Media hysteria and propaganda promoting "human-caused global warming" have hit a new high this month, just as the previously most successful campaign of world technological genocide – the demonization of DDT – is passing from the scene. After eradicating malaria from the entire developed world, DDT was banned by the United States, the United Nations, and their retainers. The result has been the deaths of more than 50 million children, mostly African, and chronic ongoing illness from malaria for more than 500 million adults – 10% of the human race.
There was never a shred of credible scientific evidence that DDT was harmful to the environment or to animal or human health. Even the scientific review board of the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, the agency that initiated the DDT ban, found DDT to be entirely safe and environmentally beneficial. Before the ban, DDT saved hundreds of millions of human lives, and its originator received a well-deserved Nobel Prize.
Based on Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, a book that was demonstrably false from cover to cover, and promoted by self-interested ideologues, including Al Gore, the anti-DDT pogrom reached an intensity comparable to the current campaign against energy.
Use of DDT against malaria is now being advocated by the US and the UN. Why has DDT been rehabilitated? The reason is that malaria has been killing mostly black children, and black political power has finally reached a point where this can no longer be overlooked. So, those in the culture of human death have lost the ban of DDT, but they managed to kill a lot of people while it was in force.
Banning DDT, however, is child’s play compared with banning energy – the most genocidal action ever attempted in human history.
The campaign against inexpensive and plentiful energy resources for human technology is not new. It began on college campuses in the 1960s. The same left-wing radicals who controlled those campuses are now in control of many American political institutions.
Their target was and is energy – in any form that is industrially robust. Their primary demons have been nuclear energy and hydrocarbon energy. Solar energy, biofuels, and wind energy will be acceptable to them only so long as they remain industrially impractical for the generation of large amounts of inexpensive energy.
Evidence for this is found in hydroelectric energy, which has actually been classified by our government as a "non-renewable" resource and demonized by the anti-technologists. Its sin – it produces large amounts of inexpensive entirely renewable electrical energy.
In the 1960s the cry arose for people to reduce their use of hydrocarbon energy from coal, oil, and natural gas. The initial claim was that we were running out of these "precious and rare" commodities. The truth, however, is that the United States especially and the world in general has plenty of hydrocarbon energy supplies for the next several centuries – a truth that soon asserted itself in the market price for hydrocarbon fuels. Oil itself is plentiful. Moreover, coal and natural gas can be easily converted into oil. There is no natural shortage of these commodities.
Political actions in the 1970s and thereafter, however, created shortages in the United States. Taxation, regulation, and litigation placed such onerous burdens on hydrocarbon production inside the United States that new production was instead developed abroad – and Americans were gradually forced to buy more and more of their hydrocarbon energy from often unstable foreign countries, especially those located in Muslim regions.
An alternative was available, however, in nuclear electric energy. While hydroelectric energy was peaking because most good hydroelectric sites had been developed, about 100 nuclear power plants were already supplying 20% of America’s electrical energy. More such plants could have substituted for diminishing hydrocarbon supplies and maintained the energy independence of American industry.
So, a vast, unprincipled, falsehood-filled propaganda campaign was launched against nuclear power – and it succeeded. Not one nuclear power plant was built in the United States after the 1970s. The safest, least expensive, most environmentally benign source of industrial and domestic energy was essentially banned from further development in the United States – a situation that continues today.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal OnLine, February 24, 2007, an estimated 251 nuclear power plants are in various stages of planning and construction throughout the world, but there is not a single such plant under construction in the United States.
Without nuclear energy and without development of sufficient domestic hydrocarbons, Americans powered their country with imported hydrocarbon fuels. These, it turned out, were not in short supply as had been claimed.
Therefore, the anti-technologists tried another lie. Noticing that global temperatures were in a mild downtrend, they screeched that "global cooling" would soon engulf the planet. This, they claimed, was being caused by the burning of hydrocarbon fuels. If we did not stop using hydrocarbons, they asserted, we would all soon freeze in the dark. The global cooling campaign met its end when temperatures began to rise naturally and when Carl Sagan predicted that, if Iraq burned the oil fields of Kuwait, the resulting global winter would cause world-wide devastation. Iraq did set fire to the Kuwait oil fields – and no global cooling took place.
