Climate Change

Like many of the vox populi I was skeptical of man-caused climate change, but with so many on board the climate train it was hard not to jump on. My brother was even more skeptical than I and in many ways we agreed that the ice cores showed that carbon dioxide levels were higher in the past when it was colder than they are at present.

Recently he bought a copy of “Climate Change: The Facts.” He was so enthusiastic that I borrowed and read it.

The evidence against anthropogenic climate change is vast and unimpeachable. The first part of the Al Gore/pro climate change scientists’ Holy Grail was the “hockey stick” graph that showed a precipitous rise in global temperatures due to fossil fuel burning. In fact the overall energy balance for the earth has not changed for the past seventeen years. So much for that bit of nonsense.

Another bit of science fiction promulgated by those in favor of anthropogenic climate change is the “heat sink” proposal. That is all the heat that must have been generated by the carbon dioxide in the air must be locked up in the ocean. But there is no evidence for that assertion; in fact, the ocean temperature has not varied much more than a fraction of a degree over the same time that the earth was supposed to be warming from all that CO2.

If the evidence weren’t enough there are numerous occasions where the international panel on climate change has manipulated the data to show that their models of man-caused climate change are correct. If this kind of manipulation were discovered in any other professional body the scandal would reverberate from pole to pole and around the Equator. But as some of the authors in the book point out climate science appears to be immune from a thorough investigation of not only the evidence but also the scandalous assertions that are made in the name of the IPCC.

The silver lining in this cloud of obfuscation is that the “undeveloped” countries have balked at having to meet the same carbon reduction criteria that the biggies have to meet (USA, UK, etc.). What that means is that the rush to limit, curtail or eliminate fossil fuel burning, especially coal, is on hold for who knows how long.

All in all the book goes a long way to show that climate is such a complex mix of gases, winds, solar radiation, oceans and other natural elements that have nothing to do with fossil fuel burning that one’s carbon footprint doesn’t loom as large a contributor to a catastrophic end for humanity as before the writers and editor began to analyze exactly what the gloom and doom anthropogenic climate change bloc was all about.

The statistics and charts in the book are explained in plain English so most of the scholarly approach to discussing the evidence is readable. But the book is not a page turner and one wouldn’t expect it to be so since it takes a while to digest the information presented.