Investor's Business Daily, March 13th, 2007
Environmentalism: Even green-friendly media are daring to ask if higher temps are really just part of a natural cycle that could peak before all the forecast doom and gloom. Has Al Gore oversold man-made global warming?
The New York Times, seeing a chance the debate could shift in favor of alternative sources for recent warming, cautiously threw some cold water on Gore's overheated rhetoric.
In Tuesday's issue, it opened the possibility that some of his central claims are "exaggerated and erroneous," and deigned to recognize scientists who have challenged him.
"A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases" produced by cars and factories, the Times reported.
A few? Hardly a week goes by without a new research paper questioning the assumption that carbon-spewing humans are the cause of global warming. Many blame solar activity instead. Because such reports don't fit with the left's anti-industry agenda, they've been buried in the debate.
Most recently, National Geographic News cited new NASA data showing that ice caps near Mars' south pole have been melting due to milder temps on that planet, too.
As far as we know, no Martians drive SUVs. Or run factories. Or do anything else that could produce evil "greenhouse gases." So what could be warming the two planets simultaneously?
"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," concludes the head of St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia.
He and other scientists say changes in the sun's output account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets. Mars and Earth have experienced periodic warming and cooling throughout their histories.
Previous warming on Earth was 20 times hotter than anything recorded this century, and occurred long before the industrial age. Obviously something other than man caused it.
But this is old news. Back in 1991, a year before Gore first sounded the alarm over global warming, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study showing that global temps closely track solar cycles. The historic data, going back centuries, revealed that whenever the sun heated up, Earth heated up, and vice versa. Global warming was -- and may still be -- just that simple.
Gore, of course, didn't like the study's findings -- compelling and validated as they were -- and ignored them in his book, "Earth in the Balance." (He only briefly mentions the Danish study on Page 381 of his footnotes, and only then to dismiss it.)
Call it an inconvenient truth. If Gore acknowledged the sun's role in global warming, how could he justify taxing industry and launching his massive wealth-transfer scheme?
The Mars melt makes the sun's role even harder to ignore. But so far it hasn't fazed Gore and his fellow alarmists. A forthcoming United Nations report warns that fossil-fuel-addicted man risks destroying not only the environment, but also his own species.
"We truly are standing at the edge of mass extinction," claimed Stanford University's Terry Root, who co-authored the report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A draft was leaked to the press this week.
The U.N. body is 90% sure that people are the cause of global warming, and that warming will continue for centuries.
In reaching that conclusion, it ignored an earlier NASA-funded study led by a Columbia University researcher who found that solar activity may have "provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years."
The U.N. also ignored studies showing no link between industrial activity and temperatures. Economic booms over the past century haven't caused spikes in temperature, despite higher carbon emissions. And conversely, recessions haven't cooled the planet.
It's plain that carbon is not the culprit. And curbs on industrial output are not the answer.
Yet Gore -- who's called for "completely eliminating the internal combustion engine" -- will not rest until we're all riding bicycles to the windmill factory.
He and the rest of these new Luddites are the real danger to the planet.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
