By H. Michael Mogil, Special to the Naples Daily News
As a certified consulting meteorologist who has written extensively about weather, I am compelled to address the spate of stories that appear almost daily in the Daily News. Almost without fail, weather and climate events are based on “global warming.” The offerings in the Oct. 21 paper were “Rising Seas, Sinking Land” (about Thailand) and “New England’s fading fall foliage colors blamed on climate change.” I was shocked not to find that the article on Georgia’s drought or the one on Cleveland’s Game 6 playoff loss weren’t linked to global warming as well.
Long-term climate studies show that the Earth goes through large- and small-scale weather and climate patterns. These are based on solar energy output and solar flare activity, wobbles of the Earth’s rotation, changes in land locations (plate tectonics or continental drift, depending upon your age when the subject was taught), periodic melting and reformation of glaciers and much more. Humans are clearly affecting some of these typical variations, but we are not their cause.
While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore claim that humans are almost certainly the cause of the changes, I disagree.
Regardless of global warming, there are many other reasons that we should be reducing dependence on oil and other fossil fuels, better managing Earth’s resources (including water supplies) and otherwise tending to our special place in the solar system. Read more here.
H. Michael Mogil is a certified consulting meteorologist with B.S. and M.S. degrees in meteorology from Florida State University. Mike has earned the American Meteorological Society’s Television Seal of Approval and was recognized by the National Weather Association in 1988 for his “...outstanding efforts in weather education.”
By Nigel Lawson, former British Cabinet minister
Investing in sea and flood defences is a more sensible reaction to possible global warming than trying to cool the planet, a former British Cabinet minister told the Business Roundtable in Auckland yesterday. Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s Government and father of food writer Nigella Lawson, acknowledged there was evidence of global warming and that carbon dioxide emissions did play some part in warming the planet.
But he told the gathering that it was not at all clear how much CO2 emissions were contributing to global warming, and that humankind could adapt to whatever problems global warming caused. Lord Lawson, in New Zealand as a guest of the Business Roundtable, has written extensively about climate change and has raised concerns about what he says are the scientific uncertainties surrounding it. He told the gathering last night that mankind had adapted to many dangers over the years without the need for government intervention, but governments could invest in “public goods” such as adequate sea and flood defences. Governments in developed countries in this case had a moral obligation to invest in such defences in warmer developing countries, which were likely to be the biggest losers from any global warming. “The more one examines the current global warming orthodoxy, the more it resembles a Da Vinci Code of environmentalism. It contains a grain of truth - and a mountain of nonsense. See story here.
By Marc Sheppard, American Thinker
Interviewed in the magazine’s third 40th Anniversary Issue of the year, self-proclaimed planet savior Al Gore warns that: “It is a mistake to think of the Climate Crisis as one in a list of issues that will define our future. It is the issue. Everything else must be viewed through that lens.”
That’s right—The issue. Not the all too real, ongoing struggle against radical Islamic madmen. Not nuclear proliferation. Not even the truly apocalyptic potential fusion of the two, a prospect which recent events in Pakistan have chillingly served to advance.
No - the issue, insists Gore, is his completely conjectural Climate Crisis. As though to support such an absurd declaration, he then offered these keen observations: “The north polar ice cap is melting, the fires are burning, the sea level is rising, living species are going extinct. These and many other manifestations, including half the U.S. being in drought last year, are visible to the naked eye. We have got to recognize that even though it’s never happened before, it is happening right now.”
Now, virtually every claim in his first two sentences is technically truthful. Until, that is, augmented by the catastrophe-implying qualification of the third. And it is just that dishonest inference—that these occurrences are without precedent—that exposes the true measure of this man in oh so many ways. Not a single one of Gore’s five examples of what’s “happening right now” has, as he persists, “never happened before.” Not one. So in how many ways does Gore deceive? Given five deceptions in three sentences in one paragraph in just one interview, who can possibly keep count? Read more here.