Eight Reasons Why ‘Global Warming’ Is a Scam

[ghosthunter]

February 2003: Eight Reasons Why ‘Global Warming’ Is a Scam
Written By: Joseph L. Bast
Published In: Heartlander > 2003
Publication date: 02/01/2003
Publisher: The Heartland Institute


When Al Gore lost his bid to become the country’s first “Environment President,” many of us thought the “global warming” scare would finally come to a well-deserved end. That hasn’t happened, despite eight good reasons this scam should finally be put to rest.


It’s B-a-a-ck!

Similar scares orchestrated by radical environmentalists in the past--such as Alar, global cooling, the “population bomb,” and electromagnetic fields--were eventually debunked by scientists and no longer appear in the speeches or platforms of public officials. The New York Times recently endorsed more widespread use of DDT to combat malaria, proving Rachel Carson’s anti-pesticide gospel is no longer sacrosanct even with the liberal elite.

The scientific case against catastrophic global warming is at least as strong as the case for DDT, but the global warming scare hasn’t gone away. President Bush is waffling on the issue, rightly opposing the Kyoto Protocol and focusing on research and voluntary projects, but wrongly allowing his administration to support calls for creating “transferrable emission credits” for greenhouse gas reductions. Such credits would build political and economic support for a Kyoto-like cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

At the state level, some 23 states have already adopted caps on greenhouse gas emissions or goals for replacing fossil fuels with alternative energy sources. These efforts are doomed to be costly failures, as a new Heartland Policy Study by Dr. Jay Lehr and James Taylor documents. Instead of concentrating on balancing state budgets, some legislators will be working to pass their own “mini-Kyotos.”


Eight Reasons to End the Scam

Concern over “global warming” is overblown and misdirected. What follows are eight reasons why we should pull the plug on this scam before it destroys billions of dollars of wealth and millions of jobs.

1. Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate. More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” (Go to www.oism.org for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism.

2. Our most reliable sources of temperature data show no global warming trend. Satellite readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to within 0.01ºC, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error.

3. Global climate computer models are too crude to predict future climate changes. All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers’ expectations, modelers resort to “flux adjustments” that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says “climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”

4. The IPCC did not prove that human activities are causing global warming. Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC’s latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about predicting the future climate: “The Earth’s atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.”

5. A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization. Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD), which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland, were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the “climatic optimum,” was even warmer and marked “a time when mankind began to build its first civilizations,” observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study for Consumer Alert. “There is good reason to believe that a warmer climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today.”

6. Efforts to quickly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions would be costly and would not stop Earth’s climate from changing. Reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990’s levels by the year 2012--the target set by the Kyoto Protocol--would require higher energy taxes and regulations causing the nation to lose 2.4 million jobs and $300 billion in annual economic output. Average household income nationwide would fall by $2,700, and state tax revenues would decline by $93.1 billion due to less taxable earned income and sales, and lower property values. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocol by all participating nations would reduce global temperature in the year 2100 by a mere 0.14 degrees Celsius.

7. Efforts by state governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are even more expensive and threaten to bust state budgets. After raising their spending with reckless abandon during the 1990s, states now face a cumulative projected deficit of more than $90 billion. Incredibly, most states nevertheless persist in backing unnecessary and expensive greenhouse gas reduction programs. New Jersey, for example, collects $358 million a year in utility taxes to fund greenhouse gas reduction programs. Such programs will have no impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. All they do is destroy jobs and waste money.

8. The best strategy to pursue is “no regrets.” The alternative to demands for immediate action to “stop global warming” is not to do nothing. The best strategy is to invest in atmospheric research now and in reducing emissions sometime in the future if the science becomes more compelling. In the meantime, investments should be made to reduce emissions only when such investments make economic sense in their own right.

This strategy is called “no regrets,” and it is roughly what the Bush administration has been doing. The U.S. spends more on global warming research each year than the entire rest of the world combined, and American businesses are leading the way in demonstrating new technologies for reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions.


Time for Common Sense

The global warming scare has enabled environmental advocacy groups to raise billions of dollars in contributions and government grants. It has given politicians (from Al Gore down) opportunities to pose as prophets of doom and slayers of evil corporations. And it has given bureaucrats at all levels of government, from the United Nations to city councils, powers that threaten our jobs and individual liberty.

It is time for common sense to return to the debate over protecting the environment. An excellent first step would be to end the “global warming” scam.

Taken from:
http://www.heartland.org/policybot/r...ml?artId=11548

[Memphis Raines]

So that's why the movie 'Waterworld' was a big flop!

Nobody believed it could actually happen

.

