Your Energy Bill and Man-Made Global Warming Hysteria

by Mike Griffith, Staff Writer

In the name of saving the planet from man-made global warming, the White House and Congress want to impose massive new taxes on carbon emissions that will force all of us to pay a lot more for gas and electricity.  Yet, thousands of scientists are now on record as rejecting the claim that man-made emissions are causing climate change.  Many of these scientists have signed the Oregon Petition, which states the following:  "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.”

Who are these scientists?  Here are just a few of them:

–    Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world’s leading experts in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves

–    Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

–    Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville, principal research scientist and team leader on NASA’s Aqua satellite

–    Don Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington

–    Tom V. Segalstad, Associate Professor of Resource and Environmental Geology, University of Oslo

–    Syun Akasofu, Professor of Physics and Director Emeritus, University of Alaska

–    David Legates, Delaware State Climatologist and Associate Professor of Climatology, University of Delaware

Indeed, instead of being in a period of global warming, the scientific evidence indicates that we’re in a period of global cooling, a fact that all the global-warming computer models failed to predict.  Dr. John S. Theon, a former chief of NASA’s Climate Processes Research Program and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, discussed this in a recent article titled “Is Climate Change Driven by Mankind?”:

None of the climate models predicted the leveling off and cooling of the atmosphere that has occurred since 1998. This cooling has taken place even though the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has continued to rise. This fact, together with the work of Professor Fred Singer, has convinced me that climate models are far too sensitive to the greenhouse effectiveness of carbon dioxide. Water, as a vapor, is by far the dominant greenhouse gas, and as cloud droplets, snow, and ice crystals, it controls the Earth’s radiation budget.

In conclusion, our understanding of how the climate system works is still rudimentary, clearly not reliable enough to serve as the basis for government policy making. Policies that rely on climate model predictions call for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to ameliorate the disaster that the models predict. Such policies will cost billions, if not trillions, of dollars and will have little, if any, effect on carbon dioxide concentrations or global climate change. Government policies should be focused on energy conservation and developing new energy sources that will reduce the free world’s dependence on imported energy. (“Is Climate Change Driven by Mankind?”, Global Warming Facts, March 16, 2009, paper presented at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change)

These same points were made in an open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations signed by 100 prominent scientists in December 2007:

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC’s conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it. . . .

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by government representatives. The great ­majority of IPCC contributors and ­reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.

Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:

* Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.

* The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.

* Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. (Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, December 14, 2007)

Some of the scientists who signed this letter include:

–    Ian D. Clark, Professor of Isotope Hydrogeology and Paleoclimatology, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa

–    R.M. Carter, Professor of Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia

–    Freeman J. Dyson, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, N.J.

–    William Evans, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, and editor of the American Midland Naturalist

–    Gerhard Gerlich, Professor for Mathematical and Theoretical Physics, Institut für Mathematische Physik der TU Braunschweig, Germany

–    Anthony R. Lupo, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science, Department of Soil, Environmental, and Atmospheric Science, University of Missouri-Columbia

–    James J. O’Brien, Professor Emeritus, Meteorology and Oceanography, Florida State University

We need to tell our politicians to stop listening to the man-made global warming alarmists and not to impose huge new energy taxes based on their alarmism.

Sources for Further Study:

Who Is Misrepresenting Climate Science?

http://www.abd.org.uk/tggws.htm

Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/open_letter_to_un.html

Is Climate Change Driven by Mankind?

http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/full/24892/Is_Climate_Change_Driven_by_Mankind_My_Personal_Journey.html

Global Warming: A Convenient Lie

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5086

The Clear and Cohesive Message of the International Conference on Climate Change

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/the_clear_and_cohesive_message_1.html

The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change

http://www.heartland.org/events/NewYork09/newyork09.html

Obama and Your Electric Bill

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=31137

Climate Change Truths

http://www.abd.org.uk/climate_change_truths.htm

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