Pat Dollard | Young Americans

TPS made his first splash on the net with a comment posted here which became famous under the name “I Am A Student Of History”. It soon caught Team Obama’s attention.

TPS will be joining us as a contributing editor, with his debut post tomorrow.

TPS’s comment to post: 2008: A Very Bad Year For The “Man-Made Global Warming” Cultists

“Global Warming? Questions From a Non-Scientist That Deserve Direct Answers”

by TPS

Did you know that over the past century, our media has been arguing that unless we change our ways, we are going to either freeze to death or join Satan in the southwest corner of Hell? Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself (more on that point below).

Some among us, with a megaphone and platform from which to shout, are desperately trying to convince the rest of us that global warming is a manmade phenomenon. The primary thrust of their argument is we mortals have a very limited window of time within which to act to save the world from a disaster of our own making. Unless we find a way to reduce dramatically carbon dioxide emissions, they claim, the polar ice caps will melt, sea levels will rise over the next century, hurricanes will appear over the Field of Dreams in Iowa, and pigs will sprout wings. (Ok, maybe not that last one.)

But is any of this true? I am not a scientist, but I know a little something about history and politics, and my parents and teachers instilled within me more than a dollop of common sense. I think that common sense and a little historical context is about all you need to understand this entire issue.

As I have been explaining to my law and history students for the past 16 years, humans have a natural tendency to use their own short life spans as a yardstick for measuring what is “normal.” For example, some people remember that winters were colder when they were kids and the snow was deeper and more plentiful. Therefore, when the media tells us the winters are a bit warmer today and snowfall less plentiful, the natural conclusion of the uninformed and non-thinking among us is that what is happening today is “abnormal”—and thus something to fear.

Here is another example, this one dealing with presidential politics. If you don’t know history, then you accept the media-hyped accusation that the current Patriot Act is the greatest single threat to our liberty ever forced upon us by a president. You don’t need to be a strong George Bush supporter (I am not) to know that such a charge is patently ridiculous. Even a cursory understanding of what Abraham Lincoln did during his presidency to keep the Union together (suspending Habeas Corpus, jailing opponents, and exiling a Congressman for speaking out in a manner that might help the enemy are just three examples) demonstrates Bush’s actions are tame by comparison. But I don’t know anyone who was alive in 1861 so many people use their own limited life experience to determine what is “normal.” The same thing is happening (again) with the global warming hysteria sweeping the world.

For the sake of discussion, let’s ignore the movement’s socialist underpinnings of redistributing the world’s wealth, and forget that atheists and the irreligious proselytize global warming more fervently than the Church of Latter Day Saints collects genealogical data. Let’s assume instead that we have an earth that might be slightly warming. (Even this is debatable.)

What follows are thirteen factual statements followed by a question. Each is seriously posited and respectfully submitted, and each deserves a straightforward answer in order to discover whether a rising temperature on earth is something unusual or even manmade. Everyone who advocates manmade global warming should be able to answer these questions with convincing data and a straight face.

1. Proponents of manmade global warming are deeply concerned that unless the world acts now, the mean temperature of the earth may rise a few degrees over the next century. In other words, today’s temperature would become “abnormal,” and hence we must change our way of life to prevent that from occurring. According to the world’s scientists, the mean temperature of the earth has risen 6/10s of one degree Celsius in the past one hundred years. But the earth has experienced dramatically different mean temperatures over its billions of years of existence; indeed, it has witnessed widely varying temperatures over the just the past two millennia, and over the last several centuries.

QUESTION: How do we know that today’s mean temperature is “normal”? How do we know it is the temperature we should be altering our entire way of life for in order to preserve?

2. The Earth has experienced several ice ages. An ice age is s cyclical event triggered by a lengthy decline in the earth’s temperature harsh enough to expand the polar ice sheets, continental ice sheets, and mountain glaciers. The climate change was so severe that in places where I played baseball as a kid, ice sheets were a mile or more thick. This evidence is rooted in decades of hard demonstrable geological, chemical, and paleontological science. The last ice age ended roughly 8,000 B.C.

QUESTION: What stimulus triggered the earth to cool so dramatically for such long periods?

3. The reason the earth has had several ice ages is because each has, at some point, ended. The earth’s atmosphere warmed over a long period of time dramatically enough to cause the massive ice fields to recede and the sprawling polar caps to break apart and melt.

QUESTION: What stimulus triggered the earth to warm so dramatically as to bring about the end of each major ice age?

4. Sunspots appear as dark patches on the face of the sun (some as wide as 50,000 miles) because they are cooler than the rest of the star. Sunspots contract and expand, and appear and disappear over time because of rotation of the sun.

Question: How do sunspots affect the mean temperature on earth, and can we control the size and intensity of sunspots? If we cannot, how can altering our way of life here control Earth’s mean temperature?

5. Every time a location on earth experiences a heat wave or some other natural event linked to heat (a warm winter, an early spring, etc.), major media outlets routinely comment that these events are simply more evidence that global warming is underway, and that man is the cause of the warming. Last year, California suffered a massive freeze that ruined its citrus crop, upstate New York was blanketed under 11 feet of snow, and the center of the country has been frozen for weeks with sub-zero temperatures.

QUESTION: Why aren’t these events mentioned by the same reporters and editorialists as evidence contradicting manmade global warming?

6. Viking explorer Erik the Red sailed to and settled southern Greenland about 982 A.D. At that time, the southern fjords were rich with greenery and the climate was much warmer than it is now. It was so hospitable that his people dressed in what we might today call “mini-skirts,” farmed the land, and lived there for more than four centuries. Over the course of those centuries, however, the mean temperature of the region slowly declined and glaciers spread. This eventually made it too difficult to farm and the Viking settlers abandoned Greenland.

