Let’s begin by acknowledging that the science of global warming is beyond the vast majority of us. Nonetheless, this does not mean we turn off our brains and simply accept the pronouncements of those sounding the alarm and offering their remedies. I am a global warming skeptic (to say the least) specifically because I have thought through the issue and the claims of the alarmists just don’t add up. What follows is my thinking and what it is that has led me to conclude that global-warming is a leftist farce which is being perpetuated for both financial and political reasons.
First, I am skeptical because skepticism is the scientific starting point. Not cynicism but skepticism. This is especially true when the remedy being proposed is so drastic — in this case requiring the near-total dismantling of society as we know it.
I am not overly impressed by talk of a “consensus” as there are enough good and serious scientists who reject the claims of the alarmists to make the pronouncement of “consensus” simply untrue. Besides, every wrong theory that had previously been embraced by society – such as the “fact” that the world is flat – was embraced by a “consensus” of scientists at the time and obviously that consensus was very wrong.
My skepticism is only increased with the knowledge that the science of climatology is relatively new, little tested and since its claims about consequences are decades and even centuries in the future, never proven by having had their predictions come true. In fact, many of the alarmists’ most hyped claims have been proved by time to be patently wrong. As one leading alarmist wrote in an email he thought would remain private, global warming has been on a fifteen year hiatus that he felt needed to be covered-up.
My skepticism of this new science is furthered even more by the knowledge that the “facts” upon which their models are created are based almost entirely on numbers that are not easily verified and which require great speculation to determine. If these “facts” are wrong then the models are useless (to say the least.) Remember, the whole global-warming theory is based on only a couple of degrees of change over many millennia. Do scientists really know what the temperature was in northeast Siberia in the year 802? Do they really know that number down to a single fraction of a degree? I’m skeptical and you should be, too.
My confidence in the conclusion of these alarmist scientists is further weakened because I’ve been here before. For as long as I can remember the “experts” – many the very same people pushing global warming hysteria today – have been predicting one ecological disaster after another. In the 1970s and virtually every year afterwards, we were doomed – doomed!!! – to global cooling, global wetting, global drying, mass starvation, acid rain, an epidemic of heterosexual AIDS, Mad Cow and, just the other day, a deadly pandemic of Swine Flu. Alarmism seems to be a tactic employed by scientists to draw attention to their causes, garner major funding and make a name for themselves and hyped by a willing news (and publishing) media because hysteria sells.
My trust in the conclusions of the alarmists is even further diminished by the unscientific methods the alarmists are using in their efforts. Not only are we now privy to leaked documents emailed back-and-forth between those at the head of the “climate change” research detailing the destruction of their work and their underhanded methods of preventing Freedom of Information laws to allow others to double-check their supposed findings, but the campaign to slander other scientists – those whose work sheds doubt on the alarmists’ claims – reeks of the kind of cowardice shown by those who know they are lying. Slander is not a scientific practice. Dubbing anyone who challenges their hysterical campaign as being like Holocaust deniers is an ad hominem attack with no scientific merit. In fact, it is anti-scientific, a means to discredit the man rather than the answering the opposing science.
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