What to Do About Global Warming?

Is this the hottest issue of the day or what?

The New York Sun editorializes that "Global Warming Turns Ugly" in the face of debate. And check out the way it absolutely slams England's Guardian newspaper for its attack on global warming dissenters:

"...the singularly nasty attack by the left-wing Guardian newspaper of England a week or so ago attacking a distinguished American think tank, the American Enterprise Institute of Washington, D.C., for soliciting scholarly papers that might disagree with the so-called global warming consensus. 'Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study,' the Guardian breathlessly headlined its story last week.
"AEI, described as a 'lobby group,' was said to be offering $10,000 — plus, wait for it, travel expenses — to scientists and economists for essays that showed the 'limitations of global climate models.' In the second paragraph the Guardian described AEI as an 'ExxonMobil-funded think tank with close links to the Bush administration.'
"Never mind that scientists on both sides of the issue take 'cash' to study global warming. And never mind that AEI isn't a 'lobby group' — under American tax law, organizations like AEI are expressly prohibited from lobbying. Or that ExxonMobil funding is less than 1% of AEI's total budget, or that a recent AEI research paper called for a tax on carbon, an idea that is hardly in line with ExxonMobil's financial interests."

Wow - was that good or what...

Also, the United Nations report referred to in the beginning of the article is worth analyzing. More specifically, the organization behind the report itself, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is worth a second look.

Just who are they?

According to Patrick J. Michaels, author of Meltdown (emphasis mine):

"Projections of future warming from greenhouse gases largely depend on how much carbon dioxide is produced by the respiration of our civilization. For years, the unchallenged prognosticator of these concentrations has been the United Nations.
"In 1988, the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which describes itself as 'an intergovernmental mechanism aimed at providing the basis for the development of a realistic and effective internationally accepted strategy for addressing climate change.'
"The IPCC conducts occasional 'assessments' of the state of climate science, producing one assessment in 1990, another report as a supplement for the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and subsequent assessments in 1996 and 2002. Those slick, massive volumes are the product of hundreds of scientists and a larger community of reviewers. They include analyses of past climate behavior, projections of future greenhouse gas emission pojections, and forecasts of future climate....
"Briefly, the IPCC is as much a collection of government bureaucrats as it is of working scientists. In The Satanic Gases, my coauthor, Robert Balling, and I determined that only about 33 percent of the 200+ 'lead authors' are in fact climate scientists. Consequently, the 'consensus' that these documents achieve is in fact determined by a majority opinion that is not necessarily formally trained in the subject matter."

You will not hear this from mainstream media outlets!

Czech president Vaclav Klaus recognized both the imbalance and lack of expertise among the U.N. panel and blasted them in this way:

"'These are politicized scientists who arrive there with one-sided opinion and assignment,' he told interviewers.
"According to the Czech president, 'each serious person and scientist' says that global warming is a myth. "

Politics should not be involved in the scientific debate over global warming, and the Czech president is right to recognize it and speak out against it. The Washington Times calls attention to the bullying coming from the Left, and notes that this bullying has led to putting people's jobs in jeopardy:

"Scientists skeptical of climate-change theories say they are increasingly coming under attack -- treatment that may make other analysts less likely to present contrarian views about global warming.
"'In general, if you do not agree with the consensus that we are headed toward disaster, you are treated like a pariah,' said William O'Keefe, chief executive officer of the Marshall Institute, which assesses scientific issues that shape public policy.
"'It's ironic that a field based on challenging unproven theories attacks skeptics in a very unhealthy way.'
"Two climatologists in Democrat-leaning states, David Legates in Delaware and George Taylor in Oregon, have come under fire for expressing skepticism about the origins of climate change. Oregon Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski is publicly seeking to strip Mr. Taylor, widely known as the state's climatologist, of his position because of his stance.
"'There has been a broad, concerted effort to intimidate and silence them,' said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global-warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 'It's the typical politics of the hard left at work. I think these are real threats.'"

