Global warming hype peaked in 2007 with calls for vast increases in government control to stifle industrial growth, eliminate fossil fuels and impose new carbon taxes. We were told desperate measures are needed because there’s a scientific “consensus” that man-made greenhouse gases are increasing dangerously. Former Vice President Al Gore claimed there’s no legitimate objection to the catastrophes he and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict. All this received much media coverage and support from politicians and government bureaucrats, who stand to gain control if we heed their warnings. The problem is, there’s noscientific consensus for doomsday claims, let alone that drastic remedies are needed.

Growing numbers of global warming science skeptics are making their opposition known. They include experts in climatology, oceanography, geology, biology, environmental sciences and physics, among others. They are affiliated with prestigious institutions worldwide, including Harvard, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, MIT, the International Arctic Research Center, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and many others. Many shared a portion of IPCC’s 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (co-won with Mr. Gore), and others have won previous Nobel Prizes for their research.

A U.S. Senate report accumulated more than 400 of their views to refute Mr. Gore’s claim of “consensus.” Read more of this editorial here.

Some journalists are so confident that we’re already cooked by global warming that they’re scolding ignorant Americans in advance for all the now-unpreventable doom that’s coming our way. Newsweek’s Sharon Begley rings in the new year by shaking her head at the Stupid, Soon to Be Overheated Majority and how we’ll have to adapt to being cooked: “As scientists and policy types figure out what changes will be necessary to cope with global warming, it’s obvious that massive sea walls will be required to hold back rising oceans, that enormous new reservoirs will be needed to cope with the alternating droughts and deluges that many regions will suffer and that a crash program to develop heat- and drought-resistant crops would be a good idea if people are to keep eating....”

I’d love to see Begley face the idea that news magazines and other scientific sages saw the opposite weather threat in the 1970s. As R. Warren Anderson and Dan Gainor laid out in the Business and Media Institute report Fire and Ice.

Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center

These days it is well nigh impossible to not be aware of the ‘Global Warming’ hysteria.  From the doomsday movies, to alarming media headlines, to politicians scrambling over each other to get on the green bandwagon, one thing is clear - it’s not politically correct to question it.  When I first decided to look into what all the fuss was about on climate change, I was not opinionated on the subject at all.  From what I understood then, the only difference between the global warming alarmists and me was a difference in opinion on the economics involved.  That has now completely changed.

They have engaged in exaggeration and deception on just about every single last aspect of climate change. The point of my article is to show you that the theory of anthropogenic global warming needs to be exposed to criticism to ensure its health.  If the theory has merits, then it has to be proved under the rigors of the scientific method, not through political campaigns.  It is important for any subject, but especially one on a global scale with so much at stake, to be rationally discussed without the panic, hysteria, and sensationalist rubbish.  People who try to suppress this debate are highly irresponsible and their motives should seriously be called into question.  A lot of the responsibility for how this is handled rests on you and me.  If someone tells you that the world is going to end in 100 years time because of the gases that come out your mouth and backside, you should have the intellectual fortitude to critically question that claim, and not treat like heretics those who do. Read more here.

Heads of state, government bureaucrats, environmental activists, and the news media—15,000 strong—have just completed a global warming conference in Bali, Indonesia. They intended to force mandated reductions in man-made carbon dioxide emissions (CO2 ) in order to avert the catastrophic consequences of global warming. But respected and skeptical climate scientists were banned from panel discussions, censored, silenced, and threatened with removal by the police if they tried to present peer-reviewed evidence contradicting the ‘’prevailing wisdom.’’ The message was that, ‘’the debate is over; don’t confuse the issue with facts; it’s time to move ahead.’’

But, the nations of the world refused to commit to CO2 reductions because the consequences to their economies would have been truly disastrous. Perhaps the scientific evidence that man-made global warming does not exist somehow sneaked into the conference, and caused doubt about the conventional wisdom, the so-called ‘’scientific consensus’’ that humankind causes global warming.

The 2007 report issued by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee details the views of over 400 prominent scientists from more than 25 countries who voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called ‘’consensus’’ on human-caused global warming. Many of these scientists are current or former members of the IPCC, and are criticizing the claims of the IPCC. This blockbuster report lists the 400-plus scientists by name, academic/institutional affiliation, country of residence, and features their own words—verbatim. The thing that is glaringly absent from the global warming theory is testing. The scientific method requires exhaustive testing to validate a hypothesis, and also requires that a test be applied that would show the hypothesis to be false. This was not done, but instead, the environmentalists cherry-picked only periods of time when CO2 and temperature were both increasing. The problem is, that has rarely happened. Read more here.

