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By Alan Caruba As 1999 began, the headlines looked familiar. In the previous two years, parts of the nation had been gripped by major snow and ice storms. "Storm Pummels Full Depth of Middle U.S.", said The New York Times on January 3rd. "Storm Triggers Travel Chaos", said USA Today on January 4th. Stuck in my memory was a headline from The New York Times, January 14, 1996. "Blame Global Warming for the Blizzard," wrote science reporter William K. Stevens. From the data banks of Nexis, I would discover that Stevens had written ninety stories about global warming since January l99l until that January 1996 headline. In 1997, I began to keep a tally of Steven's output on global warming. He would write twenty-six more stories and, in 1998, he would write twenty-two more, augmented by John H. Cushman, Jr's comparable stories. As this final year of the century began, I was culling through a vast personal library and came across two books, "The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age" by a group of authors calling themselves the "Special Impact Team" and "Earth's Aura" by Louise B. Young. "Many climatologists believe that since the Sixties the world has been slipping toward a new ice age," said the authors of "The Weather Conspiracy." Young wrote, "in the last two decades of the nineteenth century (the 1800's), the trend was reversed and the world passed through a long warming period that continued until about 1940." She noted, too, that "In the early 1940's another reversal occurred, and the climate--at least in the Northern Hemisphere--turned gradually colder." Both books were published in 1977. The theme of both books, written over twenty years ago, was that man was altering the earth's weather. Young wrote, "man now makes clouds form and rains fall; he deflects the path of hurricanes and the flow of volcanic lava..." Does anyone really believe, based just on the past two decades, that man does either? Man did not deflect hurricanes Andrew and Mitch. Man did not control the eruption of Mount Pinatubo or other volcanoes. If man could make rain to fall, the 1998 drought could have been averted. The simple, obvious truth is that man does not control the weather. Never has. Never will. However, the climatological facts cited in both books were accurate. Until the 1940's, there had been a warming trend in response to a Little Ice Age that had occurred in the 17th century. It coincided with a period when the sun had a greatly reduced magnetic activity. This is widely known to climatologists as the Maunder Minimum. The records of sunspot activity go all the way back to 1609 when Galileo began observing such phenomenon and, parenthetically, got in trouble with the Church for suggesting the earth circles the sun, not the other way around. He spent the last years of his life under house arrest. Telling the truth when the ruling powers disagree can carry a penalty. Ignoring the truth is equally dangerous. It is the sun's magnetic activity, an eleven-year cycle, that dominates the weather on earth as it warms and cools. To put it another way, the earth's weather has virtually nothing to do with the greenhouse production attributed to human activities. Fully 95% of the carbon dioxide, now identified by Greens, i.e., U.S. and worldwide environmentalists, as a form of pollution, is produced by natural sources such as evaporating seawater, decaying organic matter, and from plant and animal respiration. Each year, 157 billion metric tons is released in the atmosphere. Of this amount, barely 457.2 million tons comes from cars and trucks. According to American Enterprise Institute researcher, James Johnson, "Eliminating all U.S. gasoline powered vehicles would reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions by 0.18%." Less than one half of one half of one percent. Despite this minuscule contribution, Albert Gore, Jr., in his book "Earth in the Balance", advocates "eliminating the internal combustion engine" by the year 2018! This is the same gentleman who has been a driving force behind the United Nations treaty on Climate Control, formulated in Kyoto, Japan. And, despite the fact the U.S, Senate passed a unanimous resolution saying it would never ratify this treaty, the acting U.S. representative to the UN signed it in November 1998. Neither the President, nor Vice President, participated in this event. In August, however, the Associated Press reported that the President had called the mid-year heat wave the latest symptom of global warming and had ordered energy-saving measures in all federal buildings. "Global warming is real; the risks it poses are real," said Clinton. "The sooner Congress understands that, the sooner we can protect our nation--and our planet--from increased flood, fire, drought, and deadly heat waves." He asked for $6.3 billion in research and tax incentives over the next five years to "encourage the private sector to cooperate..." The obvious question, given the President's fears of global weather catastrophes, is why didn't he personally sign the UN treaty? Or designate the Vice President, its strongest advocate, to do so? Contrary to the Constitution which states that two-thirds of the Senate must approve a treaty, the Environmental Protection Agency is reportedly already taking steps to implement it. In October 1997, President Clinton addressed the National Geographic Society saying, "The United States proposes at Kyoto that we commit to the binding and realistic target of returning to emissions of 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. And we should not stop there." Why? Why reduce carbon dioxide emissions from human activities when (1) they represent less than 1% of all emissions and, (2), by any measurement applied, would have a