Fanatics, heretics and the truth about Global WarmingBy Tom DeWeese"Oceans lash our coasts. Deserts Burn. The sky provides no shelter. Turmoil of Biblical proportions threatens not just our weather but life itself. Global Warming is upon us."Those words aren't from the preview trailer of the silly, overblown, over dramatic film, "Day After Tomorrow" that invaded movie theaters a few years ago. And they aren't just carefully selected "scare" words developed from a sweep through a thesaurus. These are the opening words to yet another hysterical diatribe passing as news these days on the subject of Global Warming. This particularly silly one greeted readers of a recent issue of Playboy Magazine. The article was, of course, accompanied by the obligatory pictures of smokes stacks belching over a city and the melting of ice burgs.    You hear it everywhere. Global Warming is a fact. It is here. It is now unstoppable. The Polar Ice Cap is melting. Polar Bears are endangered. Greenland is actually turning green! Hurricanes are blowing with more force. Tornadoes are growing in numbers. Water levels are increasing, threatening to flood New York City. Human existence is threatened. And, of course, the deserts are starting to burn. We are assured that scientists are in near total agreement with the assessment. The media is in a frenzy, rushing to report the latest news release from special interest groups with the latest report or prediction. Al Gore is rushing his hi tech docudrama to the theaters to whip up more frenzy. Corporations are being forced to turn "green" to show their "corporate social responsibility" in the wake of the coming disaster. Global Warming has become a euphemism for a political agenda. There is Socialism, Capitalism and Global Warmingism. It has become a religion run by fanatics reminiscent of the leaders of the darkest days of the Inquisition that nearly destroyed civil society only a few hundred years ago. We are not to question the great god of Global Warming.  Those who do are separated from civil society and labeled as heretics. So how can anyone question the decrees handed down from the Ivory Towers to the unwashed masses? Answer: every religion has its heretics. The simple truth is there is no scientific consensus on Global Warming. In fact, as the media frenzy screams global warming, there are a growing number of scientists who are expressing their doubts. In 1992, just prior to the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders signed The Heidelberg Appeal, a quiet call for reason in dealing with the climate change issue. Neither a statement or corporate interests, nor a denial of environmental problems, the Heidelberg Appeal expresses a conviction that modern society is the best equipped in human history to solve the world's ills, provided that they do not sacrifice science, intellectual honesty and common sense to political opportunism and irrational fears. Today, the Heidelberg Appeal has been signed by more than 4,000 scientists and leaders from 100 countries, including more than 70 Nobel Prize winners. Also in 1992, another statement from some 47 atmospheric scientists was issued saying "such policies (greenhouse global warming theories) derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. The statement cited a survey of atmospheric scientists, conducted in the summer of 1991, "confirms that there is no consensus about the cause of the slight warming observed during the past century." The statement went on to say, "We are disturbed that activists, anxious to stop energy and economic growth, are pushing ahead with drastic policies without taking notice of recent changes in the underlying science."In 1995, over 85 scientists and climate experts from research labs and universities worldwide, signed the Leipzig Declaration in answer to the International Symposium on the Greenhouse Controversy, held in Leipzig, Germany that year. In part, the Declaration says; "In a world in which poverty is the greatest social pollutant, any restriction on energy use that inhibits economic growth should be viewed with caution. For these reasons, we consider 'carbon taxes' and other drastic control policies – lacking credible support from the underlying science – to be ill-advised, premature, wrought with economic danger, and likely to be counterproductive."In 1997, a Gallop Poll of eminent North American climatologists shows that 83% did not support the claims of the green house theory of Global Warming. In 1998, The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) issued a petition for signature by atmospheric scientists saying there is no scientific evidence indicating that greenhouse gases cause global warming. That petition was signed by more than 17,000 scientists and leaders involved in the issue. Global Warming scaremongers have tried to discredit these statements from the opposition, saying either they are too old to be counted in today's debate or that they weren't signed by real scientists. Neither is true. One only has to look at the signers on the documents and statements to know who and what they are. The relevance of the documents can be answered in two ways. First, most of the signers of these documents from the 1990's hold the same positions today. Second, as is the fallacy in the Global Warming debate, such drastic climate changes, as described in the scaremongers diatribes, would not come about overnight. Though the proponents would have you believe otherwise, 15 years is but a microsecond in the study of the earth's activities.However, there is great question about the validity of the documents promoted by the Global Warming crowd. There is strong, documented evidence to show they care little about sound science and facts and much more about their political agenda. For example, in May of 1996, unannounced and possibly unauthorized changes to the United Nation's report on climate change touched off a firestorm of controversy within the scientific community. