'The Glaciers, Greenland, and the Polar Ice-Cap Are Melting'by
Vin Suprynowicz California Correspondent writes to respond to my piece on the global cooling of 2008: “You may be aware of Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish scientist who was long skeptical of global warming. He is not any more. His complaint is with what he perceives as hysteria, and unsound policy. I wonder if your line of reasoning has more to do with ideology and your view of (proposed) policy, than a considered look at the science at work. The mechanism of global warming is well established. … “You write: ‘It’s getting colder. 2008 was the coolest year in a decade.’ That leaves the other nine years to account for. If the last nine years were consecutively cooler, you would have a cooling trend. The trend is in the other direction. “The glaciers, Greenland, and the polar ice-cap are melting. Plants and species are migrating northward to areas where they have not been seen in recorded history. “And, according to the Washington Post (Jan. 12, 2008; Page A03): ‘Data collected from around the globe indicate that 2007 ranks as the second-warmest year on record, according to a new analysis from climatologists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “ ‘A second team of scientists, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has come up with slightly different results using the same raw data Ñ suggesting that last year was the fifth-warmest on record Ñ but the groups reached the same conclusion on where Earth’s climate has been headed for the past quarter-century. Taking into account the new data, they said, seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001. “There are a number of good books on this topic. The one that convinced me was ‘Field Notes from a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change,’ by Elizabeth Kolbert, Bloomsbury, 2007. “I admire your courage in often taking the unpopular view. But a view may be popular because it is accurate, not because people are being deluded or misled, and that is the case here. … “I wonder if your time might be better spent – and the public better served – if you were to critique policy as regards energy & conservation rather than the problems (and global warming is only the most worrisome) that stem from long-term profligate and inefficient energy use.” I replied: Of COURSE it would be more convenient for the Luddites if I were to accept their underlying assumptions and limit myself to “critiquing policy as regards energy & conservation.” Just as, in 1500, it would have been judged MUCH safer to study how best to DISCOVER and DESTROY witches than to challenge whether the old crones had any demonic powers in the first place. As a matter of fact, challenging the EXISTENCE of the supernatural powers of witches was prima facie proof that the challenger was HIMSELF a witch (“warlock,” whatever), which was likely to get you burned. Amazingly, under those circumstances, publicly expressed opinion – holding that the demonic powers of witches was real – was NEARLY UNANIMOUS! Surely they couldn’t ALL have been wrong. Ain’t sealed systems grand? Yes, the mechanism of global warming is well established. It’s primarily solar, and has nothing to do with the tiny amount of “greenhouse gas” mankind produces. Or were there too many cars and coal-fired generating plants 10,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age spontaneously melted away? (See the nice charts here.) What’s not well established is any ability to predict whether the globe will be warmer or cooler in three years, let alone 30 or 300. When major Green groups charted “greenhouse gas” emissions for 1991 (they sent me a lovely colorful graph, showing America as the “worst offender,” of course) they listed the Philippines as a quite small producer, way “down the curve.” This is because the Philippines are a “good” country, you understand, where people “know their place” and have properly resigned themselves to living in poverty, mostly doing without private motorcars or air conditioners, fertilizing their rice fields with human feces, etc. I called the authors of the chart to ask how the Philippines could possibly have produced a TINY amount of greenhouse gases that year, since that’s the year Mount Pinatubo erupted. They pointed me to a footnote that said “from man-made sources.” If you’re only going to MEASURE greenhouses gases from man-made sources, you’re only going to SHOW greenhouse gases from man-made sources, making America’s 1991 atmospheric contribution appear larger that the Philippines’, which is absurd. Shouldn’t we be asking how much is actually up there, and where it actually came from? If water vapor and CO-2 are both greenhouse gases, and there’s 100 times more water vapor than CO-2 in the atmosphere, what effect would it have on the level of total greenhouse gases to double the amount of CO-2 in the atmosphere? Look up the Newsweek cover of April 28, 1975, on “The Cooling World.” You’ll find many of this same gang urging the same brand of government “energy policy” takeovers to halt the dangerous trend of “global cooling.” As well they might, since the next Ice Age will be a REAL problem. It’s all about seizing control of (and eviscerating) the economic advantages of the Western nations, which is why the Greens show no interest in merely launching some reflective gravel into orbit, which would probably lower global temperature by a couple of degrees. (Look up 1816, the “Year Without Summer.”) After all, if the alleged problem were simply and cheaply SOLVED, how could they get any traction for their REAL Luddite agenda? The Only Cure for Global Warming Why do you suppose they sue to block virtually any project that might advance human welfare, citing alleged dangers to weeds and bugs so obscure the litigants probably wouldn’t recognize one if you plopped it on their dinner plate? China and India aren’t about to stop churning out all the carbon smoke they deem necessary to catch & overtake any Western nations moronic enough to cripple our own economies out of some bizarre feeling of guilt that we “use too much energy.” Energy use per capita is a pretty good measure of how far you’re advancing from the stone age, when life expectancy was under 40. There is no energy shortage. God’s and Nature’s challenge to man is to promote life – not to flagellate ourselves over the sin of being alive – to use all the stuff provided to better our lives and those of the generations to come. We use less than 1 percent of the solar energy that streams past us. We need to start using a lot MORE of it. If some of us get rich in the process (without “taxpayer subsidies,”) so much the better. That’s what humankind is good at. Abandon progress in favor of superstitious dread, and you’ll soon be conquered by someone who has not. The pending energy shortage looked pretty dire in 1855, if you stopped to add up when we were likely to run out of whales for whale oil to light our lamps. Then someone discovered “snake oil” was actually refinable petroleum – of which we still have enough KNOWN reserves to last for decades. We also have enough coal to last centuries, and enough nuclear fuel to last longer than that. There is no “energy crisis.” Solar farms, windmills, and geothermal are vastly more expensive (poverty-inducing) and environmentally hazardous (when you consider the backup battery farms and transmission lines they’ll require) than anything we’ve got now. They’re tax-devouring make-work scams. Julian Simon proved Paul Ehrlich and the “Population Bomb” folks wrong about their predictions re “running out of” whatever-you-care-to-name so many times they stopped accepting Mr. Simon’s wagers. Only collectivists consider they have any moral right to criticize the “profligacy” of those who create enough wealth to use whatever they can buy on the free market, in any way they choose, whether it be “energy,” land, or long underwear. Underneath their cloak of presumed holiness, collectivists are would-be thieves, aiming to impoverish those of whom they are jealous. They simply lack the courage to pull out a gun and deprive the “profligate fat cats” of their wealth DIRECTLY – they prefer to hire bully-boys in government uniforms to do the job for them, under the sanctified cloak of “shared sacrifice.” The Greens don’t want to see “energy efficiency.” They want to artificially make energy so expensive that we’re forced to use less of it, accepting “reduced expectations” for our lifestyles and life expectancies.
I suspect I’m the best judge of how to use my limited days on this sphere, where a predictably larger number of poor people with asthma will die this year thanks to the fact their inhalers will now cost $25 more, since the propellant chlorofluorocarbon has just been banned on the completely unproven theory that it “damages the Earth’s ozone layer,” under the “1987 Montreal Protocol,” which I don’t remember ever coming up for a popular vote. But what are a few predictable deaths, when the glaciers and the ice sheet are MELTing?!! Or are they?
January 6, 2009 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2009 Vin Suprynowicz
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