Let’s Have a Debate

An iceberg in the Ilulissat fjord, on Greenland's western coast.

The hysteria at the UN Climate Change conference in Nairobi, Kenya continues following Kofi Annon’s warning that global warming is as dangerous as weapons of mass destruction. British newspaper The Independent published a series of headlines “we will all be reading in reality if nothing is done to prevent climate change.”

2030: RIP -- Arctic polar bear breathes its last

2040: Life-giving rainforests now a wasteland

2050: The last drops of rain fall to earth

2060: Tsunami horror hits Britain

Holy Toledo!!!

Media reports and telecasts are filled with this kind of agenda-driven pseudoscientific nonsense.

Here is another: “Global warming presents humankind with the most important social, political and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. At stake is the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.”

This statement is from the bestseller The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can we Survive it? written in 1975 by Lowell Ponte.

Sorry, I fooled you; the italicized word in Ponte’s statement was supposed to be cooling, not warming. The same hysteria we hear today, but the temperature was going in the opposite direction back in 1975.

The Independent article reported yesterday that 20,000 protesters, ranging from the Women's Institute to Friends of the Earth, and the Ramblers' Association to members of the rock band Razorlight, rallied outside the US embassy in London against the environmental policies of the Bush administration.

"Everyone is waiting for the United States. I think the whole process will be on ice until 2009," when Bush's second term expires, said Paal Prestrud, head of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

After two weeks of talks, 70 environment ministers in Nairobi agreed to a review of Kyoto in 2008 as a possible prelude to deeper emission cuts by rich nations beyond 2012 and steps by developing countries to brake rising emissions. Sounds like another meeting to me.

Solemn UN pronouncements, media hysteria and environmental craziness are the orders of the day in the enlightened European Union.

I think it is past time for some common-sense talk. The public needs to have an honest debate on the global warming issue, starting with the real data.

The debate should address questions such as these:

1. How often do global warmings occur due to natural causes, and what is the usual temperature rise?

2. What are the temperature forcings and is atmospheric CO2 the dominant forcing, or is something else?

3. How much is the human contribution to the temperature forcing?

4. On balance, is warming good or bad for humanity?

5. What is the most likely geothermal environment in 2100?

6. When is the next ice age expected, and what problems will it bring?

Only when the technical answers are in hand should we begin debating the global warming mitigation measures and their costs. Those who say “the science is settled” are pulling on your leg.

I have partially addressed these questions in previous posts. (See, for example, Junk Science, 4/10/06, You Say Warming, I Say Cooling, 6/6, Be Very Scared, 6/16, Global Warming Warriors, 6/18, Last Word on Global Warming, 6/20, Afterword, 6/23, Show me the Beef, 7/8, Bad Ideas, 7/9, Good Ideas, 7/10, Catastrophe!, 10/21.)

I think it’s worth more of my time and effort because of newly found references and a new group of scientific friends from Omnilore. I’ll look at the first question tomorrow.