GLOBAL WARMING — STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

By James Wilson

            What do you call it if you mix documented facts like no – none, nada – increase in the average surface temperature of the earth in the past eighteen years, or the reality that there has been no loss of Arctic ice in eight years while Antarctic ice covers more ground than it has in forty, with environmentalists like Al Gore?  With apologies to Paul Simon – still crazy after all these years.

            The University of Illinois’ Polar Ice Research Center found Arctic ice stopped losing ground between 2005 and 2006.  They report Antarctic ice grows – compensating for any loss – as it has for decades.  Patrick Michaels directs the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science.  Their research shows global warming stopped in the mid nineties, about a decade before Gore and friends boarded a train already out of track.

            In the midst of hysterical demonstrations – the People’s Climate March recently paraded through two thousand worldwide locations – more and more scientists recognize they bet on the wrong horse.  Dr. Steven Koonin was Barack Obama’s undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy before publishing a Page One story in the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review on the topic.  He says climate science and conclusions about global warming are anything but settled from his new position as director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University.  He warns the prevailing groupthink – his term – achieves nothing but the stifling of serious discussions leading to rational policy decisions.  Koonin notes the repeated claims of consensus on the subject, but says there is just no such thing.  He adds, “The climate has always changed and always will.”

            Koonin happens to believe, by the way, that human action does influence climate, although he does not call it the principal dynamic in change.  In fact, he maintains, human action can at most cause shifts of one to two per cent.  And he admits that while human contributions to carbon dioxide levels have risen by twenty-five per cent in this century the surface temperature is not increasing – as the computer models worshipped by the Gore school say it must.  He acknowledges the shift – from Arctic to Antarctic regions – rather than a net reduction in ice mass, as well as the fact sea levels are not rising any faster today – if at all – than they did prior to 1950.  And then we get to John L. Casey, President of the Space and Science Research Corporation and former White House national space policy adviser.

            Casey goes a lot farther than Koonin.  In his book, Dark Winter, he calls the climate change hysteria “the greatest scientific fraud in history.”  He contends the sun – a far more potent influence on climate than any human action – has entered a cyclical period of “solar hibernation’ that will alter climate within the next two decades.  He does not call it a coming ice age, but he says global crop damage will come and we are totally unprepared for it.  Why?  Because the politics – not the science – is all about warming and how much government should restrict human free enterprise in order to combat something we did not cause and cannot hope to control.  We can only – if we are crazy enough – control one another right back into a human caused stone age.

            Casey points out that science in the former Soviet Union is far more open to free inquiry and experimental verification – wherever the results lead the discussion – than is the United States today.

            Some will ask how our president does not know of these findings coming from his own present and former advisers.  Why does he keep making speeches to international bodies claiming human caused climate change is the foremost danger in the world today?  Perhaps a president who misses three in five of his national security briefings is just as inattentive to his science briefings.

            And the polar bears headed for extinction due to human excesses?  Their numbers have increased by about twenty-five per cent in recent years.

            The good news is that there is a God Who not only creates this world but lovingly maintains it and calls us into partnership with Him.  There is no Biblical excuse for wanton pollution or irresponsible use of resources.  Scripture says the heavens themselves declare God’s glory; a house build outside this revelation cannot stand.  The Son of God tells us to let our yes be yes and our no be no.  Only with honesty and humility can we discover and act on truth, and that always leads to good decisions for living.  The only alternative is to remain crazy.  And deadly.