Global
Warming and Modern Environmentalism
from Fascism, Environmentalism, and the Third Way
July 30, 2002
by
Bernard Switalski
Initial
Publication Date: July 18, 2001
Editor's
Note: This article on global warming, as well as separate
articles on ozone depletion
and the dangerous roots of the
environmental movement, have been extracted from a
very comprehensive work by Bernard Switalski documenting
misinformation about global warming and ozone depletion as
part of an overall strategy by international socialists, fascists,
and "third way" proponents to seize power by creating public
fear about the environment.
Doomsday grifters have run their
scam a long time and they've never lacked for chumps to bamboozle.
Hark!! One fine day in the year 156 A.D., in Phrygia (now part
of Turkey), the prophet Montanus suddenly reeled round and round
and keeled over into a trance in which he envisioned Christ's
second coming and the end of the world. Thenceforward, Montanus
roamed the dusty paths of Asia Minor, proclaiming to all who
would listen that doomsday lay just round the bend. Montanus
gathered many disciples, among whom was one, Quintus Septimus
Florens Tertullianus, Tertullian went on to become a champion
of Monantism and a dynamic intellectual force and teacher in
the early Christian church.
At the core of Tertullian's
teachings lay his bitter admonition that life in the 2nd century
had become too extravagant, too wasteful, and that population
growth had run out of control. Mankind was raping the Earth
of its resources, he warned grimly "...we
men have actually become a burden to the Earth ... the Earth
can no longer support us ..." And, to escape total planetary
destruction, mankind had to withdraw to the past and practice
severe asceticism, living in a simpler more natural state.
Fast-forward 1800 years...
Below, a few snips from the
"Heidelberg Appeal", an environmental policy statement signed
to date by at least four thousand scientists - including 72
Nobel laureates - from 106 countries. Note the way these guys
have skipped past all the technical details and drilled right
to the core of the matter:
"We are
worried, at the dawn of the 21st century, at the emergence of
an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial
progress and impedes economic and social development...
"We contend
that the Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with
a tendency to look toward the past, does not exist and probably
never has existed...
"We do, however,
forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet's destiny
against decisions which are supported by pseudoscientific
arguments or false and nonrelevant data."
Following are a few technical
details re: "pseudoscientific arguments or false and nonrelevant
data."
First, this general question:
who decides which is the "correct" global temperature? By that
I mean... environmentalists claim that the CO2 released
into the atmosphere by our techno-industrial society has caused
the global climate to warm, thereby portending catastrophic
consequences for us all. Yet, over the eons, absent homo sapiens,
the globe has experienced wide swings in temperature. Even during
the pre-industrial historical era, there have occurred: the
Medieval Warm Period, with temperatures much warmer than today,
followed by the Little Ice Age, with temperatures much cooler.
Therefore, one might ask, what point on the global temperature
curve is the "correct" point? That is, which is the "correct"
global temperature? And who decides these things?
Moving right along...
"Mean
sea level has not changed in the past century, which puts a
lie to the ecologists argument that global warming is melting
the polar ice caps; atmospheric temperatures, though having
up-and-down cycles, have not established a trend in either direction....
and the gasses in the atmosphere caused by human activities
are insignificant."
- - Dr. R.E. Stevenson, Secretary
General of the International Association for Physical Science
in the Ocean.
Got to love Stevenson - he flat
out calls environmentalists liars. Which they are.
Also:
- For years NASA has claimed
that the South Polar ice cap was melting. However, recently,
NASA issued a newsletter suggesting that they might have misinterpreted
the data and, perhaps, there had been little or no melting
at all.
- Water vapor accounts for
98 percent of the greenhouse effect, and CO2 is
only one of several other gasses that account for the remaining
2 percent. To investigate how variations in the levels of
atmospheric gasses effect climate change, it would seem reasonable
to begin with the most important gas, water vapor. Instead,
environmentalists have locked on CO2. True, in
the past century, the CO2 content of the atmosphere
has risen from about 0.04 percent to about 0.06 percent -
a 0.02 percent increase. But, based upon the environmentalists'
own numbers, at most only about 15 percent of that increase
can be traced to human sources, the rest being part of the
natural variation in atmospheric CO2, the causes
of which we have little or no understanding. 15 percent of
0.02 percent is 0.003 percent. Thus, environmentalists ignore
the gas that accounts for 98 percent of the greenhouse effect
to focus on the gas that accounts for three-thousandths of
one percent, and they claim the three-thousandths of one percent
as sufficient cause to trigger the wide-sweeping structural
changes to the global economy that the Kyoto Treaty demands,
and the consequences of which cannot be foreseen.
