Here Comes the Assault

Since 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been trying to convince western populations that their lifestyle is the cause of a global warming that will destroy life on earth. Before that, from the 1970s and 80s, the same people were telling the world's populations that they were the cause of global cooling that would destroy life on earth. And in case you were unmoved by those disaster senarios, there was the population explosion that would destroy civilization as we know it. Of course, all three were all man's fault. (Do you notice a pattern here? Man is evil?)

With the 4th IPCC Assessment Report due out in 2007, you can be sure that between now and then there will be a massive push to scare the American people into believing the earth will end if we all don't indulge in an orgy of self-sacrifice.

This push came to the Detroit area today via an article in the Ideas section of The Detroit News titled "Global Warming Can we slow it down?"

The article, by Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein, has a large photo of a little girl standing on railroad track as a large locomotive is bearing down on her. Evidently the locomotive is supposed to be Global Warming and the fact that the girl is still alive means that there is still time to do something about global warming.
The message is obvious: submit to the will of the environmentalists and politicians and the media who support them, or the little girl-presumably representing future generations-dies.

The article points out that:
"It's just an ad, part of a campaign from the advocacy group Environmental Defense, which hopes to convince Americans that they can do something about global warming, that there's still time."

One of the things they could do to is be honest with Americans and tell them that GW is not going to have bad consequences. Also, Mr. Borenstein could have informed his readers that Environmental Defense is a far left advocacy group with strong anti-free market leanings. However:

"But many scientists are not so sure that the oncoming train of global warming can be avoided. Temperatures are going to rise for decades to come because the chief gas that causes global warming lingers in the atmosphere for about a century." There is no mention of why when most of the "chief gas" was being pumped into the atmosphere between 1940 and 1975, the planet cooled. But we can't let a few facts get in the way of a good scare. How scary is it?

"The big disasters are believed to be just decades away. Stopping or delaying them would require bold changes by individuals and government." In other words, forced sacrifices. Later in the article:

"Robert Correll,a scientist in charge of an eight-country research program into Arctic problems caused by warming, recognizes the contradictions, especially since developing nations such as China, India and those in Africa will play bigger roles in greenhouse gas pollution in the future.
The individual effort Correll said, *is damn important, but you're not going to make much difference.* That requires group or governmental action, he said."

Exactly how "individual effort" that's "not going to make much difference" can be "damn important" eludes me.

So where are they getting all their information from?

"Nearly two dozen computer models now agree that by 2100, the average yearly global temperature will be 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than now, acording to Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research."

Let the record show that these scientists are using computers as if they were crystal balls that can see into the future. They can't. At least not yet. There is simply too much we don't know about our climate to be ascribing predictive powers to these models. On Sept 22nd 2004 I had an op-ed titled "Models of Doubt" printed at Opinioneditorials.com which is here. There is no way all these uncertainties have been clarified since then. A few maybe.

There is another good article on climate models at the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) here. Scroll down to Item #3.

The battle is on and the truth needs as many letters to representatives and LTEs as possible to counter the hysteria.