blogs and newspaper headlines and television talk shows, each bristling with its own expert panel, I realize that we're in the midst of a pop-culture movement rather than a true scientific debate.
The scientific debate is not over, for how can a scientific debate be "over" when our scientists don't have even an approaching understanding of all the variables involved? "While researchers argue whether Earth is getting warmer and if humans are contributing . . . (a) confusing array of new and recent studies reveals that scientists know very little about how much sunlight is absorbed by Earth versus how much the planet reflects, how all this alters temperatures, and why any of it changes from one decade to the next."
The debate is over? Hardly. The climate may be changing, but as oceanographer Kevin Vranes wrote: "Where we go from here is anybody's guess, but I tend to agree with the Oracle in the second Matrix movie: we already know the answer to that question, our task is to understand why we are going to do what we are going to do."
Heretics -- please apply.