Is there global warming? If so, is global warming the result of the actions of man? These are scientific, not political, questions. The answers to these questions ought to be determined as a result of investigation and observation, not by a show of hands and media pressure. Remember, there was a "scientific consensus" that the earth is flat, that the sun orbits the earth, that atoms were the smallest particles of nature (in fact, that is where the name elements comes from...the most elementary), and many other ideas that today have been tossed aside. Global warming theory is the first modern scientific or pseudoscientific idea that constantly proclaims its correctness on the basis of a consensus rather than on the basis of evidence. Indeed, the computer models that underlie the theory of global warming do not explain either the past or the future climate on earth.
Let me explain. Almost all of the global warming discussions are about computer models that put earth's climate in a computer simulation and then play that simulation years into the future. Of course, we do not and cannot have data for the future climate, so there is no way to verify the correctness of the models from the data they predict for the future. There is, however, another way to check the accuracy of these models. We can take climate data from the past and see if it agrees with the results predicted by these computer models. After all, if the computer model cannot explain the actual data we have, then there is no reason to believe that it can explain the future. The problem with the computer models, however, is that they do not explain the past. For example two thousand years ago, the earth was warmer than it is today. It was also warmer 1000 years ago during what was known as the medieval warm period. One thousand years ago, there were vineyards in Sweden and large agricultural settlements in Greenland. Europe, the area with the best climate records, was substantially warmer than now. None of the computer models explain this warm period or the other ones before it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, earth was cooler than it is today. Remember the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Eve? The river is filled with ice, a condition that almost never happens today and certainly never in December. Again, the computer models do not explain this cooling period. Something else caused these climate changes, something that the model cannot explain. That leads to the simple conclusion that something else may be causing climate variations now, something that has nothing to do with man's activities. No matter what the consensus says, science says that man made global warming has not been proven or even demonstrated as the likely cause of climate change.
A group called the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit lobbying group for global warming, is out today with a study that criticizes Fox News and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal for failing to fall in line behind the "consensus" view of global warming. Fox is taken to task for mentioning the widely publicized belief in the 1970's that earth was cooling. Now, the UCS says this was just a minority view. I guess they did not live through the 1970's so they missed all the hype about the consensus that earth was cooling. The Wall Street Journal is attacked for allowing someone to call global warming a hoax on its editorial page. But if global warming theory does not explain the past, what else can one call it? Would UCS prefer actual scientists to call global warming theory a widely-shared delusion? How about a discredited theory that many cling to for political reasons?
The main stream media, of course, is widely publicizing the UCS position. They love anything that cricizes Fox News.
In a reasonable world, the federal govenment would have funded a detailed study of climate history which would be made available in full detail on line for anyone and everyone to review. That would, at least, let us all agree on the basis data of the past. Remember, the main source of climate data thus far, the University of East Anglia, is the place where emails from those involved in gathering the data revealed that much of it was "modified" so that it would fit the theory. Normally the theory is changed so that it will fit the data, but not so here.
In a reasonable world, the government would also have a group like NASA or the National Science Foundation review the data from the experiments at CERN in Europe that showed that the level of solar radiation is nearly 1000 times more likely to be the cause of climate change. The higher the solar radiation, the more high level clouds that get formed in the atmosphere, and those clouds affect temperature much more so than slight changes in greenhouse gases.
The truth is that right now, there is no reliable data to tell us if earth is even warming. Oh, we know the day to day changes in temperature. What we do not know is the decade to decade changes or the century to century changes. Without such data, the theories as to the causation of climate change are little more than electronic superstition.
It would be nice if a group called the union of concerned scientists could support science rather than dogma and consensus. The issue of climate change and its possible impact across the globe are way too important for the results to be determined by political views rather than science.
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