Preacher Al Gore and the Global Warming Fundies

(An "Al Gore Global Warming Fundie" is a true believer that global warming is man made, regardless of all dissenting science. Just as religious believers can’t prove there is a God, and atheists can’t prove there isn’t, Al Gore and followers can’t prove global warming is man-made, so they just accept it as a matter of belief. Therefore, they are Fundamentalists following Preacher Al in the worship of the only God the Left truly believes in, the One that will give them control over the personal and economic activities of all mankind under the banner of "Saving The World." Their motto: "We can't wait until we're certain, because then it'll be too late!")

You had been called to report on a possible murder in a southern state in the early 1960’s. The body of a black man was pulled from the river, where it had been found by some fishermen entangled with their anchor. They struggled mightily to drag the body to shore because it was wrapped in heavy chains. One of the fishermen raced into town and soon returned with the Sherriff and Coroner. The Coroner made a quick examination of the body, noting what appeared to be marks of “blunt instrument” trauma on the head and body.

The Coroner turned to the Sherriff and said, “This looks bad, really bad.”

The Sherriff replied, “Yep, worst case of suicide I ever saw.”

Maybe Sherriff Justice, standing there, sweat soaked shirt, dripping sweat down his forehead, down his nose, dropping onto his cigar, falling finally onto his commodious belly, was looking at the evidence and seeing what he wanted to see.

“Yep, obvious suicide.”

Just like Al Gore and the Global Warming Fundies. Take the widely discredited study by Mann that gave birth to the “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures showing the 20th Century was the hottest in the past 1000 years. Combine it with studies showing the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising rapidly in the past 100 years. Voila! You have man-made Global Warming, just what you need to take control of all the personal and economic activities of any and all citizens of the free world.

For a thorough debunking of the "hockey stick," go to The `Hockey Stick': A New Low in Climate Science, by John L. Daly.

Why only take control over the activities of citizens of the free world? Because the governments of the non-democratic countries already have control over their citizens’ personal and economic activities.

Since science is funded based on its “sexiness,” and impending world disaster is sexy as long as 1) it can be blamed on the United States, corporations, or capitalism – if you blame it on all three, then you’ve got sexiness cubed and 2) it’s nothing that can be proven or disproven (unlike the bankruptcy of Social Security in ten years), but it’s something that has to be dealt with now because “if we wait until we’re sure, it’ll be too late.”

Once the link between carbon dioxide and the spurious study that produced the “hockey stick” was established, then the race was on to find anything and everything that suggested global warming was man made.

Were there a lot of hurricanes this year? Man-Made Global Warming (MMGW) had to be the cause.
Some record high temperatures? MMGW, of course.
Sea level was 7 inches higher in 100 years? MMGW, what else could it be?
Violent storms and flooding? MMGW, naturally.
Less Arctic sea ice? MMGW, because who ever heard of no Arctic sea ice?
Some polar bears are thinner, and four drowned? MMGW, and if we don’t do something soon, polar bear extinction, for sure.
Glaciers are retreating? MMGW is melting them all.
Mt. Kilimanjaro is snow free? MMGW. If Hemingway saw it, he’d blow his brains out.
Spring comes earlier to the mountains? MMGW is causing stuff to grow higher and earlier than ever before.
Greenland ice is melting? MMGW. Al Gore says that Greenland melting will cause its ice cap to slide into the Atlantic, then it’ll melt fast and sea levels will be up 20 feet by 2100 AD.
Antarctic ice sheets bigger than Rhode Island are breaking off? MMGW, why ask?

Then the next thing was to dramatize Global Warming, so that all the ignorant and short attention-span peoples of the free world could scream, “We have to do something! Now! Before it’s too late!”

Preacher Al Gore needed something – anything – to bring himself back from irrelevance, and what better for a Democrat than a campaign based on blind faith to save the world from destruction caused by personal freedom, economic growth, and prosperity?

Reverend Al had already laid the basis for his campaign with his scientifically unsubstantiated “Earth in the Balance,” so dull and boring that only the already converted Environmental Fundies could plow through it. It was obvious that the Preacher of Apocalypse had learned something from previous global alarmists, and avoided their cardinal error of making the onslaught of the disaster too imminent.

We all remember the tale of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf.” When the villagers kept answering his cry, and never found a marauding wolf attacking the flock, he soon lost any credibility for future alarms.

Other classic examples of this type of error include Paul Ehrlich and his book, “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich wrote the book in 1968, forecasting immediate world starvation resulting from a geometrically increasing world population and a linearly increasing world food supply. Ehrlich sold a lot of books immediately, but in less than a decade it was obvious that the opposite had occurred.

