Garbanzo Toons

Greener Than Thou

Susan Ager is a local columnist for the Detroit Free Press. She usually isn't covering topics that I'm interested in, so I rarely read her. Sometimes I skim the first paragraph just to make sure, mostly because I wish it would take longer than ten to fifteen minutes to get through the entire paper - excluding the comics.

This column, however, piqued my interest.

. . . five days later, my husband and I finally watched "An Inconvenient Truth."

Midway through, I turned our thermostat down to 55, two hours earlier than normal. This morning, as I write, I turned it down again.

The film is as powerful as an earthquake. Obviously, it changed the Crawfords' lives. It promises to change the lives of all who see it.

To stick to your old ways in the face of what it teaches is to be indifferent to all who follow you on this planet.

Yeah, another true believer, brought even further into the Green fold by the unvarnished, unassailable, unarguable truth of His Greenness, Al Gore. But she doesn't excuse Gore for his extra large carbon footprint. Oh no, she gives it to him, both barrels, in a scathing, blistering critique of His Econess' over use of precious and finite energy:

Gore's own footprint needs shrinking. His house is too big. So is mine, and maybe yours. That puts extra pressure on us to do what we can.

Well, maybe "scathing" wasn't the right word. And perhaps "blistering" was also a bit strong. But she does slap his wrist . . . sort of, along with her wrist, and my wrist. But I'm not sure that my house is "too big" compared to Gore's house. I'm guessing that my house, along with the garage that my wife has wanted for years but that we still don't have, would fit in his foyer.

On the other hand, there is this article over at The Ornery American, wherein we learn that Al Gore's "truth" is neither unassailable or unarguable. In fact, Orson Scott Card builds a pretty convincing argument that Al Gore is full of enough hot air to actually create the man-made global warming he warns us of.

If you pay close attention, you'll find that Global Warming alarmists are not actually saying "Global Warming" lately. No, nowadays it's "Climate Change." Do you know why?

Because for the past three years, global temperatures have been falling.

Oops.

The thing is, we've had twenty years since the Alarmists first raised the banner of Global Warming. They told us that "If This Goes On" by 2010 or 2020, sea levels will be rising so high that coastal cities will be flooded, famines will cover the earth, and ...

Oh, you know the list. They're still making the same predictions -- they just move the dates farther back.

It's like those millennarian religious cults in the 1800s. Religious leaders would arise who would predict the Second Coming of Christ in 1838. When Christ didn't oblige them by showing up, they went back to their visions or scripture calculations or whatever they claimed and report that they miscalculated, now it was going to be 1843. Or whatever.

Here's the raw truth:

All the computer models are wrong. They have not only failed to predict the future, they can't even predict that past.

That is, when you run their software with the data from, say, the 1970s or 1980s, and project what should happen in the 1990s or 2000s, they project results that have absolutely nothing to do with the known climate data for those decades.

In other words, the models don't work. The only way to make them "work" is to take the known results and then fiddle with the software until it finally produces them. That's not how honest science is done.

Why are so many scientists so wrong?

First of all, there aren't all that many scientists. You hear about how "everybody" agrees about global warming. But who is "everybody"?

I had somebody at a conference get very angry with me for even raising a question. "I have a friend who's a climate scientist and he says that the Everglades are definitely drying up!"

But that's not the question, I said. Global warming isn't even the question. The question is, what is causing global warming or cooling or climate change? Is it human Carbon Dioxide emissions or something else? Your friend is studying aquifers in one specific area. In what way is he qualified to speak about global climate?

The only answer I got was the answer you always get when you challenge the roots of someone's religion -- fury, dismay, and a refusal to talk about it any more.

That's what happens over and over. Who are the scientists who are qualified to speak? There aren't that many. It's the relatively few scientists who are studying paleoclimate and those who are working on contemporary data collection and collation and analysis.

And here's where it almost gets funny. Even the IPCC, which was so heavily biased in favor of Global Warming alarmism, could not get its pet scientists to agree that Global Warming in recent decades is even probably caused by human activity.

The whole article is well worth reading especially if you are panicking over global warming or climate change or any other of the environmental disasters we have been told to fear ever since the 1960s. As for Al Gore, continue to ignore him.

Labels: Al Gore, global warming, Orson Scott Card

posted by Harry @ 8:09 PM