Is Watch-and-Wait A Wiser Strategy Re Global Warming?

With so many compelling problems facing the world--from cancer to world poverty--I cannot understand why liberal leaders such as President Obama are so eager to immediately start spending so massively in perpetuity in an attempt to cool the planet when average global temperature has gone up just 1/2 of one degree since 1880 and flat or declining for the past decade, even if we don't count the aberrantly warm year of 1998. Here's another chart, this one from MIT, reporting that there's been essentially no increase since 1995!

Insisting on immediately and massively spending to try to cool the planet seems particularly foolish because key evidence suggests that even that 0.5 degree warming since 1880 is at least partly natural variation, not man-made. For example, there has been a major CO2 increase during most recent decade, a period in which temperatures have been flat or declining. Atmospheric CO2 is a proxy for man-made hydrocarbon emissions. If man-made behaviors were causing global warming serious enough to justify the world making massive efforts to cool the earth, global temperatures should not be declining. Even if other factors are masking the man-made contribution to global warming, the amount and rate of global warming is small, far less than predicted by Al Gore and his anti-corporation-motivated allies. And remember the climate change alarmists' data is based heavily on highly conjectural computer models: garbage in-garbage out.

Another untested assumption: Even if, over the next 50 years, average global temperature were to reverse trend and rise, would the net effect be so negative as to justify an immediate and massive indeed quixotic effort to slow it? For example, many areas, for example in Canada and Russia, previously too cold to grow crops, would become farmable. An article in Germany's leading magazine, Der Spiegel makes the case that it's impossible to predict whether global warming, if any, will yield a net positive or negative effect on the earth.

Perhaps the most dispositive reason to watch-and-wait instead of, right now, spending massively to try to cool the planet, is the extraordinary difficulty, indeed unrealism, of trying to get the worldwide spending of incomprehensibly large amounts of money, curtailment of development and of travel in perpetuity that would be required to possibly achieve even a one- or two-degree decline in average global temperature.

Charles Siegel of preservenet.com commented on today's New York Times editorial that said:
"The hope is these [Copenhagen] talks will produce commitments from each nation that, collectively, would keep temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That will require deep cuts in emissions — as much as 80 percent among industrialized nations — by midcentury." Siegel commented, "In reality, it requires at least an 80% cut in emissions in the entire world by 2050, not just from the industrialized nations." Is it realistic to do that?

There are only so many fiscal and human resources to go around. If we immediately and forever spend so massively on trying to cool the globe, we will have to shortchange initiatives with a higher probability of improving humankind--such as a true war against cancer or world poverty.

Of course, some efforts to cool the planet also facilitate energy independence, for example, nuclear energy and conservation efforts that minimally impinge on our freedom such as higher CAFE standards. I support both of those measures. But the sorts of permanent massive spending and incursions on our freedoms (for example, restricting road building thereby encouraging gridlock, and eliminating already scarce city parking spots, forcing us into inevitably time-wasting mass transit) being proposed by President Obama and other liberal world leaders is incomprehensible to me.

It seems to me that in light of the 15-year flat global temperature and below-average extreme weather such as hurricanes despite the CO2 increase (the opposite of what Al Gore and the IPCC's politically stacked panel predicted,) and that the money and effort could be diverted to better address the world's enormous pressing needs, a few years of watch-and-wait, accompanied by continuing, non-politically-motivated research on the above questions, along with private-sector research into improved alternative energy sources is a wiser path than immediate massive spending to try to cool the planet. What am I not understanding?

Who Should Win the Nobel Peace Prize?

I received this email from a stranger named Michael Chramko: mchramko@softcom.net.

Recently a 98 year old lady named Irena died.

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive...

As a German Christian, she heard the Nazis' plans for the Jews.

Irena smuggled infants out in the back of her truck.

She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let Irina in and out of the ghetto.

The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog, and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.

During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.

She was caught and the Nazis broke both her legs, and arms, and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out, and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunited the family. Most of course had been gassed.

The kids she helped got placed into foster family homes, or adopted.

Last year Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize....

She LOST.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on global warming.

I've argued in previous posts, that Gore's movie and speeches assert as certainties, statements that are the subject of significant doubt among climate scientists. Here are links:

http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2008/06/elite-scientists-dissent-from-climate.html

http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2008/06/climate-change-consensus-is-softening.html

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/10-questions-for-those-concerned-about-climate-change_id1551

Meanwhile, at Gore's impetus, the world is expending enormous sums and is planning equally large restrictions of people's freedoms (to drive, set their thermostats at comfortable temperatures, etc.). Before such massive impositions on humankind, we deserve better evidence.

I invite you to check this woman's bio out, and then ask yourself whether she or Al Gore was more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize:
http://www.irenasendler.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler

Elite Scientists Dissent from Climate Change Consensus

The new book, The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon lists these (and many more) scientists as among those who dissent from the so-called consensus on climate change/global warming:

Dr. Edward Wegman--former chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences--demolishes the famous "hockey stick" graph that launched the global warming panic.

Dr. David Bromwich--president of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology--says "it's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now."

Prof. Paul Reiter--Chief of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the famed Pasteur Institute--says "no major scientist with any long record in this field" accepts Al Gore's claim that global warming spreads mosquito-borne diseases.

Prof. Hendrik Tennekes--director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute--states "there exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies" used for global warming forecasts.

Dr. Christopher Landsea--past chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones--says "there are no known scientific studies that show a conclusive physical link between global warming and observed hurricane frequency and intensity."

Dr. Antonino Zichichi--one of the world's foremost physicists, former president of the European Physical Society, who discovered nuclear antimatter--calls global warming models "incoherent and invalid."

Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski--world-renowned expert on the ancient ice cores used in climate research--says the U.N. "based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false."

Prof. Tom V. Segalstad--head of the Geological Museum, University of Oslo--says "most leading geologists" know the U.N.'s views "of Earth processes are implausible."

Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu--founding director of the International Arctic Research Center, twice named one of the "1,000 Most Cited Scientists," says much "Arctic warming during the last half of the last century is due to natural change."

Dr. Claude Allegre--member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science, he was among the first to sound the alarm on the dangers of global warming. His view now: "The cause of this climate change is unknown."

Dr. Richard Lindzen--Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T., member, the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, says global warming alarmists "are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right."

Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov--head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science's Pulkovo Observatory and of the International Space Station's Astrometria project says "the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."

Dr. Richard Tol--Principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, at Carnegie Mellon University, calls the most influential global warming report of all time "preposterous . . . alarmist and incompetent."

Dr. Sami Solanki--director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who argues that changes in the Sun's state, not human activity, may be the principal cause of global warming: "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."

Prof. Freeman Dyson--one of the world's most eminent physicists says the models used to justify global warming alarmism are "full of fudge factors" and "do not begin to describe the real world."

Dr. Eigils Friis-Christensen--director of the Danish National Space Centre, vice-president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, who argues that changes in the Sun's behavior could account for most of the warming attributed by the UN to man-made CO2.

I feel the need to add one: Lord Christopher Monckton, a leading climate change scientist in the UK. He is the technical advisor to The Institute for Science and Public Policy. The site contains considerable data suggesting that claiming a global warming consensus is indeed premature.