The Science of Global Warming
                                         
By David A. Noebel
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          Just when it seems that Ted Turner is beginning to relax and make some sense (he is launching a $200 million partnership with Lutherans and Methodists to fight malaria in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Africa), he proves once again that old dogs have a difficult time learning new tricks.  Either that, or his lithium meds need to be reprogrammed! 
 
          Soon after announcing his promising and highly doable anti-malaria campaign he tells the world that global warming "could lead to cannibalism."  His answer-stabilize the population!  "We've too many people, that's why we have global warming.  Too many people are using too much stuff."  Ted's way to stabilize the population-have couples pledge to have only one or two children. 
 
          Mr. Turner may wish to volunteer his services to Barack Obama if he becomes his party's candidate for the U. S. presidency since BHO says one of his first cabinet appointments will be Al Gore. He wants Al to take charge of climate change. Al's first fact-finding trip may be to the sun (at night, of course) to find out why it's allowing humankind to do its job of heating up the earth. He may include side trips to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn to see why they're also warming even without the help of SUVs or too many children breathing out CO2. (We have to maintain a sense of humor in our discussions on climate change with the likes of Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Ted Turner, and Jimmy Carter lest we plunge into the abyss with them!)
 
          What drives me close to the edge of that abyss is seeing the contradictions between the alarmists, the climate scientists and the regular guy or gal on the street.  While reading Ted's 10- to 40-year projection on the fate of this miserable planet, I'm also reading the following:
 
a)     U.S. National Climatic Data reports average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the twentieth century mean for the first time since 1982. (London Telegraph, Feb. 26, 2008 article by Catherine Elsworth)
b)     Temperatures were colder than average across central Asia, the Middle East, western United States, western Alaska, and southeastern China. (Ibid.)
c)     The largest January snow cover extent on record was reported for the Eurasian continent and Northern Hemisphere. (Ibid.)
d)     Snow fell for the first time in recorded history in parts of China and central Asia. (Ibid.)
e)     In Yushu, Guoluo, and Huangnan Tibet Autonomous Prefectures, most of the grassland was covered by snow, usually 16 to 32 cm thick, bringing great losses to local animal husbandry. (China View, March 2, 2008 at news.xinhuanet.com/english)
f)       A month-long cold spell in Vietnam killed tens of thousands of cattle. (World, March 22/29, 2008)
g)     Record snowfall in Juneau, Alaska. (Juneau Empire.com, April 19, 2008)
h)     Sweden records coldest Easter in more than 100 years. (John Ray, Greenie Watch, March 29, 2008)
i)        A violent cold front moved down from the Arctic upon places like Nikkaloukta, Northern Lappland that experienced 41 degrees below zero temperatures. (John Ray, Ibid.)
j)        Greenland's last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century.  In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the 19th century. (Patrick Michaels, Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2008)
k)      For the contiguous U.S., the average temperature for January was below the twentieth century mean and the forty-ninth coolest January on record. (London Telegraph, Feb. 26, 2008, op.cit.)
l)        Much of North America suffered the heaviest snowfalls since the 1960s. (Ibid.)
m)  The January 2008 Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent was significantly above the 1979-2000 mean, ranking as the largest sea ice extent in January over the 30-year historical period. (Ibid.)
n)     Canada's National Post reported that there were so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec that the property market suffered because buyers did not want to go outside. (Ibid.)
o)     The Arctic winter has been so severe that the ice has not only recovered, but is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than it was at the same time last year. (Ibid.)
p)     In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabbibullo Abdusamaatov predicted the sun would soon peak, triggering a rapid decline in world temperatures.  Only last month, the view was echoed by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, who advised the world to stock up on fur coats.  Sorokhtin, who calls humanity's contribution to climate change "a drop in the bucket," predicts the solar minimum to occur by the year 2040, with icy weather lasting till 2100 or beyond. (Daily Tech, Feb. 9, 2008 article by Michael Asher)
q)     Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, meaning that global temperatures have not risen since 1998. (BBC News U.K., April 4, 2008)
r)       Most of Antarctica is cooling, though the newspapers somehow won't be telling you that. (Lord Monckton, Science and Public Policy Institute, March 4, 2008)
s)     For the last seven years temperatures globally have been falling at a rate of nearly 1 degree F per decade and I bet you haven't heard that on CBS. (Lord Monckton, Ibid.)
t)        The planet has not warmed appreciably since 1998…eight of the last ten years have not been the hottest in history. (Lorne Gunter, National Post, April 21, 2008)
u)     Physicist Phil Chapman said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 C.  This is the fastest temperature change in the instrument record and it puts us back to where we were in 1930. (Fox News, April 23, 2008)
 
What's so frustrating about the findings listed above is that so little of it gets the attention of the national news media.  I read that CBS News reported 38 stories on why human activity (driving that SUV, smoking, eating beans, breathing out CO2) is causing global warming and only 1 on the other side.
 
