I keep a weblog like it's still the 90s. For commentary and dissent please visit jontaylor.ca, or various other purveyors of thought online.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Alarming News!

Remember when I used to write about global warming, then stopped? Well I did, check the archives... Today I feel vindicated because experts are starting to question whether or not the Goracle tells the truth.

First Richard S. Lindzen:

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. [...]
one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world's average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its "forcing"—its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn't been uniform—warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.

Yes, that Richard S. Lindzen - the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Of course Laurie Goldstein from the Toronto Sun has an opinion too:
But well-fed, First World, Kyoto fanatics, awash is their naive, pastoral fantasies, don't want the Third World building coal, oil or natural gas-fired energy plants to supply electricity. They also object to nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gases. They would deny the Third World any realistic means of modernizing itself. Instead, they insanely demonize industrialization and development, the only things that can lift poor nations out of poverty, while lecturing the world's poorest to use wind and solar power, a farce given how impractical and expensive this would be.

Meanwhile, the IPCC and its cheerleaders give us ever-more-hysterical "climate porn" updates -- theoretical predictions of the additional deaths that may occur due to man-made global warming, that ignore the real deaths happening right now because of the Third World's lack of electricity.

Here's African economist and author James Shikwati, interviewed by Channel 4 in Great Britain for its documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle: "One clear thing that emerges from the whole environmental debate is the point that somebody came to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop. We are being told 'don't touch your resources. Don't touch your oil. Don't touch your coal.' That is suicide."