The Global Warming Mirage — by Polydamas
In one of the previous posts here at The Cassandra Times, titled “The Prostitution of Science in the Service of Politics”, we pointed out how science ceased to be an objective and dispassionate quest for the unvarnished truth about the universe we live in. Instead, scientists have abused the public trust by perverting the principles of science and trading on its prestige, permitting pseudo-science and fraud to lend support to public policy with which they happen to agree, and even injecting themselves into the political debate. In the hands of crafty politicians, think tank policy wonks, and political consultants, science has been reduced to a component of the logically fallacious Argument from Authority, in Latin, argumentum ad verecundiam. Essentially, advocacy for a predetermined political conclusion has become nothing more than the name-dropping of a prominent scientist or collection of scientists who supposedly support it. (e.g., the headline “Humanity Must Return to Living in Caves”, Proclaims the Eminent Professor Z).
Over the past decade, several of the contributors to The Cassandra Times have discussed among themselves with a certain healthy degree of scientific skepticism the notion of global warming. Global warming, the theory that man-made changes to the environment of the Earth will result in a Pandora’s Box of natural disasters and societal ills, has gained tremendous purchase within the scientific community. Our natural skepticism was triggered by reading reports that the surfaces of the moon and of Mars have also experienced warming. Since neither the moon nor Mars have an atmosphere that could develop the Greenhouse Effect and since neither of these celestial bodies have fallen victim to humanity’s Industrial Revolution, it stood to reason that increased solar output is most likely the common cause for our solar system’s overall warming trend. If so, the more legitimate question is whether human activities on our planet are significant or minuscule in comparison to the sun. Our strong suspicion was the latter.
Our skepticism about global warming deepened significantly after some unnamed computer hacker hacked into the computers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in late 2009. The hacker then unleashed onto the Internet a treasure trove of confidential documents and e-mail correspondence between prominent scientists who studied the apparent global crisis. (http://www.climategate.com/). Although we do not condone, and, in fact, condemn in the strongest terms, any criminal acts, the purloined e-mails were of immense use. They demonstrated conclusively that the scientists already had a preconceived conclusion that man-made global warming existed. Like archers painting their target only after unleashing their arrows and, after the fact, situating its bullseye where their arrows hit, the scientists searched for ways to fit the observational climate data to support their conclusion and sought to explain away, discard or ignore any data that would tend to contradict the conclusion. Interestingly, three years earlier, the 2006 documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” employed a cornucopia of facts and figures to support former United States Presidential candidate Al Gore’s global rallying cry to “act boldly, quickly, and wisely” to avert the impending environmental disaster. In a twist of irony, some of the so-called inconvenient scientific truths highlighted in the film had contrary and, thus, inconvenient observational truths of their own that had to be suppressed lest they detract from the overall message.
In the past week, the global warming theory experienced a major blow to its credibility. The July 11, 2012 British Daily Mail reported (http://bit.ly/P0vD7L) that a tree-ring study of semi-fossilized trees in Finnish Lapland, conducted by Dr. Jan Esper from the Institute of Geography at JGU, has determined that the opposite effect of global cooling has actually taken place over the past 2,000 years. In measurements dating back to 138 B.C., the long-term trend is that the Earth is actually cooling at the rate of 0.3 degrees Celsius every thousand years due to gradual increases in the distance between the Earth and the sun. The tree rings showed warmer climate phases during Roman and Medieval times. Significantly, Esper said “We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low. Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.”
If Dr. Esper’s study is true, the prophecies of Earth’s environmental doom due to the man-made Greenhouse Effect are completely unfounded. If anything, global warming is a natural, short-term phase that will naturally reverse itself in the long run. The drastic measures and exhortations of environmentalists to avert irreversible global warming by immediately dismantling industrial society in favor of a zero carbon footprint, agrarian society should be viewed as overblown Luddite fantasies. The environmentalist think tanks and the associated cottage industries that sprouted around the altar of global warming will need a new civic religion and cause to which they can devote their energies. Perhaps they will turn to the cause of global cooling and advocate that the products of modern technology must all be used to fuel camp fires to keep us all warm during the impending ice age. (One can only suspect that their true religion is authoritarian anti-technology, and global warming or, conversely, cooling is only the garb du jour).
As an added benefit, Dr. Michael Crichton’s insightful observation in his rightfully-celebrated speech “Aliens Cause Global Warming” that “consensus science” is an oxymoron should gain significant traction. The notion that global warming must be taking place because a consensus of ostensibly respectable scientists believes it to be true will have been proven to be as patently misguided as a consensus of Galileo’s detractors.
