Is Global Warming a Crisis?

Sorry, but doing voodoo science does not count as debate.

Let's start with the basics: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not the cause of global warming . Neither is it the cause of the super El Nino of 1998 nor of the twenty-first century high, a cluster of warm years from 2001 to 2007, which are the only real instances of warming since the middle of the twentieth century. You have probably been told about Hansen's famous testimony in front of the Senate in 1988 which is supposed to have convinced everyone that global warming is happening. He got away with it simply because no competent climate scientist checked his facts. His crucial testimony is marred both by unscientific claims and by dishonest presentation. It is not well known that this was not his first but his second time that he testified before the Senate. The first time was in November 1987, it was cold, no one wanted to talk about warming, and the media just ignored it. Senator Wirth, committee chairman, was not pleased. But if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, and he sure did. He called up the Weather Bureau and asked them to tell him what the warmest day in Washington, D.C. was. It was June 23rd so he booked that day for a new hearing. And to make sure that the air conditioning was not working properly he sent his staff out at night to open all the windows in the hearing room. It worked: the TV crew, the star witness, and the audience sweated profusely and global warming was on every television screen that night. It was that publicity stunt that made establishment of the IPCC possible. But what did he actually say? He said that we are in a warming trend and that this warming is caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide that we constantly release into the air. What was true was that measurements starting in 1958 showed that carbon dioxide really was increasing steadily from year to year. What was not true was the claim that this carbon dioxide was the cause of the warming. That is because the warming trend that he said we were in was barely ten years old, having a definite beginning about 1977. Prior to that, in the sixties and the seventies, there was no warming whatsoever. I picked 1977 because in 1975 the New York Times could still write that "a major cooling of the climate" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950." Check NOAA’s temperature chart and verify it yourself. But now there is this problem: we know that carbon dioxide was already in the air during that twenty year cool period but had not shown any inclination whatsoever of giving us some warmth. Hansen’s claim that his warming was caused by carbon dioxide is equivalent to saying that in 1977 carbon dioxide in the air just changed its mind and decided it was time to start warming the world. To accomplish this feat takes powerful voodoo but Hansen had it in him. Science it is not, a miracle it is, the one miracle that got that global warming religion started. It is this religion that has brought us the Kyoto Protocol, cap and trade laws, and now the Waxman-Markey bill. It is absolutely amazing that no scientist has called him on his claim. But maybe not so surprising: Göbbels knew about the Big Lie and used it effectively in Nazi Germany. On top of that now even the warming that Hansen said was there at the time is suspect because satellite temperature measurements that are accurate to 0.03 degrees Celsius cannot find a trace of it. Before closing I want to do one more thing for your membership: I want to disabuse you of the thought that carbon dioxide has ever caused any warming at any time. Daniel Rothman’s article “Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years” (PNAS 99:4167-4171)(April 2, 2002) puts it this way: “The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climate variations at tectonic time scales.”