Like the boy, Ehrlich kept repeating his warning as the years passed, moving the date of impending catastrophe later as his previous predicted date came and went without dire results.

It wasn’t long before, if Ehrlich was chatting with a friend and said it looked like rain, the friend would laugh and put away his umbrella. (The last part about the chat with a friend is a made-up anecdote which, as Dan Rather said of the forged Texas Air National Guard letters about George Bush, even though they were forged, they illustrated a profound truth. (See "speaking truthiness to power." “Truthiness” means something is known intuitively, instinctively, or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts. It's an inherently Liberal practice.)

Paul Ehrlich is only 74 years old, so for the past 38 years he has weathered embarrassment as people point at him, yell “Boom!” then fall down laughing their butts off. Dr. Ehrlich should have stuck to his butterfly studies, and saved himself and Stanford from ridicule.

Carl Sagan was another afflicted with “premature prognostication.” During Operation Desert Storm in 1991 he debated Dr. Fred Singer on ABC Nightline, and forecasted that the smoke from Kuwaiti petroleum fires would loft into the upper atmosphere, disrupt the monsoons, and lead to ecological disaster. Singer said such a view was ridiculous, that the smoke would go up only a few thousand feet and then be washed out of the atmosphere by rain. Three days later, black rain began falling over Iran, proving Dr. Singer right (and of course, not ever mentioned by the Left, Sagan wrong).

Pastor Al and the Fundies have providentially placed their forecasts of disasters well into the future, so they can claim that just about any quirk in climate is a “sign” of looming global catastrophe, and cut another notch in the global warming headboard.

The only problem is that Soothsayer Al and the Global Warming Fundies can’t make their “science” stand up to scientific inquiry. Want proof? Take a stroll through the European countryside. In fact, go here to start your tour: => Global Warming - A Stroll Through the European Countryside

Better bundle up. It’s still pretty cold this time of the year, not balmy like it was back in Ye Goode Olde Medieval Warm Period, 800 to 1300 AD.

It seems quite odd that Global Warming “scientists” don’t ridicule Al Gore for his ridiculous forecast of sea levels rising 20 feet by 2100. Even the political arm of United Nations scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), only forecasts sea levels rising in a range from 7 to 35 inches, with the most probable rise being about 12 inches (based on today’s rate of 3 mm per year) in the next 100 years. Sea levels rose 7 inches in the past 100 years, and in the 18,000 years since the last Ice Age reversed, sea levels have risen an average of almost 22 inches every 100 years.

However, the increases were far greater in the early stages of ice retreat, and during the past 8,000 years have been much lower. The 7 inch rise in the past 100 years was expected, and was established as the norm a long time before anyone cried “man-made global warming.”

Since the best scientific estimates are for only a sea level rise of a foot in the next 100 years, that leaves Al Gore with about 19 feet in his mouth.

Why are seas still rising? Because although we are in an interglacial period, we are also still coming out of the last ice age.

And the next glacial period will begin soon (soon, that is, in geologic time).

Ecclesiastic Al and His Acolytes sure tried to pull the Global Warming wool over everyone’s eyes, but they couldn’t pressure enough dissenting scientists to stop their quests for knowledge and just shut up to get away with it.

Forinstance, how can you have the “warmest 100 years in the past 1000 years” when the Earth itself provides abundant evidence that it was warmer 1000 years ago? 20th Century Climate Not So Hot, a Harvard study of 240 climate studies.

If high hurricane activity in 2005 proved global warming was coming, did low hurricane activity in 2006 prove global warming had fizzled? Or are weather experts right when they say that climate is highly variable, and that hurricane activity ebbs and surges in Arctic sea ice also moves in cycles corresponding to changes in currents and wind? From 1935-1945, arctic temperatures were much higher than today, and dropped from that peak until about 1960. From 1920 to 1940, the Arctic temps skyrocketed, warming by +/- 4°C in two decades ... about twice as much as the current rise since 1960, and in less time, and all without the benefit of CO2 increase.

All of the concern about the Arctic heating up because of less sea ice, more dark, open water exposed, therefore more absorption from solar heating is totally wrong. Because of the low Sun angle, solar heating of the Arctic is less than 3% of equatorial. Rathre than directly from the Sun, Arctic heating comes from heat transferred from the Equator via atmospheric circulation.

