The Inconvenient Truth of global warming is being hampered by Inconvenient Facts

I suppose you could say that global warming wackos lied, and people panicked and bought hybrid cars. But what did they lie about? Let's check out Michael Fumento's latest article... If you follow the global warming debate, you “know” that nine of the ten warmest years recorded in the U.S. lower 48 since 1880 have occurred since 1995, with the very hottest being 1998. But whaddya know! Those figures are wrong. Data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) now show the hottest year since 1880 was 1934. Nineteen-ninety-eight dropped to second, while the third hottest year was way back in 1921. Indeed, four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, while only three were in the past decade. The real 15 hottest years are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before the chief “greenhouse gas,” atmospheric carbon dioxide, began its sharp rise; seven occurred afterwards. Say it ain't so! So all Al Gore's inconvenient graphs in An Inconvenient Truth are inconveniently wrong? Don't forget though that the global warming debate is over. The polar bears and penguins are roasting to death and it's our fault. Even if the facts still don't support their premise... UPDATE @ 8:08am on 8/18 - Michael has a more detailied version of the Townhall article posted at his website. Check it out for all the cool graphs. Chicks dig graphs. Thanks for the link Michael!

Denying global warming is tantamount to heresy

I guess I'm a heretic now, equivalent to the scum who deny the holocaust. But the bright spot is that maybe this whole global warming thing means that next year my front yard won't die from 2 straight months of severe cold. That'd be nice... But in the mean time, check out this great op-ed piece by Walter E. Williams over at Townhall.com. Most climatologists agree that the earth's temperature has increased about a degree over the last century. The debate is how much of it is due to mankind's activity. Britain's Channel 4 television has just produced "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a documentary that devastates most of the claims made by the environmentalist movement. The scientists interviewed include top climatologists from MIT and other prestigious universities around the world. The documentary hasn't aired in the U.S., but it's available on the Internet. Among the many findings that dispute environmentalists' claims are: Manmade carbon dioxide emissions are roughly 5 percent of the total; the rest are from natural sources such as volcanoes, dying vegetation and animals. Annually, volcanoes alone produce more carbon dioxide than all of mankind's activities. Oceans are responsible for most greenhouse gases. Contrary to environmentalists' claims, the higher the Earth's temperature, the higher the carbon dioxide levels. In other words, carbon dioxide levels are a product of climate change. Some of the documentary's scientists argue that the greatest influence on the Earth's temperature is our sun's sunspot activity. The bottom line is, the bulk of scientific evidence shows that what we've been told by environmentalists is pure bunk. And it just so happens The Great Global Warming Swindle is over on YouTube (thanks to commenter Ted for pointing it out to me). It's about 75 minutes long so snuggle up with a cup of hot cocoa and a warm blanket and... Wait a sec... global warming... duh... Snuggle up in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops with an iced tea and watch it. Good stuff.

Denying global warming is now equivalent to denying the holocaust

It's so unbelievable, what can you say? By every measure, the U N 's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is "unequivocal." The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get. I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future. So denying global warming is the moral equivalent of denying the holocaust. Since holocaust denial is illegal in much of Europe, will global warming follow suit? Talk about crazed fanatics... For a more skeptical perspective let's take a look at another Boston Globe article. Perhaps the Chicken Littles are right and the sky really is falling, but that opinion is hardly unanimous. There are quite a few skeptical scientists, including eminent climatologists, who doubt the end-of-the-world scenario. Why don't journalists spend more time covering all sides of the debate instead of just parroting the scaremongers? Only rarely do other views pierce the media's filter of environmental correctness. A recent series by Lawrence Solomon in Canada's National Post looked at some of the leading global-warming dissenters, none of whom fits the easy-to-dismiss stereotype of a flat-Earth yahoo. There is, for example, Richard S.J. Tol -- IPCC author, editor of Energy Economics, and board member of the Centre for Marine and Climate Research at Hamburg University. Tol agrees that global warming is real, but he emphasizes its benefits as well as its harms -- and points out that in the short term, the benefits are especially pronounced. Another dissident is Duncan Wingham, professor of climate physics at University College London and principal scientist of the European Space Agency's CryoSat Mission, which is designed to measure changes in the Earth's ice masses. The collapse of ice shelves off the northern Antarctic Peninsula is often highlighted as Exhibit A of global warming and its dangers, but Wingham's satellite data shows that the thinning of some Antarctic ice has been matched by thickening ice elsewhere on the continent. The evidence to date, Wingham says, is not "favorable to the notion we are seeing the results of global warming." Still other scientists profiled by Solomon contend that the sun, not man, plays the dominant role in planetary climate change. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center, for instance,believes that changes in the sun's magnetic field, and the corresponding impact on cosmic rays, may be the key to global warming. Nigel Weiss, a past presidentof the Royal Astronomical Society and a mathematical aerophysicist at the University of Cambridge, correlates sunspot activity with changes in the Earth's climate. Habibullo Abdussamatov, who heads the space research laboratory at Pulkovo Astronomical Observatoryin Russia, points out that Mars is also undergoing global warming -- despite having no greenhouse conditions and no activity by Martians. In his view, it is solar irradiance, not carbon dioxide, that accounts for the recent rise in temperature. If only Al Gore would make a horrible movie that no one would go to see, we could finally put this issue to rest. Oh... wait a sec... he already did that. Oops.