          In an article published in Canada's National Post (Feb. 25, 2008), Lorne Gunter maintains that the issue we'll be facing before too long won't be global warming, but "a new ice age."  He writes, "And remember the Arctic Sea ice?  The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its lowest levels on record.  Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.  The ice is back." (According to the March 8/15, 2008 World magazine, "polar ice levels…have roared back over the winter to near their original size.")
 
          He quotes Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council, who is convinced that we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.  Tapping maintains that the last time the sun was this quiet, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted for five centuries, ending in 1850. 
 
          Nicola Scafetta and Bruce J. West, research scientists at Duke University, published a paper in Physics Today (March 2008) and agreed with Tapping.  According to Scafetta and West many solar researchers are predicting a significant global cooling due to the sun's slow down in activity.  (World, March 22/29, 2008)
 
          And this morning (April 2, 2008), the Colorado Springs Gazette reports that a "nongovernmental panel of renowned scientists recently concluded that not only is the slight warming of the atmosphere in recent decades insignificant, there now are signs of cooling, and even so, temperature fluctuations most likely are naturally occurring, and a resumption of warming would even be beneficial." 
 
          Let me also mention that "all four major global temperature monitoring organizations (Hadley, NASA, UAH, and RSS) have released data documenting that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.  The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C to 0.75C.  This is the single fastest temperature change ever recorded-either up or down-for all four organizations" (see http://epw.senate.gov/public). Such contradictions should drive us to reread Michael Crichton's insightful book State of Fear.
 
          Listen as Crichton explains the situation in down-to-earth language:
 
Drake paced. He looked unhappy. "But it just doesn't make sense," he said. "It's not logical to say that freezing weather is caused by global warming."
"What's logic got to do with it?" Henley said. "All we need is for the media to report it. After all, most Americans believe that crime in their country is increasing, when it has actually been declining for twelve years. . . . There is no greater proof that all reality is media reality."
"Just think how far we have come!" Henley said. "Back in the 1970s, all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming.  They thought the world was getting colder. But once the notion of global warming was raised they immediately recognized the advantages. Global warming creates a crisis, a call to action. A crisis needs to be studied, it needs to be funded, it needs political and bureaucratic structures around the world. And in no time at all, a huge number of meteorologists, geologists, and oceanographers suddenly became 'climate scientists' engaged in the management of the crisis.  This will be the same, Nicholas."
"Stop whining.  Don't you remember how long it took to establish the global threat of nuclear winter, Nicholas? It took five days. On one Saturday in 1983, nobody in the world had ever heard of nuclear winter. Then a big media conference was held and by the following Wednesday the entire world was worried about nuclear winter. It was established as a bona fide threat to the planet.  Without a single published scientific paper."
"Five days, Nicholas, five days!" Henley said (pp. 315-316).
 
          Let's look at this scenario another way. If the earth is experiencing man-made global warming, that proves we desperately need world government. And if the earth is experiencing global cooling, that also proves we desperately need world government!  World crisis requires world government! World government requires United Nations.  United Nations requires a worldwide tax scheme to fund the battle against global warming.  
 
          Every liberal leftwing socialist is preaching the gospel of global warming with global governance embedded in that gospel. For example, Paul Kurtz, editor of Free Inquiry and head of a major Secular Humanist organization centered in Amherst, New York, pontificates in his Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call For A New Planetary Humanism, "Global warming is probably on the increase, in part as a consequence of deforestation in poor countries and atmospheric carbon-dioxide emissions, especially in the affluent nations." His solution: "Nation-states must transfer some of their sovereignty to a system of transnational authority. . . . The world needs at some point in the future to establish an effective World Parliament. . . . We recommend an international system of taxation in order to assist the underdeveloped sectors of the human family and to fulfill social needs not fulfilled by market forces."
 
