From timblair.net
A brief history of environmentalist panic, compiled by the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby:
In 1902, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing “their final annihilation” due to rising temperatures. But by 1923, it was the ice that was doing the annihilating: “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada,” the Chicago Tribune declared on Page 1.
So it was curtains for the Canadians? Uh, not quite. In 1953, The New York Times announced that “nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat.” Yet no sooner did our neighbors to the north breathe a sigh of relief than it turned out they weren’t off the hook after all: “The rapid advance of some glaciers,” wrote Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling,” his 1976 bestseller, “has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union.” And now? “Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say,” the Times reported in 2002.
Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that all these competing narratives of doom can’t be true.
As of yet, the global-warming environmentals have yet to explain how humans caused the single greatest case of global-warming known: The end of the ice age. On the other hand, if the end of the ice age--the most extreme case of climate change ever seen on this planet--can be explained by 'natural forces' perhaps the current incidents of 'global warming' (miniscule in comparison) can also be explained by 'natural forces' (unless of course there are political motiviations which make 'natural forces' an undesirable explaination).
ReplyDeleteIf you read "State of Fear" by Michael Crighton, he gives a credible, though fictional, scenario for the political reasons why the media, politicians and greeenies are all advantaged by the current "crisis".There is a blog that I've quoted on other posts called "The Reference Frame", written by a very intelligent and qualified physicist who cogently argues the sceintific case against human causes for global warming.Some points I've picked up from him:* the rate of increase of sea levels has halved in the second half of the 20th Century.* our BEST climatic information only goes back 400 years which coincides with the end of the Mini Ice Age* because of natural variability in climatic data, you have to go back 230 years to be statistically sure that there is an increase in temperature. In fact there is, but this obviously started before the industrialisation that is supposed to be causing current warming.Blessings!Keith
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