To a rational person, the environmentalist
view seems misguided, if not outright stupid. But it ain't misguided,
and it ain't stupid; they know exactly what they're doing. Environmentalists
have powerful reasons for attacking anthropogenic CO2,
reasons that will emerge below; so stay tuned.
"There
is almost universal agreement among atmospheric scientists that
little, if any, of the observed warming of the past century
can be attributed to the man-induced increases in greenhouse
gasses."
- - Dr. Hugh Ellsaesser,
Participating Guest Scientist, Lawrence Livermore Labs and
author of several books and over 100 articles on atmospheric
science.
Ellsaesser, one of the most
respected atmospheric scientists around, says that his crowd
almost universally dismisses the anthropogenic-CO2/global-warming
hypothesis as false.
On the other hand, Al Gore,
the self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet, claims the opposite
to be true.
Let's see .... whom shall I
believe... ?
"[The]
70-90 year oscillations in global mean temperatures [correlate]
with corresponding oscillations in solar activity. Whereas the
solar influence is obvious in the data from the last four centuries,
signatures of human [influence] are not distinguishable in the
observations."
- - Dr. K. Lassen, Danish
Meteorological Institute, Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division.
Lassen's and similar studies
deliver compelling evidence that variations in solar radiation
effect the global climate in detectable ways - and you can throw
in oscillations in the Earth's orbit, tilt, and wobble, not
to mention volcanic activity, and its detectable effects. But
when you ask the environmentalists to identify the anthropogenic
CO2 signal in the data, they go mute. Which immediately
demands a response to the request: please point out the difference
between the effect of anthropogenic CO2 and no effect
at all.
"There
is absolutely no guarantee that any CO2-climate signal
over the past century can be identified in [an atmospheric]
system that has such a high degree of natural variability. ...[The
temperature trend in the 20th century] ... is not statistically
different from zero. We cannot say with confidence that there
has been any trend in U.S. mean annual temperatures in this
century! ... Though not statistically different from zero, the
period from 1920 to 1987 has been dominated by a cooling of
0.13C (0.24F). Here we have possibly the best temperature data
set for any area of the planet, and during a time (1920-1987)
when equivalent CO2 increased by over 30 percent
(from approximately 325 to 425 ppm), the temperature cooled
slightly. If one accounts for the remaining heat-island effect
and the effects of stratospheric dust, we may assume that any
warming signal of the past century in the United States would
be reduced even further."
- - Dr. R.C. Balling, statistician,
climatologist, and Director of the Office of Climatology,
Arizona State - recognized internationally as an expert
in global warming and the greenhouse effect and author of
one book and dozens of papers on climatology published in
leading journals.
The CO2/global-warming
hypothesis asserts that: if the CO2 content of the
atmosphere rises, then the global climate gets warmer.
But it takes only a single negative
event to refute a hypothesis, and there’s the negative in Balling.
That is, during the 67 years CO2 levels rose by 30
percent, global temps fell, and that fact alone knocks the pins
out from under the CO2/global-warming hypothesis.
"Besides
the general prevalence of fudge factors, the latest [computer]
models have other defects that make them unreliable. ... We
must continue to warn the politicians and the public: don’t
believe the numbers just because they come out of a super computer."
- - Dr. Freeman J. Dyson,
Nobel laureate, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton’s
Institute for Advanced Studies.
The Kyoto Protocol, formally
entitled, "Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change", imposes upon technologically advanced nations
a host of restrictions on the generation of CO2 (and
other gases) as the cause of global climate change. Yet, in
its text, the Kyoto Protocol:
- Never claims that the climate
is changing.
- Never claims that anthropogenic
CO2 (or any other anthropogenic gas) has in any
way affected the climate.
