Nigel Calder sums up the global warming issue quite well: "When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works."
Contrary to popular opinion, science cannot disprove the existence of God, empirical observations do not crown a theory correct and there is rarely consensus on any issue. Science is not what newspapers would have us believe.
The current acolytes of the Church of Ecology are not doing science at all. They are creating dogmas and dressing them up as science and it is offensive to our tradition. Aristotle knew better more than two millennia hence.
It should be troubling to our "scientific age" that global warming alarmism is not supported by current observations or reliable projections. The computer models used to suggest a dangerous warming trend are never correct in their predictions. Journals like The Journal of Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics have published studies that argue that the very concept of a "global temperature" is absurd.
I could (and might) write an entire column solely on "An Inconvenient Truth" and its heavy-handed pseudoscience spewed by the Goracle, The Church of Ecology's giver of truth and light.
The recent "Summary for Policymakers" released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included an affirmation that humans were cooking the planet. So perhaps temperatures are generally going up. They do that periodically; they also go down. We are clearly not in an ice age now, so the planet must have gotten warmer since the last one ended. Is it unthinkable that this trend has not yet reached its zenith?
And what about the data that suggests that carbon levels have little to do with warming? There are theories about solar and other galactic drivers of fluctuation, and the data lines up much better here than in attempts at carbon data correlation.
In any honest branch of science, a failure to make accurate predictions spells bad news for a theory. But New Environmentalism, being a religion and not a science, whisks it under the rug with the rest of the data they don't like.
Snow rests on the cherry blossoms in our nation's capital and I wear a jacket to go to my car 10 feet away from my door. Al Gore's speech about global warming was on the coldest day in New York City. And the congressional hearing on the subject was postponed due to inclement cold weather. Surely God created irony.
Environmentalists might say, "Fine, you don't have to agree with us. But we aren't hurting anyone, so why be so fervent in speaking out against us?" I will tell you why.
In the 1970s, the New York Times informed us that "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable," while Newsweek informed us that stubborn politicians would be unwilling to take steps necessary to prepare for the impending ice age. It is precisely this sort of attitude that makes the Church dangerous.
Politicians under the sway of New Environmentalism have called for a "New World Order" to fight global warming. Scientists in Canada (and elsewhere, I am sure) have received death threats for being skeptics of human caused warming. They are called "deniers" and likened to individuals who deny the Holocaust. Climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball received a threat: "If you continue to speak out, you won't live to see further global warming."
Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg was brought up on charges of "scientific misconduct" by Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. Lomborg's crime? Writing a book questioning the science behind global warming theories. Lomborg is a Greenpeace anti-war protestor - but, alas, the Church will not even suffer one of its own to dissent.
It is also dangerous to pretend, as some do, that global warming is the greatest threat to the poor. It is not. Drought, famine, AIDS, political corruption, pestilence and dictatorships rank higher on the list than something that may not be happening and the consequences of which are extremely unclear.
We cannot allow The Church of Ecology to hijack the public debate with bad science and alarmism. A cursory understanding of the Kyoto Protocol makes this clear: the treaty was a thinly veiled socialist scheme designed to tax wealthy nations while leaving places like China and India immune to its terms.
We have to be ready to identify and avert underhanded attempts to get socialism in the back door. New Environmentalism is just the latest such tactic.
Information from - The Telegraph (UK), AFP, United Press International, Science Daily, the Patriot Post, frontpagemag.com, NY Times, Reuters, Newsweek