[v6dreamer]

It is definetly a scam. My TITO Al Gore just wants to make money off of all this and him and other big name people are trying to scare everybody. My biology book has a graph that from like 1900-1970 that kept ground charts for the temps around the world and if it was warmer, or cooler then usual each year, and each year they were around normal, (the earth wasn't colder, or warmer then usual) but those weren't as accurate since a lot of earth is made up of water. and then after 1970 they started keeping track of the temps by satellite so they could see if the world was warmer, or cooler then normal each year. And each year since they started using the satellites, it's been around normal, and it shows that the earth has absolutely NOT been warming. It's been around normal temps. Also, a group of Harvard students did a study that showed that it was a lot warmer back in the Middle Ages then it is now. And of course we all know that in the Middle Ages, they didn't have cars and all the things that we have now, that so many people say are causing "global warming".

No wonder that more and more people see conspiracies in things (who really shot JFK), but the nature of how science works makes it absurd that some scientists and my TITO Al Gore are somehow conspiring about global warming to get grant money, etc.

Conspiracy theorists will tell you that global warming is part of a natural cycle. That variations in the Earth's orbit, solar output and naturally caused variations in greenhouse gas output due to phenomena like volcanic activity cause cycles of global warming and global cooling. And all of that is absolutely true. But scientists and my TITO Al are of course aware of these factors. What conspiracy theorists don't tell you is that historically when the Earth has had naturally occurring fast cycles of global warming or global cooling, we have also had mass extinction events. Take for instance the Permian/Triassic mass extinction event (PTr) 251 million years ago. This was caused by global warming that resulted from massive supervolcanic activity that buried Siberia in 400 foot lava flows (google Siberian traps). Supervolcanoes put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which traps the sun's heat. As a result of the global warming of PTr 99+% of all life on Earth died, 96% of all species became extinct and 90% of all genera became extinct. Currently the amount of carbon dioxide that people are putting into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels mimic the supervolcanic activity of the close of the Permian.

[cablespy]

So that's why the movie 'Waterworld' was a big flop!


.

For some strange reason I loved that movie hehe.

[Horsepower]

With the seeming gaps in history, it makes me think that maybe mankind has been wiped out time and time again.

Earth should really do so again this time. Mankind, esp those that aren't scientifically adept, learned nothing from history.

[niky]

There is no such debate... the IPCC stated that they found a clear warming trend.

And given the source... heartland.org... is a conservative think-tank heavily funded by conservative industrialists in the US... and some scientists have objected to their being included on the "doubters" list that it publishes. Besides, any site that is funded by conservative industrialists and proposes a "no-regrets" approach to pollution kinda makes you question its impartiality.

[ghosthunter]

There is no such debate... the IPCC stated that they found a clear warming trend.

A clear warming trend but what is the cause?... Is it CO2 as believed by the greenhouse effect followers or is it because of increased solar activity from the sun?

There has been studies that warmer weather is not caused by CO2. In fact it seems to be the opposite, warmer weather causing increases in CO2. This was checked by comparing temperatures vs CO2 levels on a time graph.

[dbuzz]

na alaala ko yung Y2K SCARE.

kasi nga when micro chips came out, they were never designed to handle a roll over of numbers.
since these microchips were in everything from clock radios to coffee makers to computers. People were worried that on Jan 1, 2000 na ang internal clocks on the chips would not understand what to do and just short circuit or make the date Jan 1, 1900.

so, then iyun nga -marami ang kumita doon at marami din ang gumastus more than it suppose to be.

most of the scare was drummed up by computer geeks to sell fake software, books, and such. kasama na doon ang mga computer companies that joined the scare band wagon para ma-push nila ang newer models.

at syempre pa, marami ding politiko ang nakikisakay doon of course, para pasikat.

what i mean is nature na talaga ng tao ang pagiging OPORTYUNISTA.

[niky]

A clear warming trend but what is the cause?... Is it CO2 as believed by the greenhouse effect followers or is it because of increased solar activity from the sun?

There has been studies that warmer weather is not caused by CO2. In fact it seems to be the opposite, warmer weather causing increases in CO2. This was checked by comparing temperatures vs CO2 levels on a time graph.

CO2 is a contributor... the question is how much? But the mistake is to focus too much on CO2 production (which, if you're producing energy, you can't limit) instead of focusing on restoring the ecological balance by restoring the Carbon-fixers... the rain-forests and plant-life.

There's no denying changing solar activity has an effect on planetary temperature. The current "cooling" spell is due to reduced solar activity.

[scharnhorst]

And given the source... heartland.org... is a conservative think-tank heavily funded by conservative industrialists in the US... and some scientists have objected to their being included on the "doubters" list that it publishes. Besides, any site that is funded by conservative industrialists and proposes a "no-regrets" approach to pollution kinda makes you question its impartiality.

It's a sad fact that scientists, doctors, and researchers nowadays are becoming more and more like puppets for their respective funding agencies.

Researchers do all sorts of methods to remove biases from their studies, but it doesn't matter if from the start they already have an outcome provided by their employers...