Is Global Warming A Hoax?

[Lightkeeper]

The Tempest

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, May 28, 2006; W08



As evidence mounts that humans are causing dangerous changes in Earth's climate, a handful of skeptics are providing some serious blowback.

Bill Gray a hurricane specialists was supposed to debate another scientist at a weather conference, but the organizer found him to be too obstreperous, and disinvited him.

Much of his government funding has dried up. He has had to put his own money, more than $100,000, into keeping his research going. He feels intellectually abandoned. If none of his colleagues comes to his funeral, he says, that'll be evidence that he had the courage to say what they were afraid to admit.

Which is this: Global warming is a hoax.

"I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people," he says when I visit him in his office on a sunny spring afternoon.

He has testified about this to the United States Senate. He has written magazine articles, given speeches, done everything he could to get the message out. His scientific position relies heavily on what is known as the Argument From Authority. He's the authority.

"I've been in meteorology over 50 years. I've worked **** hard, and I've been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who've been around have not been asked about this. It's sort of a baby boomer, yuppie thing."

Gray believes in the obs. The observations. Direct measurements. Numerical models can't be trusted. Equation pushers with fancy computers aren't the equals of scientists who fly into hurricanes.


In just three, five, maybe eight years, he says, the world will begin to cool again.

Parallel Earths
HUMAN BEINGS ARE PUMPING GREENHOUSE GASES INTO THE ATMOSPHERE, warming the planet in the process.

Since the dawn of the industrial era, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen steadily from about 280 to about 380 parts per million. In the past century, the average surface temperature of Earth has warmed about 1 degree Fahrenheit. Much of that warming has been in the past three decades. Regional effects can be more dramatic: The Arctic is melting at an alarming rate. Arctic sea ice is 40 percent thinner than it was in the 1970s. Glaciers in Greenland are speeding up as they slide toward the sea. A recent report shows Antarctica losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year.

The permafrost is melting across broad swaths of Alaska, Canada and Siberia. Tree-devouring beetles, common in the American Southwest, are suddenly ravaging the evergreen forests of British Columbia. Coral reefs are bleaching, scalded by overheated tropical waters. There appear to have been more strong hurricanes and cyclones in recent decades, Category 3 and higher -- such as Katrina.

The 1990s were the warmest decade on record. The year 1998 set the all-time mark. This decade is on its way to setting a new standard, with a succession of scorchers. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global effort involving hundreds of climate scientists and the governments of 100 nations, projected in 2001 that, depending on the rate of greenhouse gas emissions and general climate sensitivities, the global average temperature would rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit between 1990 and 2100. Sea levels could rise just a few inches, or nearly three feet.

All of the above is part of the emerging, solidifying scientific consensus on global warming -- a consensus that raises the urgent political and economic issue of climate change. This isn't a theory anymore. This is happening now. Business as usual, many scientists say, could lead to a wildly destabilized climate for the first time since the dawn of human civilization.

But when you step into the realm of the skeptics, you find yourself on a parallel Earth.

It is a planet where global warming isn't happening -- or, if it is happening, isn't happening because of human beings. Or, if it is happening because of human beings, isn't going to be a big problem. And, even if it is a big problem, we can't realistically do anything about it other than adapt.

Certainly there's no consensus on global warming, they say. There is only abundant uncertainty. The IPCC process is a sham, a mechanism for turning vague scientific statements into headline-grabbing alarmism. Drastic actions such as mandated cuts in carbon emissions would be imprudent. Alternative sources of energy are fine, they say, but let's not be naive. We are an energy-intensive civilization. To obtain the kind of energy we need, we must burn fossil fuels. We must emit carbon. That's the real world.

Since the late 1980s, when oil, gas, coal, auto and chemical companies formed the Global Climate Coalition, industries have poured millions of dollars into a campaign to discredit the emerging global warming consensus. The coalition disbanded a few years ago (some members recast themselves as "green"), but the skeptic community remains rambunctious. Many skeptics work in think tanks, such as the George C. Marshall Institute or the National Center for Policy Analysis. They have the ear of powerful leaders in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The skeptics helped scuttle any possibility that the United States would ratify the Kyoto treaty that would have committed the nation to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions (conservatives object to the treaty for, among other things, not requiring reductions by developing nations such as China and India).