          Tony Blankley put it like this:  "The liberal world order will not let go of their global-warming assault on free economics until hell freezes over-by which point, obviously, the global-warming theory will be visibly disproven." (Washington Times, April 16, 2008)
 
            So ask yourself if you'd mind a temperature increase of 1or 2 degrees F or C over a 100-year period which is what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data at the University of Alabama in Huntsville predicts. (See Baptist Press, March 20, 2008 article by John R. Christy.)    And while the global warming crowd preaches "hardship on the poor" as an excuse to take away your SUV and allow you to bathe once a month, ask yourself this question: Wouldn't it be better to eradicate malaria, treat a host of other diseases, and dig 10,000 water wells for the poor than to spend hundreds of billions of dollars (some estimates put the figure at trillions by 2050) fighting climate change that won't make even a minor dent in the global temperature? It's not difficult to answer this question! 
 
Let's also ask ourselves who really benefits from the sale of carbon footprints. It's not the poor! It is Al Gore!  In fact, according to Lord Monckton, NASA James Hansen and Al Gore have some financial arrangements amongst them. (SPPI, March 4, 2008) And Al, along with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, propose furthering the "New Baptist Covenant," a fresh split off the Southern Baptist Convention, to "pool their resources and voices to push for things that really matter, like universal health coverage and fighting global warming" (First Things, April 2008, p. 71).
 
          But this isn't the end of the matter! In fact, it's not even the beginning of the end. Let's say for argument's sake that after spending hundreds of billions of US taxpayers' dollars, they accomplish their objective-they stop the rise of global temperature in its tracks.  In stabilizing the weather, they also stabilize the population (a University of Texas professor insists the world needs to find a way to deplete itself by 90 percent). They send our dirty, filthy, God-fearing capitalistic system of greed, arrogance, violence, hard work, and lack of vision back to the dustbin of history so they as socialists can fulfill their promises of a new heaven on earth. Maurice F. Strong, senior advisor to numerous U.N. Secretaries General, states it clearly: "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring it about?"
 
Strong served as the first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). He merits 11 pages in Wikipedia! He's a major player in trying to achieve the above-mentioned goal, along with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). It is reported that "poor countries want firm commitments of billions of dollars in aid from their rich counterparts," and they want this aid sent through the UNFCC! (Reuters, April 5, 2008). Global warming is a scheme to transfer wealth from the West with a modicum of freedom and education to poor countries kept poor by their lack of freedom to excel and lack of education, countries even more Marxist and corrupt than the U.N.! 
 
But I wander.  At Jane Fonda's celebration party for stopping global warming in its tracts, the news comes over her green-powered plasma TV that a volcano, the equivalent of five Mount Pinatubo's, erupted in an explosion of cataclysmic violence and covered the globe while at the same time a number of volcanoes under the ocean erupted as well, spewing out greenhouses gases that make all the efforts of the human race to deplete such pollution pale into insignificance.  You say, "no way!"  Al Gore and Bill Clinton (or his wife) can certainly wrestle volcanoes to the ground and stop their corrupting the atmosphere and the very air that women and children so desperately require.
 
          Well listen and listen hard…the Colorado Springs Gazette (March 30, 2008) reported, "A cloud of sulfur dioxide gas and ash [is] rising from the Halemaumau crater of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on Wednesday [March 26, 2008]. Big Island Mayor Harry Kim says it may be necessary to evacuate some areas around the volcano because the release of 2,000 tons of toxic gas into the air every day is causing concern for the health and safety of nearby residents" (p. A17).
 
          Instead of trying to manage the weather to fit their definition of warm and cool, hot and cold, why don't the global warming quartet of Gore, Clinton, Turner, and Carter fly to Hawaii in Al's private gas-guzzling jet to help Mayor Kim put a halt to the 2,000 tons of toxic gas being emitted into the atmosphere every single day, surely raising global temperatures astronomically!  Why isn't the global warming crowd doing something, anything, right now about mini-Mt Pinatubo?
 
You and I know the answer! It's because they can't do anything about it just as they can't do anything about the weather. It's called nature, Al, Bill, Ted, and Jimmy! A recent U.N. report included a whole section about human activity ("vehicles of selfish genes," according to Richard Dawkins) creating global warming, yet not a single word was said about the sun or its activity. Why is it so hard to admit that God's sun (see Genesis 1) is responsible for keeping the Earth warm and livable?
 
But since I've come this close to looking into the abyss, my new philosophy is fast becoming,  "Who cares what CBS News reports!"  I'm going outdoors to enjoy some warm weather.