Posted by
Grampus on Thursday, February 01, 2007 4:23:46 PM
There was an extraordinary debate about global warming on CNN’s “Larry
King Live” Wednesday night that perfectly demonstrated the battle that
is waging on this issue. In particular, it marvelously depicted the
hysteria being exhibited by the media versus the reason of those who
actually make a living analyzing the problem.
For instance, King began the discussion:
What is global warming? Could it really kill us all, submerge cities
like New York and Washington and San Francisco under floods from
melting Arctic ice caps? Cause deadly heat waves lasting weeks? Would
such a disaster be man made?
After playing some video clips of frightened Senators, and a petrified
Al Gore, King turned to Weather Channel climate expert Heidi Cullen:
And
I think that the sea level rise issue is especially one that needs to
be discussed and we need to talk about more in the sense that it sounds
like this creeping issue that's far off in the future, but it's
something that once we reach a point of warmer temperatures where we're
pretty much locked into -- to ice caps melting -- and a lot of the new
science that's come out recently suggests that sea ice is melting
faster than we ever thought.
Fortunately, Richard Lindzen of MIT was present to dash some water on all this hysteria:
Well,
I think my read on it is that there is a certain climate of fear, to
quote Mike Creighton. You know, for instance, Nye was talking about
fresh water perhaps shutting down the Gulf Stream. But that isn't what
physical oceanographers think.
First of all, you know, we've measured the heat transport from the
tropics to high latitudes. It's almost all in the atmosphere. The Gulf
Stream is mostly driven by wind. To shut it down, you'd have to stop
the rotation of the Earth or shut off the wind.
And there's a lot of confusion in this and, you know, at the heart of
it, we're talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature.
None of it in the last eight years, by the way. And if we had warming,
it should be accomplished by less storminess. But because the
temperature itself is so unspectacular, we have developed all sorts of
fear of prospect scenarios -- of flooding, of plague, of increased
storminess when the physics says we should see less.
I think it's mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark
closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves.
So, despite the best efforts of the man-made global warming advocates
to silence anyone suggesting otherwise, there are, indeed, a number of
scientific critics who question whether global warming is a problem,
and that the impact of human activity on global warming is negligible
at best.
But because the global warming debate has long since become more
political than scientific, there are increasingly fewer resources, and
recourse, for anyone not in lockstep with man-made global warming
advocates. As a result, those who would question the validity of the
man-made global warming advocates find themselves facing a new
inquisition.
It is because of that extremist influence that many scientists have
discovered the best way to get grant money is to curry the favor of
those extremists. (Follow the money trail.
Not surprisingly, scientists who are global warming skeptics are
invariably castigated as being under the financial influence of the oil
industry, or any other industry which questions global warming, while
those who provide support for the environmental extremist cause are
never questioned about their financial support.
Of course they are castigated...demagoguery is one of the radical left's best attack strategies.
Grampus