In the world of the skeptics you'll come across Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist who has steadfastly maintained for years that clouds and water vapor will counteract the greenhouse emissions of human beings. You'll find S. Fred Singer, author of Hot Talk, Cold Science, who points to the positive side of the melting Arctic: "We spent 500 years looking for a Northwest Passage, and now we've got one." You'll quickly run across Pat Michaels, the University of Virginia climatologist and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media . You might dip into TCSDaily.com, the online clearinghouse for anti-global-warming punditry. You'll meet the Cooler Heads Coalition and the Greening Earth Society.

The skeptics point to the global temperature graph for the past century. Notice how, after rising steadily in the early 20th century, in 1940 the temperature suddenly levels off. No -- it goes down! For the next 35 years! If the planet is getting steadily warmer due to Industrial Age greenhouse gases, why did it get cooler when industries began belching out carbon dioxide at full tilt at the start of World War II?

Now look at the ice in Antarctica: Getting thicker in places!

Sea level rise? It's actually dropping around certain islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

There are all these . . . anomalies.

The skeptics scoff at climate models. They're just computer programs. They have to interpret innumerable feedback loops, all the convective forces, the evaporation, the winds, the ocean currents, the changing albedo (reflectivity) of Earth's surface, on and on and on.

Bill Gray has a favorite diagram, taken from a 1985 climate model, showing little nodules in the center with such labels as "thermal inertia" and "net energy balance" and "latent heat flux" and "subsurface heat storage" and "absorbed heat radiation" and so on, and they are emitting arrows that curve and loop in all directions, bumping into yet more jargon, like "soil moisture" and "surface roughness" and "vertical wind" and "meltwater" and "volcanoes."


Gray says the recent rash of strong hurricanes is just part of a cycle. This is part of the broader skeptical message: Climate change is normal and natural. There was a Medieval Warm Period, for example, long before Exxon Mobil existed.

AL GORE IS ABOUT TO COME ON THE BIG SCREEN. Fred Smith is eagerly awaiting the moment. We're at a media

preview of "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary on Gore and global warming (it debuts this week in Washington). Smith is not exactly a Gore groupie. He is the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a factory for global warming skepticism.

CEI has 28 people on staff, "half a platoon," Smith likes to say. They're in the persuasion business, fighting for the free market. They lobby against government regulations of all kinds. Smith writes articles with titles such as "Eco-Socialism: Threat to Liberty Around the World." These promoters of capitalism don't really operate a commercial enterprise; like any think tank, CEI relies on donations from individuals, foundations and corporations. The most generous sponsors of last year's annual dinner at the Capital Hilton were the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Exxon Mobil, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and Pfizer. Other contributors included General Motors, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Plastics Council, the Chlorine Chemistry Council and Arch Coal.


As we wait for the movie to start, I ask him how he would define his political beliefs. "Classical liberal," he says. He explains that civilization is a means for allowing individuals to liberate their energies and their genius -- an emergence from primitive, tribal, collectivist social arrangements. When humans switch from collectivism to private property, he says, "you have greater freedom of ideas." This prompts the thought that the federal government owns way too much land in the West. Much of it should be privatized, he says.

Including national parks? I ask.

"Probably wouldn't touch it for political reasons," he says.

The movie begins: Images of a river. Lush foliage. Gore's voice, almost sultry, rhapsodizes about nature. Then we see him take a stage in an auditorium. He is in a suit and tie and looks very much like a candidate for political office.

"Maybe he is running," Smith says.

When Gore shows a big graph of rising CO2, Smith says, "That's a phony scale."

The film shows footage from Hurricane Katrina.

"It was a Category 3 hurricane," Smith says. Not the Cat 5, at landfall, you keep hearing about.

Gore reveals that insurance losses because of hurricanes have steadily climbed.

"That's just dishonest," Smith says. There are more beach houses and so on -- it's just an infrastructure issue.

Subsequent visits to the Competitive Enterprise Institute show Smith in his element. The think tank is a warren of offices lined with framed magazine advertisements from the 1950s and earlier. These are images of the Golden Age of American Commerce, when cars were like luxury liners and chemical companies bragged about their mosquito-annihilating concoctions.

"New Guinea is an island gripped in the vise of high, jagged mountain ranges . . . Choking entangling jungle is everywhere . . . In this appalling setting, aviation made an epic conquest." That's ad copy for the Socony-Vacuum oil company, later known as Mobil.