So, now that temperatures were rising, the ever-resourceful anti-technologists tried a third time. Now they claimed that "human-caused global warming" is the threat – again only to be stopped by rationing the human use of hydrocarbon energy. Global taxation, global energy rationing, global technology reduction, and human genocide are their goals and, given their record of success so far, these merchants of fear and death may be very close to succeeding.
Their weakness is in science. Their claims of warming due to human production of carbon dioxide are entirely without scientific merit. So, they refuse to debate the science, falsely claiming that a consensus of scientists – which does not exist – agrees with them.
"CONSENSUS SCIENCE"
Science consists of making experimental observations of the physical world and organizing those observations in rational ways. In combination with the discipline of mathematics and a systematics that subjects hypotheses to rigorous experimental tests, scientists have obtained sufficient information about the physical world to make possible the wonderful technology that we enjoy today.
Science is essentially a search for natural truth – to whatever extent that the human brain is capable of discerning that truth. Often scientists prove to be wrong. They develop hypotheses that are consistent with the known experimental facts only to find additional facts that invalidate their hypotheses. This is a continuing process that is so pervasive that most truly outstanding scientists exhibit substantial humility toward their work.
Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this humility was by Isaac Newton, indisputably the greatest physical scientist who has ever lived, who said near the end of his life, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Albert Einstein wrote, "In order to put his system into mathematical form at all, Newton had to devise the concept of differential quotients and propound the laws of motion in the form of total differential equations – perhaps the greatest advance in thought that a single individual was ever privileged to make."
Notice the profound humility in both statements. Yet these two unequaled physicists never departed from the principle that their hypotheses and theories must be verified and constantly tested by all of the experimental information available. They studied the truth, not the opinions of other people.
Benjamin Franklin discovered the electron and gave us the + and – signs on our batteries, but the overwhelming consensus of scientists during the following 100 years was that Franklin was wrong about the existence of the electron.
All scientists are guided by the principle that their hypotheses must be verified and tested by observations of the physical world. If they are not so guided, they are not scientists. Scientific truth is not determined by opinion polls or "consensus" decision-making.
The proponents of human-caused global warming are without humility and without interest in experimental information. They predict the weather 100 years in the future with unverified computer models and then state with absolute certainty that they must turn off half of humanity’s energy supplies and heavily tax the remainder. This is neither science nor environmentalism. It is fraud.
THE GLOBAL WARMING CONSENSUS
The global warmers are not interested in humility or experimental verification. Consider the hypothesis of "human-caused global warming" and the concomitant hypothesis that warming of the earth will soon result in vast environmental damage – the two hypotheses now being promoted under the banner of an alleged "scientific consensus" and a need for worldwide energy taxation and rationing.
First, there is not a single experimental observation – not even one – that verifies either of these hypotheses. The first hypothesis is supported solely by computer extrapolations of future earth temperatures, using mathematical models with so many adjustable parameters that they can be made to predict virtually any conclusion. At best, this is a computer-modeled hypothesis that has never been validated by any experimental test whatever. The second hypothesis does not even have a computer model that suggests it, and, like the first, has not been verified by any experimental test.
Carbon dioxide is actually a very weak greenhouse gas. Water vapor is much stronger. The computer models predict that a very small amount of warming from carbon dioxide will set off a cycle of increased water evaporation from the oceans, thus causing a catastrophic temperature rise. We know, however, by experiment that this is not correct. The historical temperature record as shown in Figure 2 below reveals many periods when temperatures were much higher than can be achieved by carbon dioxide warming. Yet, no water-mediated or other cycle of extreme warming took place.