The attempted silence of debate from the Left has been going on for too long. Whether its supporting ethnic profiling, questioning the legitimacy of the 9/11 widows' political points of view, or now, the global warming debate, the Left constantly tries to silence debate through intimidation, smear (we know Ellen Goodman thinks us "Holocaust deniers"), and distortion of fact. Hopefully, contrarian views on global warming will continue to be presented, as there is a mountain of evidence. (By the way, read Dennis Prager's refutation of Goodman here.)

More dissenting news from the Telegraph:

"Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.
"This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing.
"He claims carbon dioxide emissions due to human activity are having a smaller impact on climate change than scientists think. If he is correct, it could mean that mankind has more time to reduce our effect on the climate."

Naturally, the Telegraph refers to the research as "controversial" twice in the short piece. Either it's clear where the Telegraph stands on this issue, or the collective vocabulary of the editing staff is quite limited...and why is it that those who believe that man is the primary cause of global warming are always called "experts", even when called in question by "controversial" studies? Why are those scientists who believe in global warming more worthy of the label "expert" than Svensmark is?

The Times Online highlights the reporting distortion in the mainstream media about global warming phenomena:

"Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean."

Read the whole piece.

John McCain and Joe Lieberman, known to have conservative support on a number of political issues, attempt to proselytize skeptics with these hysterical predictions from their op-ed piece last month, reprinted in the Boston Globe:

"Indeed, if we fail to start substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the next couple of years, we risk bequeathing a diminished world to our grandchildren. Insect-borne diseases such as malaria will spike as tropical ecosystems expand; hotter air will exacerbate the pollution that sends children to the hospital with asthma attacks; food insecurity from shifting agricultural zones will spark border wars; and storms and coastal flooding from sea-level rise will cause mortality and dislocation."

Where's the evidence for all these outlandish claims? Again, the main source for advocates of man-made global warming is the all-powerful IPCC report blaming man for global warming (well, it's "90 percent" sure it's man's fault - good enough, right?). And, again, there's no indication of who makes up this panel, or how this panel conducts its research.

Here's more evidence contradicting "experts" on global warming - this time, more specifically, to the rise in Antarctic temperatures during the late 20th century. Curiously enough, professor David Bromwich, reporting on the study, seems sympathetic to the global warming cause:

"Bromwich said the disagreement between climate model predictions and the snowfall and temperature records doesn't necessarily mean that the models are wrong.
"'It isn't surprising that these models are not doing as well in these remote parts of the world. These are global models and shouldn't be expected to be equally exact for all locations,' he said."

Sounds like what the Washington Times predicted about dissension is already coming true.

It really is too bad that all these facts disproving global warming are coming out now, since it's become chic in Hollywood to embrace the cause. "Rock star" Al Gore has announced "plans on (July 7 of this year) for a worldwide string of pop concerts...featuring Sheryl Crow, Red Hot Chili Peppers and scores of others to mobilize action to stop global warming."

And don't worry - the sports world will not be left out of the global warning arena, either. Sports Illustrated injects itself into the argument with Dontrelle Willis on the cover, standing in a flooded Dolphin Stadium, presumably to the effects of global warming. Alexander Wolff echoes the mainstream media with some strong, baseless assertions (emphasis mine):

"...A warming planet doesn't create hurricanes, but it does make them stronger and last longer. Tropical storms become more powerful over a warmer Gulf, turning a category 4 storm, for example, into a category 5, like Katrina, which transformed the symbol of sports in New Orleans, the Superdome, into an image of epic disaster. In addition to more intense storms, higher seas, and droughts and floods, ocean flow patterns could change, leading to the extinction of marine species. Warmer temperatures could devastate agricultural economies around the globe, and diseases such as malaria now confined to the tropics would spread to other regions.
"Unlike many other pressing environmental concerns -- pollution, water shortages, overpopulation, deforestation -- global warming is by definition global. Every organism on the planet is already feeling its impact."

Global warming as a science has not yet been proven, yet Sports Illustrated has become an authority on the subject. So scientists can't expressing differing viewpoints, but Sports Illustrated should be taken at its word.

Unreal.

The next step in the debate is the "controversial" (there's that word again!) documentary which aired a few days ago in Britain. I'm curious to read the backlash this receives.

Hopefully debate will remain open on this subject that will likely remain debatable for quite some time. I leave you with a humorous take on the entire scope of the issue from Doug Giles.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.