Lindsay Perigo: Warming Up The Kyoto Science

The American president is in Europe, being demonstrated against by sundry statist scum, foot-soldiers in the "anti-industrial revolution" as Ayn Rand called it. Specifically, Mr Bush stands indicted for pulling America out of the Kyoto Accord, which would close down western industry & return us to the primordial ooze which is the scums' natural habitat. Carbon Dioxide emissions, the scum claim, are bringing on the Apocalypse. The scums' chorus became louder last week with the release of a new report on climate change by America's National Academy of Sciences. The scum went rampant through the media, claiming the report confirmed once & for all that man-made global warming is real & that it's a terminal threat to the planet. Well, hold on a minute! Let me quote one of the members of the Academy, meteorology professor Richard Lindzen, who had this to say in the Wall St. Journal of June 11:

"CNN's Michelle Mitchell was typical of the coverage when she declared that the report represented 'a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room.'

"As one of 11 scientists who prepared the report, I can state that this is simply untrue. For starters, the NAS never asks that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but rather that the report represent the span of views. This the full report did, making clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them.

"As usual, far too much public attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. The summary began with a zinger -- that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise, etc., before following with the necessary qualifications. For example, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long-term trends, but the summary forgot to mention this.

"Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds).

"But -- and I cannot stress this enough -- we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions.

"One reason for this uncertainty is that, as the report states, the climate is always changing; change is the norm. Two centuries ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from a little ice age. A millennium ago, during the Middle Ages, the same region was in a warm period. Thirty years ago, we were concerned with global cooling."

Several paragraphs later, Professor Lindzen concludes:

"Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens. This is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and the NAS. It is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational decisions. A fairer view of the science will show that there is still a vast amount of uncertainty -- far more than advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge -- and that the NAS report has hardly ended the debate. Nor was it meant to."

There never WAS a debate as far as the scum were concerned. Their object all along has been simply to bring reason, science, industry & capitalism to their knees. Communism failed them; now their weapon is "global warming." Do not be taken in by their scare-mongering. Rather, as the winter temperatures reach record lows in this part of the world (global warming? We wish!), say a silent thank you to the minds that made possible every single Carbon Dioxide emission that ever resulted from the production of the electricity that powers the heaters ... that keep you from freezing to death.

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For Lindsay Perigo's daily "Politically Incorrect Show" editorials, visit: http://www.freeradical.co.nz or listen to Radio Pacific from noon to 2pm weekdays.

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