Candace

Talmadge

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April 3, 2009

Earth Day 2009: A Climate Change Reality Check

Almost four decades after the first Earth Day in 1970, it is past time for a moment of pause in the debate over the future of Earth’s climate.

Anyone interested in this issue will want to read the Minority Report from the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. The latest version cites more than 700 scientists (and counting) who have publicly declared, either in letters to the committee or elsewhere, their skepticism that human activity, in the form of greenhouse gases from industry and automobiles, is the primary driver of climate change.

In the pages of this document is a lively, eye-opening debate about what’s going on with the climate, a discussion that U.S. media continue to ignore in favor of a threadbare global warming nightmare narrative that has been outdated by new studies and continued climate data collection and analysis.

Among the growing ranks of open skeptics cited in the document:

·         Norwegian Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever

·         Former NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson

·         Dr. Kiminori Itoh, award-winning environmental physical chemist in Japan

·         Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia, a geologist at Punjab University in India and a board member of the U.N.-supported International Year of the Planet

·         Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi in Finland

·         Stanley B. Goldenberg, an atmospheric scientist with the NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division

The scientists quoted in these pages vary in their fields, perspectives and concerns, but all of them agree that the true causes of climate change are by no means settled or even certain.

Many dismiss carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gases as having any role in affecting the Earth’s climate. Others are not so sure. Some argue that the sun and atmospheric water vapor are the main drivers of global temperature, up and down. Again, others have their reservations. Still more of them assert that the latest actual readings (not simulations) show that warming stopped in 1998 and the planet is now cooling again.

The scare scenarios of runaway worldwide heating rest entirely on computer-based climate forecast models. Many of the scientists in this report call into question both the predictive assumptions and methodology used to construct the models along with the resulting conclusions and predictions.

“Scientists do not dispel the problem of global warming – that is real – but rather the CO2 theory of global warming, which unfortunately is not verified by geological and climate records going back thousands of years or by observed fact,” says Dr. Terry Wimberley, professor of ecological studies at Florida Gulf Coast University. “The CO2 theory of climate change is based upon a computer simulation model and flawed data that has been widely criticized in the scientific literature.”

“The output of a complex computer simulation of the atmosphere is not ‘evidence’,” writes Australian geologist Viv Forbes. “It is a fluttering flag of forecasts, hung on a slim flagpole of theory, resting on a leaky craft of assumptions, which is drifting without the rudder of evidence, in the cross-currents of ideology, emotion and bias, on the wide deep and restless ocean of the unknown.”

Take the time to read through and think about what these scientists are saying. We owe that much at least to the planet that sustains us, ourselves and our posterity.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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