By Rep. Carl Gatto, Alaska
We try to stay informed, read the newspapers, watch the news on TV, and still we missed a major event that affects our future and our pocketbooks. 700 scientists, economists, and public policy experts from 20 countries met in New York City in early March of this year. They concluded that global warming, if it is ocurring at all, is probably natural rather than man-made.
The message from 700 of our best and brightest scientists who studied this issue, based on science and observation, was very different from Al Gore’s message and President Obama’s message. Gore claims that there is a crisis in our atmosphere, that a calamity is occurring, and in ten years the atmosphere may suffer irreversible harm. Gore and Obama offer their solution: cap the production of energy from fossil fuels, tax carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, create a “cap and tax” bureaucracy, make most forms of energy very expensive, and transfer our personal wealth to government wealth all to perform an absolutely worthless and unnecessary task.
The Gore-Obama plan is to collect CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground forever, spending trillions of dollars doing it. In return, we get nothing, unless you count the $645 billion in additional taxes, something that all Americans will pay every time they buy a product or fill up the tank of their car or truck.
Global warming alarmists want us to believe that the temperature of Earth would stay the same year after year, century after century, if not for “the human presence.” This is scientifically false. Huge climate changes have occurred before humans could possibly have played a role. More recently, global temperatures rose from 1900 to 1940 (1934 was the century’s warmest year), fell from 1940 to 1975, rose again from 1975 to 1998, and declined from 1998 to 2008. How does “the human presence” account for this variation? It can’t.
Most people have noticed the recent cooling that is taking place: extended cold snaps, snow accumulations, snow falling in southern states where “it does not belong” and staying around way too long. Satellite data confirms that the Earth has been cooling since at least 2001, and probably earlier.
Al Gore says “soaring global temperatures will bring human civilization to a screeching halt.” “Global warmers” also predict no more agriculture in California, and in ten years the oceans will be toxic and all life could die. And yet, we’re halfway to the much-feared “doubling of CO2” in the atmosphere, and none of these disasters has even begun to appear.
Global warming’s true believers say trains carrying coal and other fuel to cities are really death trains carrying poisonous fuel to “coal-fired factories of death.” Whew, Hollywood horror films could not top this stuff. But there is more: hurricanes, melting polar ice caps, polar bear extinctions, dust bowls, and anything else about the weather than you can imagine.
Let’s look at the facts. Nearly 85% of US energy consumption is carbon-based, and reducing that figure by using wind, solar, and other renewable sources will take a long time, be very expensive, and may not even be technically possible. Scientists (and farmers) know carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant.” The vast majority of it is produced from natural sources, not human activities, and plants and forests use CO2 to grow and produce oxygen for all living things. Ordinary air contains roughly 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, and a paltry 0.038% carbon dioxide. Scientists - including several who presented at the New York conference - are quite unsure that a tiny increase in that tiny amount of CO2 is having any effect on climate. Many scientists believe negative feedbacks more than offset whatever warming the CO2 might be capable of causing.
Our whole solar system is showing signs of climate change, including Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and even lonely Pluto. There aren’t any SUVs on those planets. What all the planets have in common, though, is that they receive heat from the sun and they are affected by cosmic rays and other galaxy-wide processes. Nothing we do can compare to changes in sun spot activity and brightness when it comes to changing our climate.
Our climate appears to be once again reversing course and cooling, repeating a cycle that has repeated itself thousands of times in the past. Glaciers advance when the Earth cools, then make up for all that work by retreating when the Earth re-warms. Human activities may have a little impact, but is it good or bad? Worth preventing? No one knows.
So for the time being, let’s accept that the Earth’s climate has been wide-ranging for five billion years. That’s our planet’s history, and we are here in spite of (or maybe because of) all those changes. Thank God for that. Read more here.
BBC News: Science and the Environment
A team of polar explorers has travelled to the Arctic in a bid to discover how quickly the sea-ice is melting and how long it might take for the ocean to become ice-free in summers. Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley will be using a mobile radar unit to record an accurate measurement of ice thickness as they trek to the North Pole. The trio will be sending in regular diary entries, videos and photographs to BBC News throughout their expedition.
