Why I am a Climate Change Skeptic

[Dave]

Interesting read and if you have a little time, interesting video. Dr Moore makes some great points and essentially shows that at least some of the supporters of man made climate change are dishonest.

[Editor’s Note: Patrick Moore, Ph.D., has been a leader in international environmentalism for more than 40 years. He cofounded Greenpeace and currently serves as chair of Allow Golden Rice. Moore received the 2014 Speaks Truth to Power Award at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 8, in Las Vegas. Watch his presentation about this piece at the video player to the left.]

I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced for the umpteenth time we are doomed unless we reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to zero. Effectively this means either reducing the population to zero, or going back 10,000 years before humans began clearing forests for agriculture. This proposed cure is far worse than adapting to a warmer world, if it actually comes about.

IPCC Conflict of Interest

By its constitution, the IPCC has a hopeless conflict of interest. Its mandate is to consider only the human causes of global warming, not the many natural causes changing the climate for billions of years. We don’t understand the natural causes of climate change any more than we know if humans are part of the cause at present. If the IPCC did not find humans were the cause of warming, or if it found warming would be more positive than negative, there would be no need for the IPCC under its present mandate. To survive, it must find on the side of the apocalypse.

The IPCC should either have its mandate expanded to include all causes of climate change, or it should be dismantled.

Political Powerhouse

Climate change has become a powerful political force for many reasons. First, it is universal; we are told everything on Earth is threatened. Second, it invokes the two most powerful human motivators: fear and guilt. We fear driving our car will kill our grandchildren, and we feel guilty for doing it.

Third, there is a powerful convergence of interests among key elites that support the climate “narrative.” Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; science institutions raise billions in grants, create whole new departments, and stoke a feeding frenzy of scary scenarios; business wants to look green, and get huge public subsidies for projects that would otherwise be economic losers, such as wind farms and solar arrays. Fourth, the Left sees climate change as a perfect means to redistribute wealth from industrial countries to the developing world and the UN bureaucracy.

So we are told carbon dioxide is a “toxic” “pollutant” that must be curtailed, when in fact it is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, gas and the most important food for life on earth. Without carbon dioxide above 150 parts per million, all plants would die.

Human Emissions Saved Planet

Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.

At 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide. The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than today. Greenhouse growers inject carbon-dioxide to increase yields. Farms and forests will produce more if carbon-dioxide keeps rising.

We have no proof increased carbon dioxide is responsible for the earth’s slight warming over the past 300 years. There has been no significant warming for 18 years while we have emitted 25 per cent of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted. Carbon dioxide is vital for life on Earth and plants would like more of it. Which should we emphasize to our children?

Celebrate Carbon Dioxide

The IPCC’s followers have given us a vision of a world dying because of carbon-dioxide emissions. I say the Earth would be a lot deader with no carbon dioxide, and more of it will be a very positive factor in feeding the world. Let’s celebrate carbon dioxide.

Patrick Moore ([e-mail]) was a cofounder and leader of Greenpeace for 15 years. He is now chair and spokesman for Allow Golden Rice.

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/03/20/why-i-am-cli...

[Willy]

Good post Dave.

[XLFD]

A true "Green" movement would be one that celebrated higher carbon dioxide levels in the air, leading to more vibrant plant growth.  When LIAA first came to town, we also bantered around Dr. Moore's fine refutations of global warming alarmists (http://ludingtoncitizen.ning.com/forum/topics/greenpeace-founder-at...)

[Shelby]

I am new can I post discussion

[XLFD]

By all means.

[Guidothesemipsuedocaptitalistpig]

There are so many things that may as well be called myths in the man made climate change narrative. The largest being one can go back even the few hundred years modern man has created news print as seen weather patterns that debunk the already shaky models the hard core climate religion zealots point too as proof of the change being man made. Most notably the period where man was creating far more pollution during the early coal fired foundry period from the now vacated U.S. Steel plants in Gary Indiana, and Pittsburgh Steel, and the major areas built around steel in all three Levittowns. I fully agree the climate is swinging quite wildly in the last 100 years. I do not see a correlation between the current weather and any other 100 year period in the last 1000 that man has produced the kinds of levels of pollution we currently have. PS. anything we do is not going to slow down the coal driven smog machine that is China and no amount of pressure from forien countries will even slow the amount they create by themselves.

[XLFD]

If climate models severely botch in their predictions of what's going to happen in the next year why should they be trusted for telling us how the climate is going to be ten or a hundred years in the future? 

Can anyone point to any climate change models from early 2013 that predicted the brutal winters we had in the Great Lakes region the last couple of years with any degree of accuracy?  LIAA's Dr. Jeffrey Andresen surely didn't, but even though he was telling Resilient Monroe in early 2013 how snow and freezing temperatures were soon to become history here in Michigan as we moved towards an Oklahoma climate, the last two winters he indicated would be tame, we went and got our coldest February in recorded history here in Ludington and back to back seasons with greatly above average Great Lake ice coverage. 

Charlatanism and quackery by our doctors of weather science trying to sell us an elixir of global warming and philter of climate change by booms and thunders.

[Dave]

Another thing regarding weather predictions... just about every year its predicted that the hurricane season is going to be bad yet those predictions have not panned out for several years now. A lot of people don't realize that there hasn't been a hurricane higher then a category 3 to make landfall since I believe the same year that Katrina hit.

[AQUAMAN]

Way too many people with too much time on their hands. Way too many "chicken little's", "the sky is falling" types. All these types have about worn out their cry's for global warming. The sooner we turn our attentions back to real priorities of worth in this country, the better. Obama appears to be using this and anything else unprovable to distract attentions away from his failures in so many other areas of importance.

[Willy]

Global warming video made to scare kids.

[XLFD]

 I was thinking that poor girl, overwrought with all that propaganda inflicted by her dad and the U.N. websites, was going to throw herself off the roof in the end, so she would not have to endure the future, where everyone self-combusts because of the perils of climate change.  Pure poppycock.

[Willy]

I love George Carlin's take on Global warming.

 

[Willy]