Smith loves this stuff. Those were the days! The message: Free enterprise brings people together and improves their lives. It was the Better Living Through Chemistry era. Smith points out an ad for Weyerhaeuser Timber showing clear-cut forests on a mountainside and two raccoons tussling with one another on the stump of a Douglas fir. Another photo, lower, shows a frame house. You can clearly see that cutting forests benefits people. Nowadays, environmentalists want the benefits without any of the pain. "It's all gain, no pain," Smith says.

We pass an asbestos ad.

"When I was a kid, this was called the miracle mineral," he says.

Although Smith can be rambling and digressive, he has a team of analysts who know the global warming topic inside and out and can quickly produce the latest nugget of potentially contradictory evidence (Greenland melted faster in the 1920s!). What rankles them most of all is the suggestion that global warming is a problem that must be fixed by the government, top down, through regulations. Let the free market work its genius, they say. Countries with thriving economies will, in the long run, be more adaptive to climate change and will find more technological solutions than countries that hamstring themselves by clamping down on greenhouse emissions.

Smith's office has a grand view of Farragut Square and the Washington Monument in the distance. A man named Chris Horner, general counsel of the Cooler Heads Coalition, joins us, as does, popping in and out, Marlo Lewis, a CEI policy analyst who works on climate change. They lapse several times into the Secret Code.

"Terrible toos," Horner says. I'm confused. He explains that it's shorthand for environmental doom and gloom.

"Terrible toos. Too many people, using too many resources."

Smith has a different equation: "Less people, less affluence, less technology: We call that death, poverty and ignorance."

They believe the rise of carbon dioxide may be a symptom of global warming, not the cause. Look at the chart Gore used:

Didn't it look like the warming comes before the CO2 increase?

Lewis says the snows of Kilimanjaro have been in retreat since the 1880s. The climate there is not getting warmer, it's getting drier. Just won't snow.

They see economic growth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...301305_pf.html

Is global warming a hoax?

[Rev. Rex]

I firmly believe that it is, and this is after wading through gobs of data on the subject. In fact, there is good evidence that global climate was much warmer in the time of Jesus that it is today. Most of the time the Earth has been around, there haven't even been polar ice caps. I think that it is way arrogant to think that man is causing the earth to warm up tremendously (they've detected a .1 degree increase in overall global temperatures in the last 100 years...personally, I don't call that a catastrophic increase.)

BUT there is little doubt that the activities of man are fouling the planet. I'm seriously wondering if this isn't the whole purpose of the hoax to begin with...to divert attention from a real problem.

[Jaiket]

Within the scientific community the degree of consensus is very high. Global climate change is occuring and is being effected by humans.

[Panth]

Do I think it's a hoax? Maybe, maybe not.

Do I think it is being blown entirely out of proportion for what it is? Absolutely.

This planet has been around how long? Billions of years? It has gone through how many ice ages? Meteor collisions, asteroids, ice ages, heat waves, volcanoes, floods, earthquakes . . . the separation of the continents from pangaea for crying out loud!

And these people are telling me that a possible (arguable, unconfirmed) one degree shift in global climate over the last century is something we should concern ourselves with?

[Raugust]

Originally Posted by Panth

Do I think it is being blown entirely out of proportion for what it is? Absolutely.

If anything, the opposite is the case. Mankind has been remarkably unconcerned with the damage we've been doing to the environment. What's next, is the damage of oil spills just in the fevered imagination of environmentalist nutjobs? If the greenhouse gas effect just a myth among those ignorant scientists? Our arrogance in assuming that whatever we do to the planet "can't be that bad" is astonishing.

This planet has been around how long? Billions of years? It has gone through how many ice ages? Meteor collisions, asteroids, ice ages, heat waves, volcanoes, floods, earthquakes . . . the separation of the continents from pangaea for crying out loud!

And many of those events caused a huge portion of life on the planet to die out. There have been times when nearly all life on the planet has gone extinct. Most experts believe that we are currently entering one of the largest extinction events in the history of the planet; the climate change of global warming is only one part of humanity's multi-pronged attack on nature, but no one disputes that the extinction rate of species is increasing dramatically. Scientists predict that that rate will become even more dramatic in coming years; humans themselves may not be at immediate risk, but countless species who are dependent on current climate conditions are sure to die out. Many amphibian species (frogs, etc.) are already experiencing this change.

And these people are telling me that a possible (arguable, unconfirmed) one degree shift in global climate over the last century is something we should concern ourselves with?