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the science group that advises the United Nations on the global warming issue, presented a draft of its report in December 1995, and it was approved by the delegations. However, when the printed report appeared in May 1996, it was discovered that substantial changes and deletions had been made to the body of the report to make it conform to the Policymakers Summery. Specifically, two key paragraphs written by the scientists were deleted. They said:1. "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases."2. "No study to date had positively attributed all or part of the climate change to …man-made causes."That was not the last time data has been manipulated by the IPCC to fit its political agenda. In 2005, a federal hurricane research scientist named Chris Landsea resigned from the UN-sponsored IPCC climate assessment team because his group's leader had politicized the process. Landsea said in his resignation letter, "It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity had been due to global warming." He went onto say, "I personally cannot in good faith contribute to a process that I view as being both motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."   In 2006, the voices of reason are speaking out louder than ever. Professor Bob Carter, a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, says the global warming theory is neither environmental or scientific, but rather, "a self-created political fiasco." Carter explains that "Climate changes occur naturally all the time, partly in predicable cycles and partly in unpredictable cycles." Meanwhile, more than 60 leading international climate change experts have gone on record to urge Canada's new Prime Minster to carefully review global warming policies, warning that '"Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause." In April, 2006, using temperature readings from the past 100 years, 1,000 computer simulations and the evidence left in ancient tree rings, Duke University scientists announced that "the magnitude of future global warming will likely fall well short of current highest predictions." The study was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Gabriele Hegerl of Duke's Nicholas Schools of the Environment and Earth Sciences said her study discounts dire predictions of skyrocketing temperatures.In 2004 the Heartland Institute published a report by Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Lindzen reported that global warming is unlikely to be a dangerous future problem, with or without the implementation of such programs as the Kyoto Protocol. Lindzen, a member of the IPCC and one of the world's leading climatologists, said that alarmist media claims to the contrary are fueled more by politics than by science. Said Dr. Lindzen, "With respect to science, consensus is often simply a sop to scientific illiteracy. After all, if what you are told is alleged to be supported by all scientists, then why do you have to bother to understand it? You can simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief, and you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists except for a handful of corrupted heretics."      So why, if scientists are researching the issue and if there is no consensus that global warming is a reality, is this voice not being heard? Why is a near panic building in the news media, on Capitol Hill and in research labs across the nation and in the international community?Answer: fear and money. Simply put, scientists know where the grants will come from to pay their salaries.  Dr. Patrick Michaels, a leading opponent to the global warming scaremongers, calls it the federal/science paradigm. He describes it this way: Tax $ = Grants = Positive Feedback Loop to Get more Grants. Says Dr. Michaels, "What worker bee scientist is going to write a proposal saying that global warming is exaggerated and he doesn't need the money? Certainly no one wanting advancement in the agency! There is no alternative to this process when paradigms compete with each other for finite funding." The only ones who can openly oppose the party line of the day are those who don't need the grants or who have some other source of funding. There aren't many.                The money is in global warming because it's being pushed by a political agenda that wants power. Power in Washington. Power on the international stage. Power over economic development. Power over international monetary decisions. Power over energy. In short, power over the motor of the world. It's driven by literally thousands of large and small non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sanctioned by the United Nations, and implemented by a horde of bureaucrats, university academics and an ignorant but pliable news media.  Case in point. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) used to publish the journal Science. Since 2000, it has published roughly 75 commentaries which have supported the idea that global warming is a serious problem requiring massive solutions. Now, the AAAS acts as a massive lobbying operation pushing this agenda. Taxpayers have now provided $20 billion into the scientific community for global warming work. Moreover, Science and its British counterpart Nature won't publish articles to the contrary of the agenda. If a scientist wants the prestige of being published, then he must carry the global warming banner. According to Dr. Michaels, this is how it works: "They take a little truth and distort it or study it into a lot of revenue for them. Them = Academia + Environmental non governmental organizations + private scientific fields + Government + all the associated public and private organizations supporting this shell."Concludes Dr. Michaels in his landmark book, Meltdown, "This junk science works for the fish movement, smart growth, sustaining development, rapid transit, wet lands, critical areas, water rights, property rights, fossil fuels, logging, justifying huge government and environmental land wildlife corridor buy ups with public money, changing regulatory laws, changing high court opinions, escalating enforcement codes, on and on."  