Recently I invited myself to be the skunk at the Gualala Municipal Advisory Council (GMAC) party to rubber stamp GMAC’s support of the Consensus Statement on Climate Change and Coral Reefs. Before going I did what only one GMAC member did: I actually read the Consensus Statement. Not only read it, I prepared a point-by-point rebuttal complete with graphs copied from published peer-reviewed studies, and provided each GMAC member a copy. As far as I could tell, still only one of them has read the Consensus Statement, but this didn’t stop them from approving it 5-1.

The presentation by the advocate of endorsing the Consensus Statement was not only devoid of its actual wording, it was conspicuously devoid of science facts and studies supporting its need. His presentation included erroneous and meaningless statements, such as “Arctic sea ice lowest in 3 million years.” The rebuttal I presented demonstrated that Arctic sea ice was lower in the 1930’s, during the Holocene Climatic Optimum of 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, and during the much-warmer Eemian interglacial of only 125,000 years ago, when sea level was over 20 feet higher than now. Strangely, in a presentation about man-caused global warming, he presented three items only about temperatures this year, which were not only incorrect, but severely limited in geography and time period covered. His chart forecasted a spring El Niño, which are commonplace occurrences that were well known and documented long before we began our CO2 obsession.

I also presented a new study showing that increased atmospheric CO2 is a result of natural climate change, and is negligibly affected by burning fossil fuels since only 3% of CO2 discharged into the atmosphere is due to human activities.

Once again, in a Kangaroo Court ruled by emotions, beliefs trumped facts.