It’s that time of year again when we see headlines about 2007 being the mth warmest year on record over the past n years whether we are talking about the United States or the world as a whole. Reporters breathlessly reveal that the trend in temperatures is alarming and completely unprecedented over the eons of earth history. The buildup of greenhouse gases is immediately blamed, and we are all left to believe that the rising temperatures can only be explained by human emissions. Rarely does anyone seem to question the quality of the temperature data, and yet, articles appear regularly in the scientific literature showing that the near-surface air temperature measurements are fraught with errors, gaps, and any number of inhomogeneities.

Climate scientists have been writing about these problems for over a century. Long ago, scientists noticed that temperatures in London were substantially higher than the surrounding rural landscape, and urban climatology has been a subdiscipline in the atmospheric sciences ever since. Once the greenhouse debate got fired-up in the late 1980s, countless articles appeared in the literature on everything from the urban heat island to changes in instrumentation to changes in time of observation. Yet another major article related to the issue of contamination to the temperature record has appeared recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research written by two of the leading greenhouse skeptics walking the planet – Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute. Be aware that the peer reviewers of the manuscript would have been fully aware of who conducted the research and wrote the article, they would certainly have known of the international reputations of McKitrick and Michaels, and accordingly, the research would likely have been held to the highest standards of scrutiny.

The authors state “our analysis does suggest that nonclimatic effects are present in the gridded temperature data used by the IPCC and that they likely add up to a net warming bias at the global level that may explain as much as half the observed land-based warming trend.” Cancelling half of the “global” warming of the past few decades is highly noteworthy at World Climate Report, but no worthy of coverage elsewhere? We can only imagine the press coverage had they been able to squeeze even more warming out of the IPCC temperature record.  Read more here.

So-called Global Warming has the potential to destroy 300 years worth of scientific progress and our advanced western civilization along with it.  From an economist’s position, it is pure folly.  And our worst enemies’ dream come true.

Supporters of so-called global warming tend to fall into one (or more) of three categories: politicians who want to use this latest scare tactic as another means to take more control and power over our lives, corrupt businessmen who want to profit by selling snake oil solutions to a gullible public, or ignorant but well-intentioned people who have bought into another fantasy fable. 

First, one of the most incredible reports ever to come out of the US Senate is the U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007, released last week by the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. It “lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation.  It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007”.

Global Warming has become the socialist’s dream.  Create a scary evil monster and then tell the people that only more government regulation of their lives can save them from certain doom.  Truly a charlatan’s dream come true. With good science now being published and brave scientists now speaking out against the tyrants against truth, let us hope that 2008 is poised to be a wonderful year in which we can once again return to a world of reason and sanity—at least in the wacky world of so-called global warming.

Mr. Easton teaches University economics and is passionate about technology and entrepreneurship. He is rosy about the long-term future: “The glass isn’t half full, it’s overflowing!”

You don’t have to be religious to qualify as a fundamentalist. You can be Al Gore, the messiah figure for the global warming cult, whose followers truly believe their gospel of imminent extermination in a Noah-like flood, if we don’t immediately change our carbon polluting ways.

One of the traits of a cult is its refusal to consider any evidence that might disprove the faith. And so it is doubtful the global warming cultists will be moved by 400 scientists, many of whom, according to the Washington Times, “are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis.” In a report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, these scientists cast doubt on a “scientific consensus” that global warming caused by humans endangers the planet.

Like most cultists, the true believers struck back, not by debating science, but by charging that a small number of the scientists mentioned in the report have taken money from the petroleum industry. A spokeswoman for Al Gore said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobile Corp. Exxon Mobile spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying, “the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.”

The pro-global warming cultists enjoy a huge money advantage. Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, noted in an EPW report how much money has been spent researching and promoting climate fears and so-called solutions: “In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $50 billion (US) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one,” he wrote on June 18, 2007. The $19 million spent on research that debunks the global warming faith pales in comparison. Read more here.

The mantra is repeated daily. There is consensus on climate change. Global warming is real. It will be a disaster. Humans are to blame. We have to do something - immediately. However, the consensus of 100 scientists is undone by one fact, Albert Einstein noted.

Climate change is natural and recurrent. The human factor is small compared to that of the sun and other natural forces. There has been no overall global warming since 1998, and most local and regional warming trends have been offset by nearby cooling. One degree F of net warming since 1900 (amid many temperature ups and downs) does not foreshadow a catastrophe. Recent glacial retreats, sea-level rise and migrations of temperature sensitive species are all within the bounds of known natural variability. The best approach is to adapt, as our ancestors did. Money and resources devoted to futile climate prevention actions would be better spent on malaria, AIDS, poverty and other pressing problems. Most important, no country can progress or prosper without abundant, reliable, affordable energy that would be in short supply if draconian climate laws are implemented. Read more here.