The Global-Warming Debate Isn't Over
By John Stossel

First he won the Oscar -- then the Nobel Peace Prize. He's being called a "prophet."

Impressive, considering that one of former Vice President Al Gore's chief contributions has been to call the debate over global warming "over" and to marginalize anyone who disagrees. Although he favors major government intervention to stop global warming, he says, "the climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity".

Give me a break.

If you must declare a debate over, then maybe it's not. And if you have to gussy up your agenda as "our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level," then it deserves some skeptical examination.

Everyone has heard that Earth's atmosphere is heating up, it's our fault, and it's a crisis. No wonder 86 percent of Americans think global warming is a serious problem and 70 percent want the government to do something now.

But is it a crisis? The globe is warming, but will it be catastrophic? Probably not.

In "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore says that "sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet."

But the group that shared last week's Nobel Prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changesays in a hundred years, the oceans might rise 7 to 24 inches.

Gore also talks about drowning polar bears. He doesn't mention that the World Conservation Union and the U.S. Geological Survey say that today most populations of polar bears are stable or increasing.

And while man's greenhouse gasses may increase warming, it's not certain that man caused it. The most impressive demonstration in Gore's movie is the big graph of carbon-dioxide levels, which suggests that carbon levels control temperature. But the movie doesn't tell you that the carbon increases came after temperatures rose, hundreds of years later.

There's much more. A British court ruled that U.K. teachers could show Gore's documentary to students only if they also explain nine errors in the movie.

I wanted to ask Gore about that and other things, but he wouldn't talk to me. Why should he? He says "the debate is over."

"It's absurd for people to say that sort of thing," says Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute.

John Christy and Roy Spencer, who won NASA's Medal for Exceptional Achievement for figuring out how to get temperature data from satellites, agree that Earth has warmed. "The thing that we dispute is, is it because of mankind?" Spencer says.

Some scientists say the warming may be caused by changes in the sun, or ocean currents, or changes in cloud cover, or other things we don't understand. If it's all man's fault, why did the Arctic go through a warm period early last century? Why did Greenland's temperatures rise 50 percent faster in the 1920s than they are rising now?

The media rarely ask such questions.

The media also treat the IPCC as impartial scientists, but Reiter and Christy, who were members of the IPCC, say it is not what the public thinks it is. Many of the people involved in writing its report "are not scientists at all," Reiter says. "They were essentially activists." Members of groups like Greenpeace were involved. Skeptics were often ignored.

Christy says, "We were not asked to look at a particular statement and sign our names to it."

Adds Reiter, "I resigned."

But the IPCC still listed him as part of the so-called consensus of scientists. He says he had to threaten to sue to get his name removed from the report, although the IPCC denies that.

Skeptics like Reiter, Christy, Spencer and Tim Ball, who studies the history of climate change and heads the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, are often smeared as "deniers," lumped in with Holocaust deniers and accused of being "on the take" from energy businesses." Gore impugns skeptical scientists by saying "the illusion of a debate has been purchased."

But the scientists I interviewed don't get money from business.

Some get threatened. Ball received an e-mail that said: "You will not live long enough to see global warming!"

Is this what the global-warming debate has come to?

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Global warming -- a gradual increase in planet-wide temperatures -- is now well documented and accepted by scientists as fact. A panel convened by the U.S National Research Council, the nation's premier science policy body, in June 2006 voiced a "high level of confidence" that Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, and possibly even the last 2,000 years. Studies indicate that the average global surface temperature has increased by approximately 0.5-1.0°F (0.3-0.6°C) over the last century. This is the largest increase in surface temperature in the last 1,000 years and scientists are predicting an even greater increase over this century. This warming is largely attributed to the increase of greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide and methane) in the Earth's upper atmosphere caused by human burning of fossil fuels, industrial, farming, and deforestation activities.

Al Gore Challenged to Climate Debate

Al Gore has been challenged to an internationally televised debate on "climate change" by Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during her leadership of the United Kingdom.

In a formal press release from the Center for Science and Public Policy, Lord Monckton has thrown down the gauntlet to challenge Gore to what he terms "the Second Great Debate," an internationally televised, head-to-head, nation-unto-nation confrontation on the question, "That our effect on climate is not dangerous

Monckton said, "A careful study of the substantial corpus of peer-reviewed science reveals that Mr. Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," is a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors, now being peddled to innocent schoolchildren worldwide."

Monckton and Gore have once before clashed head-to-head on the science, politics, and religion of global warming in pages of the London Sunday Telegraph last November.

As reported by NewsMax in November 2006, Monckton challenged a U.N. report on climate change as "hysteria" over manmade global warming that distorts the truth.

A U.N. report in 1996 "showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today," Monckton writes in the Sunday Telegraph.

"But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years . . .

"Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to [5 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than now.

"Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes; today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland; now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole — a Chinese naval squadron sailed right around the Arctic in 1421 and found none."

Monckton also writes that Antarctica has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, and the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years.

In his most recent challenge to Gore, Monckton calls on the former vice president to "step up to the plate and defend his advocacy of policies that could do grave harm to the welfare of the world's poor.

"If Mr. Gore really believes global warming is the defining issue of our time, the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced, then he should welcome the opportunity to raise the profile of the issue before a worldwide audience of billions by defining and defending his claims against a serious, science-based challenge."

© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.

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An informed voter scares the Goverment lackeys.

An American first and always a Conservative.

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A bit off topic, but it shows Lord Monckton is a bit of an extremist in his views. He is funded by The Science and Public Policy Institute, which counts among their bankrollers the Exxon Mobile Corp.

Exxon Mobile money is bad because...?

__________________
"If capitalism had never existed, any honest humanitarian should have been struggling to invent it. But when you see men struggling to evade its existence, to misrepresent its nature, and to destroy its last remnants - you may be sure that whatever their motives, love for man is not one of them." - Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

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Big oil has a vested interest in disputing man's contribution to global warming. For the oil industry, Al Gore’s film is perceived as a threat, and they have no shortage of funds to try to distort it.

Upton, I can see your logic here, but if it is proven then how can someone dispute it?

__________________
An informed voter scares the Goverment lackeys.

An American first and always a Conservative.

Go Sooners

I agree, only not the way you may think. The United Nations Environmental Program has released a report entitled, Global Environment Outlook: environment for development (called GEO-4 for short) that concludes that the survival of humanity is at risk from climate change and other forms of human-caused environmental degradation.http://www.unep.org/geo/geo4/media/m...4%20Global.pdf

How exactly do oil companies profit from disputing global warming?

__________________
"If capitalism had never existed, any honest humanitarian should have been struggling to invent it. But when you see men struggling to evade its existence, to misrepresent its nature, and to destroy its last remnants - you may be sure that whatever their motives, love for man is not one of them." - Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Coyote Blog


New Law Trashes Genetic Science