How can the rapid increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the 20th Century prove that man is causing global warming? Bear in mind: 1) Most of the increased temperatures occurred over 50 years ago. 2) Temperatures dropped during the period 1970 to 1975 even as global atmospheric CO2 concentration increased steadily. And 3) the 1930’s were warmer than the recent supposedly warmest decade in 1000 years. See Apocalypse Cancelled for complete analyses.

One of the longest continuous temperature records shows a 0.6°C per century rise which has been sustained for two centuries (since 1790). It shows the highest temperatures were in the 1930-1940 period, not in the 1990’s, or 2000’s, and the greatest decade for rapid temperature rise was 1819-1828, not the current period.





Remarkably, scientists have found a positive correlation for the temperature fluctuations of the 20th Century, but it’s not with carbon dioxide. It’s solar activity, which scientists also find correlates strongly with the higher temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, and the colder temperatures of the Little Ice Age. The concentration of atmospheric CO2 shows no immediate correlation to either of the earlier warmer or cooler periods, but may in the long run.

Inconveniently for Minister Al and the Fundies, research going back half a billion years shows that increased CO2 concentrations followed, not preceded, increasing temperatures by several hundred to several thousand years. It is possible that the increase in CO2 we see today is due to the Global Warm Period of 800 to 1300 AD. Climate Chaos? Don’t Believe It has more.

Carbon dioxide is highly overrated as a global warming gas anyway. Water vapor has over five times the global warming clout of CO2, and a recent study indicates that solar activity strongly influences cloud formation that is directly tied to temperature fluctuations.

Man only plays a puny part in the Earth’s annual production of CO2 anyway. Each year Nature produces about 180 billion tons of CO2, and mankind only produces 6 billion tons, or about 3% of the total. Since CO2 is only about 15% of the greenhouse gas effect, that makes man’s contribution to the total greenhouse gas effect a whopping less than one-half of one percent! That means that if we cut our CO2 production in half, bringing virtually all human economic activity on Earth to a halt, we will reduce total greenhouse gases almost a quarter of a percent.

So if everyone stops driving, lowers thermostats to 50 and unplugs all air conditioning, and stops making anything that requires electricity or fossil fuels to produce, it would save the world except….

Except, remember that the citizens of the free world are going to be all alone on the kill-our-economy-to-save-the-world bandwagon. China will still be adding one new coal-fired generating plant every ten days big enough to power San Diego. The oil producing nations of the world won’t volunteer to help us cut their economic necks. They’ll invite any and all manufacturers to relocate to rapidly developing countries, and promise a steady supply of cheap petroleum products to ease the transition.

Who will blame the Chinese, Indians, and all the other peoples of the world from doing all they can to improve comfort and security in their life times? The last time I checked, they were only going to have one life each, the same as us. Who are we to say they must suffer and struggle through life because Global Warming alarmists think something bad might happen? Hell, Global Warming might be beneficial to mankind, just like it was the last time around, when it got much warmer.

The most effective way to cope with the effects of natural global warming is through increased world prosperity and technological innovation. During the Little Ice Age, crops failed and the poor starved. If the peoples of the world are allowed to exercise more economic freedom, to accumulate and apply capital to the betterment of their lives, the next ice ages will be accommodated without mankind suffering disasterous deprivation.

As science presses on and it becomes evident that the global warming scare is fraudulent, and calamitous global warming doesn’t happen, Al and the Fundies will join the long list of false prophets.

Just as Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many other religious groups and cults constantly predict and joyously await the End of the World, so will Al Gore and the Global Warming Fundies prophesize and await climactic Armageddon, and wait, and wait, and ….

Meanwhile, the Antarctic ice cap is growing, not shrinking, and the average Antarctic temperature is falling, not rising. I’m sure it will not be long before Global Warming True Believers will tell me that a growing Antarctic ice cap and colder temperatures are just what we should expect with man-made global warming. They have already told me that heavier snowfalls and rains are a sure sign of man-caused global warming, just as lighter snowfalls and rains are also a sure sign of global warming.

There are many good reasons why the prophesized global warming disasters won’t occur. One of the most fundamental reasons is contained in the Earth itself. As the Earth warms naturally, and snow and ice melt and expose more land, the newly bare rock begins weathering, causing absorption of CO2. Warm weather and higher levels of CO2 also promote rapid and robust plant growth, which then takes enormous quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. The vast oceans of the world, covering 70% or its surface and providing over 95% of its useful habitat for life forms, also absorbs gargantuan quantities of CO2. It seems when the Earth produces CO2 in abundance, it also prodigiously increases CO2 absorption.

Wouldn’t you expect Nature to work that way?

It has, for millions – billions – of years.

Puny man can’t change that.