QUESTION: Was the “normal” or “right” temperature range for southern Greenland the climate Erik the Red found in 982 A.D., or the much colder temperature that grips Greenland today? (Given how old the earth is and for how short a time we have been accurately measuring temperatures, how do you know what is “normal” or “right” for Greenland, or for anywhere for that matter?)

7. Speaking of Greenland (and with a hat tip to Patrick J. Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media): In late 2005, Science ran a study showing that satellite data confirmed Erik the Red’s former domicile was shedding roughly 25 cubic miles of ice each year. Media reports to this effect, offered without context, have alarmed many people. (“Miles of ice are breaking off and melting each year? Oh my God!”) However, taking into consideration the size of Greenland’s ice mass, the continent was losing (are you ready?) 0.04 percent of its ice mass per century. As Dr. Michaels pointed out recently, “was” is the operative word in the Science article. The distinguished publication noted in a subsequent piece that the recent acceleration of Greenland’s ice loss from its huge glaciers has . . . suddenly reversed.

QUESTION: If losing roughly .04 percent of its mass per century is proof of manmade global warming, then the suddenly reversal of this trend is proof of global cooling, right? (And for you Titanic buffs: what did she strike on the night of April 14, 1912? That rights, a large iceberg. She was traveling through a large field of ice. And where did it come from? That’s right, it broke off the continental ice shelf—a century ago.)

8. Legitimate scientists will never claim they possess absolute knowledge of either nature or of the behavior of the subject of the field of study. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Isaac Newton’s Newtonian law of gravitation was considered to be a universal truth—an established scientific fact beyond debate. In the early 1900s, however, Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity proved that Newton’s theory was not universally true (it does not stand up in experiments involving motion at speeds approaching the speed of light or in close proximity of strong gravitational fields). What had long been considered “established scientific fact” was overturned by decades of rigorous scientific debate and intense arguments. Today, some people call the manmade global warming thesis “established fact” and that those who take issue with it are in the same cap as “holocaust deniers.” Let’s assume for the sake of discussion the earth’s mean temperature has in fact increased slightly over the past century.

QUESTION: Is rigorous scientific debate about the cause of the planet’s warming (manmade or a natural cyclical event) more likely to establish the reason for the warming, or less likely to establish that reason?

9. The “Little Ice Age” was a significant centuries-long cooling period stretching from approximately the 13th Century AD to the early 19th Century AD. (Scientists agree the period was substantially cooler, but are unsure exactly when it began.) The earth’s climate began to warm again in the middle of the 1800s. At that time, manmade “greenhouse” gases were but a fraction of what they are today.

Question: What triggered the dramatic cooling in the 13th Century, allowed it to maintain itself for six hundred years, and then ended it with the beginning of a new warming period if it was not manmade “greenhouse” gases?

10. According to NASA, the southern polar ice cap on Mars is melting rapidly, uncovering “frosty” mountains and other never-before-seen geologic formations. Scientists believe the reason why is that carbon dioxide is filling the atmosphere, which is thickening.

QUESTION: Since Martian SUVs, industrial plants, and flatuous cattle are not driving, polluting, or farting their way across the Martian landscape, how can we account for the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide and change in temperature on Mars?

12. After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, media outlets quoted “credible scientists” that it was the result of global warming, and that the 2006 hurricane season would be one of the worst on record because of man’s disrespect for Mother Earth. In fact, 2006 might one day be called “hurricane free” because it was one of the mildest on record.

QUESTION: Why did the media claim an intense hurricane season would be “proof” of the effects of global warming, but then fail to mention that the weak hurricane season must mean the exact opposite—that it is evidence there is no manmade global warming?

And so we return where we began, with the nearly always fallible media. (Yes, this next fact pattern-question is a bit longer than the first twelve, but perhaps it is the most important of them all. Hopefully, it will trigger the light-bulb-over-the-head phenomenon for those among us who still possess the ability to reason.)

13. Since 1895, there have four (4) different “cycles” during which major print (and now radio, TV, and internet) media predicted a looming climate “crisis.” Claims ranged from the “wiping out” of Canada to famines in which “billions will die.” In the 1950s, media claimed that the Man vs. Nature “war” was direr than the possibility of nuclear destruction. Global cooling—“the coming ice age”—was all the rage in the mid-1970s. In fact, the claim that we would all be living in deep freeze by the year 2000 if we did not change the way we consumed oil and conducted our lives made the front pages of major newspapers and news magazines (including Newsweek in 1975). “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects,” warned the 1975 Newsweek article. “But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies,” Newsweek continued. “The longer the planners delay the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Like today, some people were demanding thirty years ago that we must take dramatic steps to halt the inevitable expansion of ice. Suggestions then included melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers to melt the ice. (Yes, you read that right.) Today’s suggestions are no less loony, and include Al Gore’s idea of eliminating the combustion engine to stuffing corks into cows’ behinds because they produce methane (a “greenhouse” gas).

QUESTION: Here is the final query. You are betting your future that your politicians and fellow citizens get this one right: Given the diametrically opposed shrill declarations of doom that have saturated our news outlets for more than 100 years, can we trust what the media tells us today about the “science” of global warming?

When I was a youngster, my dad used to throw salt onto the driveway ice to melt it. The next time you hear someone feeding you a line about how man is driving global warming and we must radically change the way we live—take it with a grain of salt. And ask them to answer some of the questions. I guarantee you that the look on their face will be priceless.