Global Warming Myths
By Alan Caruba

I think most people, whether they know anything about the science involved, have decided that more than twenty years of lies about "global warming" have failed to demonstrate it is happening or likely to occur any time soon.

Most have concluded, quite sensibly, that the Earth is warmed by the Sun and that there isn't a damned thing we could do about it, if it either warmed or cooled. Moreover, movies showing the Statue of Liberty drowning beneath the waves are about as believable as the "Planet of the Apes" film that showed it washed up on a beach.

So why is the Conference Board, a corporate business think tank, wasting its time announcing, as it did on September 7, that "Growing scientific evidence is confirming that the world's climate is radically changing and that human activity is now contributing to global warming." The answer is that the Conference Board, in league with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Environmental Defense, has sadly been sucked into the Great Global Warming Scam (GGWS).

Obviously, no one among the leadership of the Conference Board has a clue about the real science that refutes the GGWS. Instead, they have relied upon a panel of scientists with impressive credentials and affiliations with major universities. However, there are many more scientists with equally impressive credentials that have carefully examined climate records and concluded global warming claims are in conflict with the known facts.

The Conference Board report concludes that, "The Earth -- for whatever the exact reasons -- is on a trajectory toward an ever warmer climate." Someone should tell the Conference Board that the Earth has been warming since the last Ice Age ended eighteen million years ago. Someone should tell the Conference Board that, in the 1970s, environmentalist scientists were predicting a new Ice Age was just around the corner.

Most telling is that wonderful aside "for whatever the exact reasons" that tells us that the Ph.D.s who put the report together were, as always with the GGWS, fudging the fact that the Sun will decide the Earth's temperatures and not "human activity." Naturally, though, the Board's announcement says, "Participating scientists in the report strongly believe that ‘a reduction in human-caused emissions is an essential step in any overall strategy for dealing with climate change."

"Human-caused emissions" does not, one presume, include all that methane that vast herds of cattle and other herbivores emit daily. These are the GGWS code words for reversing industrialization, i.e., the burning of fossil fuels for the production of, well, everything. It is the raison d'etre of the United Nations Kyoto Protocols on Climate Change. The United States has firmly rejected it. And both China and India are exempt from it! Its impact on developing nations would be devastating if applied to them and it would reverse the prosperity of industrialized nations.

The Conference Board report cites the usual elements of the GGWS. It talks of ocean warming and the rise in sea levels though it notes that, "both the rate and the amount of sea level rises are, as with most other climate change patterns, subject to uncertainty." Not really, in 2001 Cecile Cabanes calculated sea-level rise for the last half-century around the world and concluded that in Bangladesh for example, in the last fifty years, it has risen an infinitesimal seven-tenths of an inch! The only uncertainty one should entertain is the level of idiocy the Conference Board report reflects.

The report worried that spring is now arriving (gasp!) on the average, 2.5 days per decade earlier than it did a century ago, but fails to note that, between 1850 and 1950, the Earth warmed about one degree Fahrenheit and then stopped warming! We've already had a half-century since then and if spring is arriving early, who cares?

The report worried about mountain glaciers such as those in Montana's Glacier National Park, "which account for about ten percent of the world's surface water, are melting." Let's make this as easy to understand as possible. In the summer, glaciers melt. If you check out data from the National Climatic data center, you would discover that average summer temperatures over Western Montana showed absolutely no warming trend in the last century.

The thing that got my attention was the way the Conference Board report came out at the same time that the September issue of National Geographic magazine devoted itself to the same GGWS hogwash. It, too, is filled with the same balderdash and gibberish. Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, spotted 35 significant errors put forth as scientific truths. Shame on National Geographic.

This coordination of the assault on the truth about the Earth's climate is a hallmark of environmental organizations and accounts for each new or revised scare campaign they manufacture in their never ending attack on the vast improvement of life on Earth resulting from free market economies and the products and services that result.

Disdain and contempt for human life is the rampant theme of environmentalism. You are still more likely to be threatened by a raging hurricane or a blizzard than from SUV's, pesticides, or the use of coal, oil and natural gas to light, warm or cool your home or apartment.

As the latest phase of the Great Global Warming Scam heats up, you can always use the latest Conference Board report to start a nice blaze in your fireplace if you have one, even if this constitutes yet another form of "human emissions."

Alan Caruba writes a weekly commentary, "Warning Signs", posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center (www.anxietycenter.com).

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