All in a Good Cause
Orson Scott Card at The Ornery American - the best description I've read so far of the human-induced-global-warming lie. I'd call it a hoax, but the people pushing it are deadly serious. And, though lots of them are just riding the bandwagon, and actually believe their anthem's lyrics, the original lie that created the Global Climate Change religion was entirely intentional. [clairefiles]
Looks like I'm going to have to read Unstoppable Global Warming and Shattered Consensus.
Bottom line: the earth is now in the warming phase of a natural, solar-caused, temperature cycle. There is no reason to panic and nothing whatsoever we can do about it, except what humans do best, adapt.
Here's the raw truth:
All the computer models are wrong. They have not only failed to predict the future, they can't even predict that past.
That is, when you run their software with the data from, say, the 1970s or 1980s, and project what should happen in the 1990s or 2000s, they project results that have absolutely nothing to do with the known climate data for those decades.
In other words, the models don't work. The only way to make them "work" is to take the known results and then fiddle with the software until it finally produces them. That's not how honest science is done.
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Science isn't done by consensus. It's done by rigorous testing. When a hypothesis -- or a computer model -- fails to correspond to the actual real-world data, you throw it out.
That's what the real climate scientists are doing. They have found, in recent years, a very close correspondence between global climate and variations in the amount of radiation the Earth receives from the Sun.
The light and heat we get varies depending on the distance and position of the Earth and the amount of radiation the Sun puts out. The Earth's distance and position seem to determine the big cycles -- the Ice Ages -- and the Sun's variations seem to determine the smaller climate cycles.
We have historical data indicating several global warm periods. There was one during the heyday of the Roman Empire; then there was a global cooling during the Dark Ages (beginning about 600 a.d.) The Medieval Warming kicked in about 950, followed by the Little Ice Age beginning about 1300.
The Little Ice Age ended in about 1860. You'll notice that most reports on our modern Global Warming set that as their base point, and leave out all prior warmings.
But those warm periods are real, as are the cool periods. Ice core samples from various places around the world back it up, as do ocean floor samples. In fact, the predictions based on the 1500-year (approximately) solar cycle are borne out everywhere.
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We can't stop global warming or cooling. We simply don't have the power to do it. We can't heat up or cool down the sun; we can't jiggle the Earth in its orbit or change its position. We'd be idiots to try, even if such unimaginable powers came within our reach.
So we'll continue, as long as the human race persists, to have ice ages and warm periods, with relatively minor oscillations (like the Little Ice Age and our current warm period) in between.
In fact, what we have right now, while we are not yet as warm as the peak of the Medieval Warming (a fact that Mann and others have tried to deny or obscure), is a superb climate that is making life better for people all over the world. It's the cold periods that cause famines and population drops, and promote plagues and floods.
We should be grateful.
Instead we are being hit with dire warnings, every one of which is either false or a normal part of the Earth's history; our business should be to adapt to the unavoidable solar-caused warming, not to destroy the worldwide economy in order to prevent something that human activity is not causing.
Because the "solutions" proposed by the alarmists do not solve anything -- and they admit it! The drastic proscriptions of the Kyoto Protocols, even if anybody were actually following them, would not have had any effect on Global Warming, even if it had been caused by human CO2 emissions.
Do you understand that? When Al Gore goes on and on about what we must do to save the Earth, he knows -- and everybody involved with the Global Warming alarmist movement knows -- that none of their drastic proposals would have the slightest effect on Global Warming even if it worked they way their fantasies say it does.
So why do they propose it? There are many personal motives, of course, but when you look at the non-solution "solutions" they propose, the pattern is clear: They are not trying to stop global warming. They are trying to punish the Western democracies for being richer than the rest of the world.