Kyoto omits making either claim
because its authors must avoid the embarrassment of having to
produce data to support such claims, and no such data exist.
Therefore, to create the illusion
of a scientific rationale for the Treaty, its authors have conjured
up a computer model that purports to prophesy the global climate
in the year 2100. Which is the propagandist's classic ruse,
making a prediction about the future that can't be proved or
disproved, but so dire as to demand immediate preventive action,
and never mind collateral damage.
Note:
- You've
got to read it to believe it. The Kyoto Protocol is 8,500
words of the most vague and incomprehensible gobbledygook
ever contrived by the mind of man. I've had lots of experience
writing and interpreting contracts (which is what treaties
are), and if someone handed me this thing to sign, I'd fling
him and his treaty out the door.
By some startling coincidence,
politically active scientists often produce computer models
that generate results amazingly concurrent with the scientists'
political agenda. Dr. Carl Sagan did it. In the early 80s, Sagan
(who was deeply involved in the peace movement) produced the
(Turco-Toon-Ackerman-Pollack-Sagan (TTAPS) model that predicted
a nuclear war would raise enough dust to blot out the sun and
bring on a "nuclear winter". Nuclear Winter! Wow! The media
ran with it, and you still hear the phrase used today. However,
the media somehow failed to report on critics of the TTAPS model,
of which there were many.
For example, Russell Seitz,
Harvard Center for International Affairs, viewed the TTAPS model
as worthless, revealing that, to achieve the results Sagan wanted,
TTAPS had ignored factors such as the effects of day and night,
clouds, rain, the continents, and the oceans. And George Rathjens
of MIT dismissed TTAPS as, "... the worst
example of the misrepresentation of science in my memory."
Later, when the Soviet Union
collapsed, looking for a new home, Sagan - as did many others
of his ilk - threw in with the eco-gang, where, during Desert
Storm, he raced from TV network to network, predicting that
smoke from the oil well fires would alter the climate enough
to cause famine in India. Gee! I wonder how that prophesy panned
out.
Besides Sagan, we have other
eco-quack scientists, fellows like the oft-quoted Dr. Steven
Schneider, who has thumped the doomsday drum for decades, and
who has this novel approach to scientific integrity:
"...
scientists should consider stretching the truth to get some
broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That,
of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have
to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements,
and make little mention of any doubts we might have. ... Each
of us has to decide what the right balance is between being
effective and being honest."
Or one might cite Dr. Paul Ehrlich,
the Grand Old Man of Eco-quackery, for forty years a most prominent
doomsday campaigner, who has battled ferociously to promote
global warming, making an alarming case for the immanent incineration
of planet Earth. However, since the early Sixties, with equal
conviction, Ehrlich has also prophesied:
- The start of World War III
on October 13, 1979.
- A new ice age. (More on the
"ice age", later.)
- Massive starvation in India
by the early 70s.
- Massive worldwide starvation
by the 80s.
- Massive shortages of fuel
and industrial raw materials by the 90s.
- The reduction of the population
of the United States to 22.5 million by 1999 because of famine
and global warming.
Which prompts one to request
from his disciples: please point out the difference between
your Dr. Ehrlich and The Man From Planet Crackpot.
The case against the anthropogenic-CO2/global-warming
hypothesis has grown so powerful that even a militant warmer
like Hansen at NASA's Goddard Institute has begun to pull in
his horns, now suddenly expressing reservations about the magnitude
of the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on the climate
and whether we know enough about the causes of climate change
to make serious predictions about the future. (See Hansen's
paper, "Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era", at giss.nasa.gov/research/intro/hansen.05)
Hansen hasn't always been so
circumspect. On a blistering hot day in July of 1988, Dr. James
Hansen testified before a Congressional committee that global
warming had arrived, and as proof he predicted that 1988 would
be the hottest year on record.
The media, right on cue, per
the script, proclaimed:
- GLOBAL WARMING HAS ARRIVED!
And you can trace much of the
public's erroneous belief in global warming directly to Hansen's
testimony. However, turned out that 1988 was not the hottest
year on record. In fact, the lower 48 experienced record cold
snaps, and Alaska had its coldest winter ever. Hansen had been
dead wrong - a fact which, per the script, never made the headlines.