The Catlin Arctic Survey team started its gruelling trek on 28 February. Last report was March 11, 2009.
WEDNESDAY 11 MARCH - DAY 12 - FEELING THE ARCTIC CHILL
From Pen Hadow: Conditions have been hard.
We have been battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised from falls on the ice. Occasionally it’s disheartening too when you’ve slogged for a day and then wake up the next morning having drifted back to where you started. The Arctic sea ice is constantly moving, breaking open and reforming into different shapes - which means we can end up moving several kilometres in any direction while we are asleep in our tents.
The wind chill today will slice us up - it’s taking the temperature down to below -50C, so we have decided to take a day’s rest to recharge our batteries and soothe the aches and pains. We are resigned to several weeks of daily discomfort and general misery, safe in the knowledge that conditions, our progress and general well-being will improve over the coming months.
See video report from the group here.
See larger image here.
Read more here.
UPDATE March 17, AFP:
No Joke! ‘The cold is relentless!’ - Arctic Global warming explorers face frostbite, ‘brutal sub-zero weather conditions’ - AFP – March 17, 2009
Excerpt: Three British explorers trying to ski to the North Pole to measure the thickness of sea ice only have one day’s food left as bad weather hampers supply flights, the mission said Tuesday. Project director and ice team leader Pen Hadow and his colleagues Martin Hartley and Ann Daniels are now down to half rations and fighting to survive in brutal sub-zero weather conditions. “Wer’e hungry, the cold is relentless, our sleeping bags are full of ice and, because we’re not moving, the colder we get,” Hadow said Tuesday in a statement from the London headquarters of the Catlin Arctic Survey. “Waiting is almost the worst part of an expedition as we’re in the lap of the weather gods. This is basic survival.” Hartley, the team’s photographer, who has frostbite in his left toe, said he had hoped the supply plane would arrive Tuesday in time to celebrate his 41st birthday. The team aims to gather data to complement satellite and submarine observations to measure the sea ice and plot how fast it is disappearing. Global warming is believed to be the main culprit in the rapidly melting north polar ice cap that is freeing up new sea routes and untapped mineral resources on the ocean bottom. Read more here. See a compilation of other nature thwarted attempts to demonstrate global warming in the arctic in this Marc Morano compilation here.
By Al Kamen, Washington Post
One of the foremost proponents of the view that global climate change is a myth, the Right Honorable Christopher Walter Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, was in town last week warning a House Ways and Means subcommittee that adopting a cap-and-trade system or another such tax plan to reduce pollution is unnecessary and would pretty much destroy the country. And it was a great show as Monckton, who has been a newspaper reporter and an adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, prefaced his remarks at a hearing on the impact of climate change on the poor by intoning: “I bring you warmest fraternal greetings from the Mother of Parliaments to the Congress of your great athletic democracy, and I pray that God’s blessings may rest upon your councils.” Athletic? What happened to the obesity epidemic? Then, in a magnificent 428-word sentence, Monckton said that the leading proposals on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide—“a harmless and beneficial trace gas”—would “threaten” the lives of poor people, “gravely diminish liberty,” maybe “render unlawful the pursuit of happiness” and lead to “fiscal incontinence.” Yikes! There would be more poverty and higher birth rates, he said, and thus even more carbon dioxide as more people exhale. “The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are thickening. The Sahara is greening. There is no ‘climate crisis,’ “ he said. So the “correct policy is not to cap or tax carbon dioxide emissions. It is to have the courage to do nothing.” His lordship later blamed California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s enviro efforts for “the mass exodus” from that state and warned that the contemplated tax ideas to reduce warming would “drive your nation into bankruptcy.”
By the end of Monckton’s low-key opening statement, and despite his use of a little Latin and French—such as “soi-disant,” meaning “so-called” or “self-styled”—the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), got the drift. “Well, I guess we could mark you down as doubtful,” he said, drawing a laugh from the crowd. (For those who missed the testimony, Monckton will be discoursing for folks on the Hill at a lunch today sponsored by the Cooler Heads Coalition. It’s at noon in Room 1334 of the Longworth House Office Building.) See post here.