The Consensus That Never Was

The LWM cooks the books on global warming:

Scientific consensus!" chants the mainstream media in America when it comes to global warming. Not so long ago, that would have been the end of the story for nearly everyone.

One of the pleasures of the Internet is coming across first-class publications - newspapers, magazines, and the like - that might never have been available to ordinary people in the pre-wired world. Newspapers like The Scotsman and the Sydney Morning Herald, far superior to their equivalents here in the U.S., open windows to other points of view and often contain information impossible to find in the domestic media. The Hindustan Times is not quite on that level. But here too we have a source of information that - to put it kindly - we might never otherwise have come across

"Experts Question Theory on Global Warming" from the February 11th edition may not be the most gracefully written or edited piece you'll ever read (e.g., the use of "cosmatic", which is not a word in standard English and which I believe is supposed to be "cosmetic"), but it's essential reading all the same, focusing as it does on the Indian scientific community's attitude toward climate change.

Dr. V.K. Raina is a leading Indian glaciologist, a scientist who has devoted half a century to the glaciers of the Himalayas, the man to see concerning South Asian glacier studies. Which raises the question of why no one has come around to see him.

Thomas Sowell:

Remember how the unusually large number of hurricanes a couple of years ago was hyped in the media as being a result of global warming, with more such hurricanes being predicted to return the following year and the years thereafter?

But, when not one hurricane struck the United States all last year, the media had little or nothing to say about the false predictions they had hyped. It’s heads I win and tails you lose.

Are there serious scientists who specialize in weather and climate who have serious doubts about the doomsday scenarios being pushed by global-warming advocates? Yes, there are.

There is S. Fred Singer, who set up the American weather satellite system, and who published some years ago a book titled Hot Talk, Cold Science. More recently, he has co-authored another book on the subject, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.

There have been periods of global warming that lasted for centuries — and periods of global cooling that also lasted for centuries. So the issue is not whether the world is warmer now than at some time in the past but how much of that warming is due to human beings and how much can we reduce future warming, even if we drastically reduce our standard of living in the attempt.

Other serious scientists who are not on the global-warming bandwagon include a professor of meteorology at MIT, Richard S. Lindzen.

His name was big enough for the National Academy of Sciences to list it among the names of other experts on its 2001 report that was supposed to end the debate by declaring the dangers of global warming proven scientifically.

Professor Lindzen then objected and pointed out that neither he nor any of the other scientists listed ever saw that report before it was published. It was in fact written by government bureaucrats — as was the more recently published summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that is also touted as the final proof and the end of the discussion.

You want more experts who think otherwise? Try a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, Patrick J. Michaels, who refers to the much ballyhooed 2001 IPCC summary as having “misstatements and errors” that he calls “egregious.”

A professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, David R. Legates, likewise referred to the 2001 IPCC summary as being “often in direct contrast with the scientific report that accompanies it.” It is the summaries that the media hype. The full 2007 report has not even been published yet.

Skeptical experts in other countries around the world include Duncan Wingham, a professor of climate physics at the University College, London, and Nigel Weiss of Cambridge University.

The very attempt to silence all who disagree about global warming ought to raise red flags.

There isn't even consensus yet that the globe IS warming, since satellite, ocean, and land data don't agree, much less that the cause of any such warming is due to the relatively minor carbon emissions attributable to human activity (versus volcanic activity such as the explosion of Mt Pinatubo, which threw more CO2 into the atmosphere than the U.S. would produce in 2,187 years at the 1995 rate).)

And let's not even get into the fact that for all the talk of climatological models we have yet to predict the mean temperature rise accurately for even the past several years. Shouldn't we be able to simply plug in the amount of megatons of CO2 we produce and chug out the mean temperature for next year as a result?

Nah, for that we'll need to spend billions and billions of dollars and return to living in caves.

To the true believers, I say: You go first.