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Global Warming Debate

One non-homogenous group believes their effort at reducing carbon dioxide will save the world from catastrophe. This group includes political activists, who might have no understanding of the science involved, and scientists, who might have an understanding of some of the science involved but are twisting the facts to suit their political ends (so they are no longer seeking the scientific truth but are instead pursuing a political agenda). When motivated by a religious crusade, where they are right and their opponents are wrong, reason alone cannot diverge them from that path, nor can conflicting observations.

The global warming crusade began, rather ironically, right after the ice age scare of the 1970's, when activists feared cool temperatures would remain for many decades. Various activists had other alarms to sound at the time, like that of overpopulation (The Population Bomb), or that mathematical models indicated imminent global collapse (The Limits to Growth). As multinational corporations had began disrupting local economies, these activists were distrustful of their actions and eventually they became the scapegoat for rising temperatures as well. When the cooler temperatures of the 1940's to 1970's began to rebound, alarms were raised that now the warmer temperatures would continue to rise for many decades, even though the temperatures had not even matched the levels of the 1930's when many American high temperature records were set.

The global warming activists, concerned about carbon dioxide somehow being the cause of pending catastrophe, dominate the debate. The UN formed the IPCC in 1988 to provide reports about how human activities generating greenhouse gases cause global warming. The IPCC provides no scientific study but instead serves only as the source for these alarmist reports, which are consistent with its charter.

Those skeptical of these claims about carbon dioxide being a threat to humanity and the global weather have been vilified, called 'deniers' to be linked with the Holocaust deniers, and the Climategate revelations showed careers have been affected by the insiders taking revenge on those that do not follow their line.

In the 1990's the debate was over global warming. As there has been no significant global warming since 1998, a period when the temperatures have averaged the same over a long time, and as people have noticed the return of colder winters with blizzards and storms, the label had to be changed to climate change, because weather is always changing but now those changes can be attributed to carbon dioxide.

Temperatures were warmer in the 1980s and 1990s then in the earlier decades, just as temperatures were warmer in the 1930s (the Dust Bowl decade) than decades in the 1950s and 1960s. There is clearly a natural cycle of temperature trends (and this site contains my own investigation into such trends), that has been attributed to the natural 60 year cycle of the Pacific Ocean, and the amount of carbon dioxide generated by human activities is far less than that generated by natural activities. However the most recent warming period was claimed to be different than the earlier warming periods because the activists claimed their climate models were now so well designed and their accuracy demonstrated the latest warming could come from only the human generated carbon dioxide. This claim has been ruined by the overwhelming evidence in the last decade that while the world's carbon dioxide level continues to grow and the models predicted the global temperatures would similary continue to rise, the actual temperatures have not risen. The climate models have been shown to be wrong and so they cannot be used to justify any alarms about future warming.

The debate about global warming must confront the lack of global warming and so dispense with the alarmism about carbon dioxide, just as it should dispense with the substitute alarms about climate change, when the world's weather is always changing and it is quite silly to be alarmed about normal changes in weather. Recently this alarmism switched to the fear of extreme weather events (called extreme by the alarmists but each time a similar weather was recorded earlier in human history) but even the latest IPCC report in 2013 confirms (as was stated many times by various climate scientists before the report) there is no connection with levels of carbon dioxide with anything called extreme weather. For example, 2013 had the lowest number of wildfires in 30 years, a near record low in tornadoes, a hurricane season that was far gentler than predicted, and the disappearance of drought conditions from most of the US.

There have been books written about the global warming and carbon dioxide debate and there are a number of web sites devoted to the investigation of the issues rather than just fanatical alarmism (like the most popular sites of Watts Up with That, Climate Audit, and Joanne Nova's site).

The effort to suppress carbon dioxide generation, by making energy more expensive, will cause misery for the poor in the world, without any effect on the world's temperatures or weather.

Insertion 01/04/2019
Recently there was something of a debate about climate science in the senate; I will provide the link and the viewer can decide on who comes across as a real scientist.

senate committee on science, about climate science, roughly 2017

Curry Christy Mann & Pielke go at it

created - October 2013
last change - 01/04/2019
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