|  Candace Talmadge Read Candace's bio and previous columns
July 3, 2009
Scientists Tell Congress:
Earth Cooling Without Carbon Dioxide Caps
As the U.S House of
Representatives narrowly passed a bill to regulate carbon dioxide emissions,
a group of atmospheric scientists mailed a letter to every member of
Congress.
They took aim at the major
premise behind this bill (HR 2454) – that human-made carbon dioxide
emissions are causing the earth to heat to dangerous levels and must be
slowed through strict legal limits or there will be a catastrophe.
Their letter’s message:
“The sky is not falling. The earth has been cooling for 10 years, without
help. The present cooling was not predicted by the alarmists’
computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.”
The seven signers of this
letter are Robert H. Austin and William Happer, professors of physics at
Princeton University; S. Fred Singer, emeritus professor of environmental
sciences at the University of Virginia and president of the Science and
Environmental Policy Project; Roger W. Cohen, formerly ExxonMobil Corp.’s
manager of strategic planning and a fellow of the American Physics Society;
Laurence I. Gould, professor of physics at the University of Hartford; Hal
Lewis, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at
Santa Barbara; and Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
They are merely a
handful of the hundreds and hundreds of scientists worldwide who have become
global warming skeptics. The seven letter-signers are concerned that
legislation like the bill that just came out of the House proposes a
flamethrower solution to a gnat of a problem that may not really be a
problem after all.
Here’s the rub. Even though
levels of human-made carbon dioxide continue to rise in the atmosphere, our
planet has entered a cooling period that began somewhere between 1995 and
1998. This has been shown through actual temperature measurements around the
world, not the computer-generated forecasts that have been cited to shout
doom and gloom from the rooftops.
“The finest meteorologists
in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the
climate for the rest of the century,” the letter-signers continue. “Can
(former vice president) Al Gore? Can (Obama science advisor) John Holdren?
We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is
closed, that we must act immediately, etc., but in fact
“THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE;
IT DOESN’T EXIST.”
Sigh. There were also a few
who bravely protested prior to the invasion of Iraq. They argued that the
Bush Administration’s evidence didn’t hold up under any kind of scrutiny,
and that destabilizing Iraq by toppling Saddam Hussein would have profound
negative repercussions in that region. How right they were. We and the
Iraqis continue to pay a heavy, heavy price for our arrogant foolishness.
Will we be wiser than we
were just a few years ago? Will we again allow a vocal minority to
scare-monger us into action that will be costly and ultimately pointless?
“The proposed
legislation would cripple the U.S. economy, putting us at a disadvantage
compared to our competitors,” the letter-writers state. “China and India are
committing no such self-destruction. For such drastic damage, it is only
prudent to demand genuine proof that it is needed, not just computer
projections, and not false claims based about the state of the science.”
We’re a Senate vote away
from finding out if we have learned anything from leaping into the abyss
before looking, spurred by manufactured data and inaccurate assumptions.
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