New Year Begins with Old Green Lies

Those of us who keep a watchful eye on environmentalists---the Greens---are sometimes in awe of their utterly relentless campaign of lies stretching back to the late 1950s. Their capacity to wage war on the truth is awesome.

On January 2nd, an Associated Press story warned of "rising global temperatures" reportedly "altering the ranges and behavior of hundreds of plant and animal species worldwide." This is such blather I won't waste time on it. Fully 95% of all the species that ever existed are now extinct. That's what happens, sooner or later, to all species. On the Animal Planet channel they're showing "The Future Is Wild", a prediction of what earth will be like in millions of years. It ain't pretty.

The next day, January 3rd, the AP's so-called science reporter, Paul Recer, had an article reporting that "An Antarctic ice sheet the size of Texas and Colorado combined is melting and could disappear in 7,000 years, possibly raising worldwide sea levels by 16 feet."

The problem with this report is that, some time in the next 7,000 years, the Earth could just as easily experience a brief Ice Age, ending the melting and increasing the ice shelf. During the Middle Ages, there was a mini-Ice Age that routinely froze the river Thames in England and had the same impact throughout Europe. It lasted about four hundred years. Then it stopped. No one knows why, but the residents of Greenland were forced to leave because it ceased to be green. It became covered with ice.

My complaint with such articles is that, despite their alleged documentation, they always fall back on words like "might" or "could", the old reliable "maybes" of Green Talk that ignore the vast body of historic and scientific knowledge that easily dismisses predictions of horrible things to come.

Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, two climatologists with an international reputation for common sense, recently commented on last year's repeated claims that 2002 was one of the hottest years in history. In particular, they cited Andrew Revkin, another so-called science writer, whose platform is The New York Times. Let it be said that this newspaper has long engaged in nothing but environmental propaganda. It is the newspaper that not long ago claimed the North Pole was melting and then had to retreat from that absurdity.

Revkin is just one in a long line of reporters since the 1970's whose writings exist solely to advance the lies of the Green movement. Just as there is junk science they engage in junk journalism. Combine the two and you get the sham and scam of "global warming." The New York Times has descended into that circle of Hell where the truth is no longer valued.

Revkin starts off his December 3lst article, stating that "Climate experts say global temperatures in 2003 could match or beat the modern record set in 1998, when temperatures were raised sharply by El Nino…" Revkin has selected those "experts" that see global warming everywhere. He generally ignores those who debunk it. Since he is writing about relatively rapid changes, he does acknowledge "these time spans are short when it comes to climate, and polar experts say it remains exceedingly difficult to ascribe regional changes to human actions rather than natural cycles in ocean and weather circulation around the Northern Hemisphere." Bingo! The impact of human activity on the weather is virtually non-existent.

One sentence in Revkin's report, however, tells you everything you need to know about why, yet again, you're reading about global warming. "And Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, plan to introduce legislation early in 2003 that would gradually establish mandatory greenhouse gas restrictions and a system in which companies could trade credits they would earn by making emissions cuts."

This is the United Nations Kyoto Climate Control Treaty that both the Senate and the Bush Administration have rejected! We are not talking about "science" anymore. We're talking environmental politics of the most loathsome kind. If the Greens can't force the UN treaty down your throat one way, they find two political stooges to foist it on you another way.

As Drs. Soon and Baliunas point out, "First of all, it's important to remember that the attempt to determine the relative ranking of a measured global surface temperature, given current limitations, is impossible."

That's right, it is and always has been impossible to make a determination of the Earth's overall temperature. The current methods are, at best, an informed guess. Even the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, if you check their web page, will tell you that "reported temperature (by the local news media) is truly meaningful only to a person who happens to visit the weather station at the precise moment when the reported temperature is measured." In short, that local weather report could change within an hour!

The absurdity and uncertainty of knowing the global average of temperature is such that it renders all predictions of "Global Warming" moot. These predictions are based on flawed computer models that leave out key elements of weather that are unpredictable. If the best computer models today can barely tell you what the weather will be in 48 hours, why would anyone think those used by the Greens have any credibility at all?

It is a disgrace that the Associated Press and other news organization continue to report these bogus predictions, all of which conclude that global warming is occurring. The warming we are experience now began anywhere from ten to twenty million years ago. Enjoy it.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs", posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.