Many species' ecosystems are extremely fragile. The fact that the Earth itself, or life itself, has survived for billions of years, doesn't somehow make global warming irrelevant. By that logic, a nuclear war would also be irrelevant, because it wouldn't cause any greater destruction than the Earth has already survived in the past. The fact that global warming isn't an apocalyptic threat doesn't make it an irrelevant one; many species are dependent upon the global climate remaining relatively unchanged, and even a small change in global temperature can have dramatic results in causing and exacerbating weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Diseases such as malaria will also become much more widespread as their carriers are able to survive in more places on the warmer Earth. What you don't seem to realize is that a "one degree shift" in a mere 100 years is indeed dramatic: 100 years is a blink of an eye in geologic time. Consider the change over the last 100 years in the context of the last millennium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1...Comparison.png. For that matter, read up more on the matter yourself, at a community-edited site where no one group (and thus no concrete "conspirators" or "hoaxers") has absolute sway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming.

[Luguber]

Originally Posted by Jaiket

Within the scientific community the degree of consensus is very high. Global climate change is occuring and is being effected by humans.

Polar bears are being threatened because of the melting away of ice, which makes it more difficult for them to find food. Locally in my Swedish neighbourhood, floods like never before cause major roads buckle and slide, and basements and low lying buildings are flooded. I firmly believe that there is a global warming, which makes me happy that I live some 100 of metres above what used to be the mean ocean level.

[elfishmoonfeather]

How can global warming be a hoax when every year the world becomes more and more emersed in smog and the heat in the deserts reach higher and higher degrees?

What's more, we are adding to it with our factories and cars and wasted products.

[Rev. Rex]

That's the point...the deserts etc are not getting hotter year after year. Furthermore, for every place that IS hotter than "average" (which is merely the hot times and the cold times averaged out), there is another place that is colder than "average". For every place that is in drought, another his getting slammed with enormous amounts of moisture. Last year was a great example. Here in the states, there were several places that were far hotter and drier than normal. Here in the Pacific Northwest, it was far cooler and wetter than normal. Likewise, there were many places in the world that were not only far cooler than normal, but that also received far more precipitation than normal.

We also have great evidence that 2000-3000 years ago, it was far hotter, worldwide, than it is now. Obviously, the Pharaohs were responsible, and it must have been when Egypt, Greece, and Rome fell that the world cooled down.

For that matter, for 90% of the time this planet has been around, it has not had ice caps. For a very long time, scientists had surmised that we are merely in a warm stretch in the middle of an ice age.

The more data I see, the more I'm convinced that global warming is a pure fiction, designed to scare people. And I'm becomming more and more convinced that it has been formulated for the purpose of drawing attention away from the real problem, which is pollution, which fouls things and kills plants and animals. In the past 20 years, the US has made huge strides in dropping pollution levels. There is still some work to do. But the problem is that third world countries have no restrictions at all and are polluting like crazy. Brazil burns thousands of acres of rain forest per day. Hong Kong dumps raw sewage and chemical wastes into the ocean daily. Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and a few others burn crude oil routinely, producing millions of tons of air pollutants per year. It is NOT going to get better until ALL countries take steps to make it better...not just the US, not just England, not just Russia, but ALL countries.

[elfishmoonfeather]

pollution is made up of many gases, including CO2. When CO2 is released into the air, it often becomes caught in the skyline/cap that is the atmosphere around the earth. Over many hundreds and thousands of years, the cap of CO2 and other harmful gases grows created smogs. These smogs occur especially over heavily populated areas where CO2 is emmitted in excesses. These Smogs keep the heat in when it is hot out, like during the summer. AKA the greenhouse affect. In the winter when it is cold, the cold is also trapped within the cap, creating freezing temperatures.

[Rev. Rex]

And a moderate volcanic eruption puts more CO2, nitrous oxide, and sulfur dioxide into the air than man puts into the air in an entire year. On the average year, there are 17 volcanic eruptions per year. Just speaking of greenhouse gases, clearly volcanoes produce more of these gases than man is even capable of.

Add to that the burning of slash and trees in Brazil. When wood is consumed by fire, the biggest substances released are carbon dioxide and water. At the rate that the rain forest is being burned, that produces more co2 than the rest of America, both north and south combined. (This also doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of acres of trees burned in wildfires in the US every year.)

ALSO, carbon dioxide levels haven't grown tremendously. There is a reason for this. CO2 is dissolved readily in water, which falls as rain. Rocks also absorb some CO2, but most of the CO2 in the world is being held in suspension in the oceans. Now, if THAT was released, we'd be in trouble.