Doctor debunks the anti-smoking data and other legislative nonsense...

I heard Dennis mention this article yesterday and interview the doctor who wrote it today. Dr. Gio Batta Gori is a renown epidemiologist and toxicologist and for whatever reason, the WaPo decided to publish his piece. Here's a snippet... Lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases develop at advancing ages. Estimating the risk of those diseases posed by secondhand smoke requires knowing the sum of momentary secondhand smoke doses that nonsmokers have internalized over their lifetimes. Such lifetime summations of instant doses are obviously impossible, because concentrations of secondhand smoke in the air, individual rates of inhalation, and metabolic transformations vary from moment to moment, year after year, location to location. In an effort to circumvent this capital obstacle, all secondhand smoke studies have estimated risk using a misleading marker of "lifetime exposure." Yet, instant exposures also vary uncontrollably over time, so lifetime summations of exposure could not be, and were not, measured. Typically, the studies asked 60--70 year-old self-declared nonsmokers to recall how many cigarettes, cigars or pipes might have been smoked in their presence during their lifetimes, how thick the smoke might have been in the rooms, whether the windows were open, and similar vagaries. Obtained mostly during brief phone interviews, answers were then recorded as precise measures of lifetime individual exposures. In reality, it is impossible to summarize accurately from momentary and vague recalls, and with an absurd expectation of precision, the total exposure to secondhand smoke over more than a half-century of a person's lifetime. No measure of cumulative lifetime secondhand smoke exposure was ever possible, so the epidemiologic studies estimated risk based not only on an improper marker of exposure, but also on exposure data that are illusory. So we're basing scientific studies and are forming public policy on nothing more than anecdotal assumptions? Great. One thing to note here is that no one is saying second hand smoke isn't unhealthy, all we're questioning is how unhealthy. Is it worth the panic that the prohibitionist anti-smoking zealots have caused? The answer there is an emphatic no. The risk of cancer due to second hand smoke is largely exaggerated. There's no reason to ban smoking outdoors as several SoCal cities have done. There's no reason to force privately owned businesses to prohibit smoking. It kind of makes you wonder what else are scientists with agendas lying about... Global warming perhaps? Is global warming really humanity's fault? They talk all about CO2 emissions, but fail to note that over the last century as temperatures have increased, during that same period CO2 emissions have dropped. Maybe those scientists are using the same computer models that back in the 70's were predicting a global freeze or reports that had us running out of landfill space by 2000 due to the overwhelming amount of garbage we produce. That's the best part about liberal agendas... you can talk and talk and talk, throwing out opinions as if they were facts and never be held accountable to them by the MSM. It must be nice. And then in the name of energy conservation, California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine has introduced a bill that would ban incandescent light bulbs... You know up until now, I'd thought the banning trans fats in restaurants was the dumbest piece of legislation going. Levine's bill is completely f*cking retarded. If you want people to buy florescent bulbs because they're more energy effficient, you don't start by banning he competition, you make the alternative more attractive. Pass tax breaks for the manufacturers and tax incentives for the consumer. You don't make light bulbs illegal. It's like California (and the rest of the country for that matter now that the Dems are in charge) is being manhandled and driven right off a cliff by a bunch of 2 year olds in the Democratic party. And dumb 2 year olds at that! "We don't like this... ban it! This makes us feel bad... ban it! Personal responsibility and a free market system? Rubbish! We know what's best for everybody!" What a bunch of crap.