And, unless one understands
a least a little about:
- The Medieval Warm Period,
- The Little Ice Age,
- The heat-island effect,
- What Pinatubo did to the
data record after 1992,
- The utter corruption and
unreliability of the surface temperature record,
- What NASA temperature-sensing
satellites have found (the only uncorrupted data-set extant),
- How the North Atlantic Oscillation
effects the climate,
- That, using the EPA's own
numbers and simple arithmetic, one can calculate that it would
take the internal combustion engine 5,000 years to double
the current level of atmospheric CO2,
- The Van Zandt problem,
- How the Pacific Decadal Oscillation
effects the climate,
- that North America, the Great
CO2 Satan, is in fact a CO2 sink, and
"undeveloped" nations are in fact net producers of CO2,
- How variations in solar radiation
effect the climate,
... then one ought not form opinions
about global warming.
Kary Mullis, Nobel, Chemistry,
observed:
"The
global warmers ... predict that global warming is coming, and
our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried
about our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and
guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple."
Mullis is partially correct;
some do it for money and/or glory. But others do it for other
reasons. What might those other reasons be?
Well...
Beginning in the late 1930s,
what passes for the global temperature record took a slight
(statistically insignificant) downward trend. Based on that
minute dip, in the early 1970s the prophets of doom rang the
alarm! A NEW ICE AGE IS COMING! A NEW ICE AGE IS COMING!
And the culprit? Industrialism!
And its noxious effluents, dust and smoke, blocking out the
sun, threatening to throw the planet into the deep freeze.
At the time, frights like these
appeared in print:
"The
continued rapid cooling if the earth since World War II is also
in accord with increased global air pollution associated with
industrialism, urbanization, and exploding population..."
- - Reid Bryson, longtime
eco-deep-thinker, 1971.
"There
are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun
to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a
drastic decline in food production - with serious political
implications for just about ever nation on earth."
- - Peter Gynne, Newsweek,
1975
"The
facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research
into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice
age must now stand alongside nuclear war as the likely source
of wholesale death and misery for mankind"
- - Nigel Calder, former
editor of the New Scientist, 1975.
But then, smack in the middle
of the campaign to stampede the proletariat into ice age hysteria,
the global temperature trend took a slight (statistically insignificant)
upward slope.
Uh-oh!
Problem?!
No problem.
On a dime, without so much as
an, "Excuse my elbow", the prophets of doom spun a one-eighty.
By George! It isn't global COOLING that threatens life as we
know it! By golly! It's global WARMING!
And the culprit?
What else?
Industrialism!
And its noxious effluent, CO2.
To illustrate how these characters
did the eco-flip.... Dr. Steven Schneider (mentioned above)
today speaks with a stentorian voice among the global warming
apocalyptics, and, like Tertullian, threatens us with fiery
annihilation, lest we change our profligate ways.
However, twenty-five years ago,
Schneider was busy flogging the anthropogenic-aerosols/ice-age
line of doom. At the time, a few scientists speculated that
the theoretical warming caused by increasing CO2
levels might tend to offset the cooling effects of anthropogenic
aerosols. In furious defense of his ice age, in a published
paper, Schneider lashed back (note the categorical certainty
of his tone.):
"Temperatures
do not increase in proportion to an increase in atmospheric
CO2... Even an eight-fold increase over present levels
might warm the Earth’s surface less than 2 degrees Centigrade,
and this is unlikely in the next several thousand years."
Point:
When global temperatures seemed
to be falling, Schneider blamed the fall on industrialism, and
he understood clearly that CO2 was an insignificant
greenhouse gas.
But when temps began to rise,
Schneider spun round and scrambled aboard the CO2/global-warming
bandwagon, this time blaming the rise on, what?
Right!
Industrialism!
So, you see, it ain't about
warming or cooling. It's about industrialism.
These guys don't like it. They
wanna kill it.
Which leads to a most interesting
question regarding eco-zealotry: why do environmentalists want
to kill industrialism?
For the answer to that question,
read Environmentalism's Tainted
Roots.
Bernard Switalski
P.O. Box 486
Riverside, IL 60546
Voice: 708.442.7354
Email: switabern@juno.com
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