It's all thrown into the offering plate as the taxpayer sits in the pew of the Church of Global Warming.Federal spending on climate research has ballooned since the early 1990's from a few hundred million dollars to $1.7 billion today. As Dr. Michaels points out, scientists who don't toe the party line don't share in that bounty.Blasphemy or not, here's the truth about Global Warming.   As reported by Dr. Lindzen, "The global mean temperature is never constant, and it has no choice but to increase or decrease – both of which it does on all known time scales. That this quantity has increased about 0.6 degrees C (or about 1 degree F) over the past century is likely. A relevant question is whether this is anything to worry about."Professor Bob Carter says the pubic has been brainwashed by politicians and bureaucrats into believing world industrialization has created "climate change" that will lead to widespread disaster. However, he shows that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940 before industrialization really began, followed by a cooling between 1940 and 1965, a period during which human-caused emissions were accelerating.   In fact, looking deeper into history reveals that global warming and cooling are simply a regular occurrence. According to Robert Essenhigh, Professor of energy conservation at Ohio State University, the ice sheets at the poles have been melting since the early 1900's and the Earth's warming had begun about the middle 1600s. That warming trend followed a 300 – 400 year cooling period, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, which came after the much hotter Medieval Warm Period, running roughly A.D.900 to 1300. During that period, the Vikings had two settlements on the west coast of Greenland. The settlements vanished with the onset of the Little Ice Age. This is the same area global warming scare mongers are panicked over because some grass is now growing there. In fact, history shows such growth is nothing new.We are told, however that man-made carbon dioxide is the source of the global warming problem. As Professor Essenhigh asks, "what has carbon dioxide to do with this"?He explains, "the two principled thermal-absorbing and thermal-emitting compounds in the atmosphere are water and carbon dioxide. However – and this point is continually missed – the ratio of water to carbon dioxide is something like 30-to-1 as an average value. At the top it is something like 100-to-1.  This means that the carbon dioxide is simply 'noise' in the water concentration, and anything carbon dioxide could do, water has already done." "So," he asks, "if the carbon dioxide is increasing, is it the carbon dioxide driving the temperature or is the rising temperature driving up the carbon dioxide"?  In other words, the carbon dioxide issue is irrelevant to the debate over global warming.            But what about all of those storms? We can see the weather changing before our eyes, we're told. We are experiencing death, destruction, plagues, extinction, biblical catastrophes at alarming rates.  Any fool can see… Those reports simply show how effective the propaganda machine has been. The truth about the hurricanes is that during the past 35 years, the average number of "significant" tropical cyclones in the southern regions, including the Pacific Ocean and the Southern Indian Ocean, is about 28.5 storms per year. The breakdown by decade is: 1970s – 32.9; 1980s- 27.8; 1990s – 29.1; and the 2000s, so far – 25.0 It is interesting to note that so far in the 2000s the numbers are actually below average. Even if one calculates just the last ten years it only amounts to 28.5 – well within the average. The fact is, researchers are now looking into Hurricane Katrina to determine its true strength. It is currently listed as a category 4 storm. But will probably be downgraded to a category 3. It is important to remember that the disaster of New Orleans was a result of bad government not taking care of the levies. There was relatively little actual hurricane damage. Ice is melting on the edge of the caps because it always melts in the summer. But research shows that the core of the ice is actually thicker than ever. And the burning deserts? Well, that's what deserts do, isn't it? It's easy to distort the facts when you start from the premise that global warming is a fact and then one must only gather details to support the premise. It's easy to find film footage of natural occurrences like melting ice and beached whales and then put your own caption on it -- especially when you are armed with millions of dollars in grant money and an impressive title to go with it. A published report in a prestigious magazine accompanied by a news story in a major news paper will lead to speeches in front of a gathering of ones peers and on to a book deal. It's good to go along to get along. So look out this summer. The Global Warming machine will be in full charge mode as Al Gore invades theaters with his new documentary entitled "An Inconvenient Truth." The primal panic will reach a deafening scream, sure to drown out the voice of reason and truth. The one that says there is no global warming!                      Tom DeWeese is president of the American Policy Center and editor of the DeWeese Report. Contact information: [email protected]