Contrary to the endless claims by Al Gore and his retainers, there is not and has never been any consensus among scientists in favor of either of these hypotheses. Some years ago, my colleagues and I circulated a petition among American scientists. In less than a month, with very limited resources, we obtained the signatures of 18,000 Americans with university degrees in physical science to a petition which states:
"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
The fact that more than 18,000 Americans with university degrees in physical science – including many very eminent men – signed this statement does not prove that the statement is scientifically correct. Scientific truth is not determined by polling. It does prove, however, that there is not a consensus of scientists – with only a handful of skeptics – in the United States who believe the opposite. The human-caused global warming industry with its billions of dollars in annual operating funds has never been able to assemble a group of scientists even one-tenth as large as this to sign a statement in support of its position. This indicates that, if a consensus exists at all, it is on the side of this petition.
Even now, when we are not soliciting signatures, we have a continual modest stream of scientists asking to sign this petition. The claim that virtually all scientists agree that humans are warming the earth and thereby severely damaging the environment is entirely bogus. It is a myth generated by a well-funded group of self-interested elitists for the purpose of avoiding discussion of the science opposed to their schemes for gaining additional political power.
What have the human-caused global warmers said in response to this petition and the definitive review article, "Atmospheric Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" by A.B. Robinson, S. L. Baliunas, W. Soon, and Z. W. Robinson, that was distributed with it?
They have claimed that we were paid by the oil industry to dummy up a false petition; that the signatories to the petition are bogus; that the petition has long ago been discredited; that the signatures are unvalidated; that our laboratory has insufficient computers; that we are a "campaigning organization"; that the review article was never peer reviewed; that we falsely pretend to be endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences; and that the first author of the review article is a Christian – the ultimate smear in the company they keep. Isaac Newton was also a Christian. All of these claims except for the last are definitively and demonstrably false, although many NAS members did sign the petition. See www.oism.org/pproject for a copy of the review article and the names of the petition signers.
What have the human-caused global warmers not done in response? They have never replied to any of the scientific data in the review article upon which the petition is based, and they have never circulated a petition of their own in opposition to this one.
The claimed scientific consensus of the human-caused global warming industry does not exist. This claim is an outright lie.
NATURAL CAUSES OF GLOBAL WARMING
While there is far more evidence of natural causes of global warming than will fit in this short article, let us review a few of the most relevant points. First, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has been rising as shown in Figure 1. Most of the rise has occurred since 1940. This rise has not been proved to be the result of human activity, but this is a reasonable hypothesis.
Figure 1
Second, the average temperature of the Earth fluctuates within a relatively narrow range of about 4 degrees Centigrade as shown in Figure 2. This is a graph of the fossil surface temperature record of a large section of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. Other experimental records and also the historical record show essentially the same temperature fluctuations as seen in Figure 2, especially the periods known as the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Notice that the temperature is now a little below the 3,000-year average. The temperature reached a maximum during the Middle Ages 1,000 years ago and a minimum at about the time of the American Revolutionary War.
Figure 2
The United Nations used a temperature graph very similar to this one in its earlier publications, but has now switched to a graph similar to that seen in Figure 3, known as the hockey stick.
Figure 3
Figure 3 is not, however, a graph of temperature. It is a graph of the rate of growth of long-lived pine trees as derived from tree-ring data in two regions – a and b – of the United States. Carbon dioxide fertilization of plants is causing a marked increase in the growth rate, amount, and diversity of virtually all plant species and of the animal species that depend upon plants for food. This increased richness of the biosphere is the primary environmental effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
A few years ago, a paper was published in which the authors attempted to derive a temperature curve from tree-ring growth data. Failure to properly correct for carbon dioxide fertilization and some other very substantial errors caused their temperature curve to look like Figure 3. Regardless of these errors, the United Nations adopted the new graph, which conforms to its claims.
This record lacks the characteristics of that shown in Figure 2, which has been validated by many other temperature studies and by the historical record of crops grown and other human activities. Nevertheless, the hockey stick curve is used in many popular human-caused global warming advertisements.
Figure 4 shows the 11-year moving average of Northern Hemisphere land-based temperature deviations in degrees Centigrade as the dark line and solar brightness as measured by magnetic cycle lengths as the light line. As the temperature has risen since the little ice age, there have been four pronounced intermediate fluctuations. In every case, temperature and solar brightness are correlated.
Figure 4
Data from the NASA Global Surveyor and Odyssey Mars missions have shown that Mars is warming just as the Earth is warming, both in correlation with solar activity. There are no humans on Mars.
Figure 5 shows the averaged length of 169 of the Earth’s glaciers. Glacier length maximized at about the time of the American Revolutionary War. Half of the subsequent glacier shortening was over before the first automobile rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line. Three-fourths of the shortening occurred before carbon dioxide had significantly risen in the atmosphere, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 5
Moreover, the glacier record shows no increased rate of shortening during the period of atmospheric carbon dioxide rise. In fact, the shortening rate diminished somewhat during this period.
The dark line in Figure 6 shows the global temperature deviation derived from the glacier record. Notice the two intermediate upward fluctuations, which correspond exactly with similar fluctuations in solar activity as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 6
Figure 7 shows the number of violent Atlantic Ocean hurricanes and maximum hurricane wind speeds between 1940 and 1998. There has been no increase in number or severity of hurricanes since 1940, after which most of the atmospheric carbon dioxide increase took place. Sea-level measurements have been similarly benign.
Figure 7
Figure 8 shows the average of 279 published experiments on increase in plant growth as a function of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The extreme possible eventual maximum in atmospheric carbon dioxide of 600 molecules of carbon dioxide per 1 million molecules of all types in the atmosphere corresponds to an increase in plant growth rate of between 50% and 100% depending upon growing conditions. Figure 9 shows the amount of standing hardwood and softwood timber in the United States. Experimental studies of tree growth show that some of this remarkable increase in standing timber is a result of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Figure 8
The Earth is warmed by the radioactivity in its elements and by the sun. The sun’s warmth is amplified by greenhouse gases within the atmosphere, principally water vapor, that capture solar energy that would otherwise be radiated into space. This greenhouse effect is robust and stable. There is not a shred of scientific experimental evidence that this stability has been affected by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide or that it will be so affected in the future.
Figure 9
Atmospheric carbon dioxide is markedly changing our environment. Since carbon dioxide is the key atmospheric fertilizer for plants, its increase is markedly increasing the extent and diversity of the Earth’s plant life. Since animals use plants for food, there is also a concomitant increase in the number and diversity of animals.
Human activity is moving carbon above ground and into the atmosphere, where it is being turned into more plants and animals. This ongoing enrichment of the biosphere is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.
References to the peer-reviewed research literature for Figures 1 to 4 and Figure 7 are given in the review article available at www.oism.org/pproject. The reference for Figures 5 and 6 is J. Oerlemans, Extracting a Climate Signal from 169 Glacier Records, Science 308, pp 675–677, April 29, 2005.
GENOCIDE
The word "genocide" appears three times in the first section of this article. Accepted definitions of genocide generally involve the mass killing of people belonging to a particular group. Selecting the black people in Africa for misery, disease, and death by deliberately depriving them of life-saving DDT is, therefore, consistent with the ordinary definition.
World energy rationing affects, however, a much broader socioeconomic group. This group is perhaps best defined by those who are not in it. Al Gore, for example, flies about in expensive personal jet planes, maintains multiple homes that use 10 times as much energy as those of ordinary people, and rides in gas-guzzling limousines. He obviously does not consider himself to be in the group who must submit to energy rationing.
World taxation, rationing, and shortages of energy will – assuming that political stability can be maintained – hurt primarily the poor, lower, and middle classes sufficiently to markedly increase their death rates. The upper classes within which the hysteria for global energy rationing has originated expect to maintain their own lifestyles with only minor inconvenience.
While, therefore, the group of people who have been selected for diminished lives, suffering, and death from energy rationing and the resulting technological decline is larger than that ordinarily associated with genocide, the number of likely deaths is also much larger than in previous genocides. We think the use of this term is appropriate and will not be confusing to the reader.
March 8, 2007