crippling impact on the nation's economy? The UN treaty, moreover, would exempt both China and India, along with more than a hundred other nations. Why are both the President and Vice President of the United States advocating a program that would, according to many organizations, think tanks, and experts on the subject, do immeasurable harm to the nation? The Ultimate Scare Campaign Today's Greens would prefer that you forget how much time and effort they put into convincing everyone that an Ice Age was on the way back in the 1970's. Why? Because it failed to frighten enough people. By the 1980's, Greens totally reversed course and began to warn of a massive heating of the earth. In 1998, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified at a Gore-sponsored Senate hearing that "The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now." Wrong. Very wrong. By 1998, Hansen, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, said, "The forces that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change." The interactions of atmospheric components remain, said Hansen, "major areas of uncertainty." The only people who are completely certain are the President and Vice President, supported by a wide range of Green organizations, all of whom are allied with the UN as "Non-Governmental Organizations." Ironically, in 1990, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that the average global temperature would rise 3.3 degrees Celsius over the next century. Two years later, the IPPC revised that figure downward to 2.8 degrees. By 1995, they revised it downward again to 2.0 degrees, and, after factoring out natural climate factors, the IPPC said human-caused warming would amount to 1 degree in the next century. A warming of 1 degree Celsius could occur naturally without any human input. Acknowledging this, the IPPC says that, "some of the global warming since 1850 could be a recovery from the Little Ice Age rather than a direct result of human activities." Widely reported in November 1998 was a statement by one of the major Green organizations, the Worldwatch Institute, along with Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurer, who said, "More and more, there's a human fingerprint in natural disasters in that we're making them more frequent and more intense..." No, we're not. Weather related and other natural disasters occur every year. History is replete with such disasters and weather, perhaps, more than any other factor, has played a vital role in the development of the human race. Simply put, the earth has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century and, as noted in the 1977 books, that warming ended fifty years ago in the 1940's. All the meteorological and radiosonde balloon data since then has found no evidence of any warming. It has, however, found a very slight cooling. This, despite the fact that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. It is now about 360 parts per million vs. 290 at the beginning of the 20th century. As Arthur B. Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine notes, "This rise probably results from human burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, although this is not certain." Writing in their book, "Age of Propaganda", authors Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, said, "Experimental data overwhelmingly suggest that all other things equal, the more frightened a person is by a communications, the more likely he or she is to take positive preventive action." And, famously, throughout 1998, a very warm year, indeed, Albert Gore, Jr. used every natural weather event from forest fires to droughts to proclaim that the earth was warming and that the global warming theory demanded the U.S. take the actions mandated by the UN treaty on climate control. Again. Why? Why is Albert Gore, Jr. trying to frighten Americans and others around the world, saying things any freshman year meteorological student knows is false? And why has The New York Times, since the early 1990's, been the leading advocate of the global warming theory, publishing hundreds of articles? On Veteran's Day, November 11, 1998, the lead editorial in The Times said of the Kyoto agreement on global warming that "Nobody has successfully challenged the urgency of their mission." Not just wrong, but deliberately and knowingly wrong. Is the famed "newspaper of record", arguably the most influential daily newspaper in the world, engaging in a propaganda campaign which would do great harm to the United States and other industrialized nations? The Times is fully aware that a Petition Project, sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, has been signed by more than 19,000 scientists from around the world disputing the theory. On April 22, 1998, an article by Times reporter Stevens attacked the Petition Project seeking to discredit it and, two weeks later, on May 2, 1998, The Times published an opinion editorial by a little known University of Maryland physics professor, Robert L. Park, who described the petition signers as "a vocal minority." One of the advocates of the Petition Project is Dr. Frederick Seitz, the president emeritus of Rockefeller University and a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, in whose Proceedings, the global warming theory was discredited by James Hansen. As far as The Times is concerned, this was a deliberate act of propaganda, not journalism. A petition in support of the global warming theory, circulated by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1997, had secured a paltry 1,559 signatures. That's more than 19,000 against and 1,599 for. Who do you believe? The desperation of some leading media outlets to convince Americans that global warming is real has totally corrupted the reporting of some print and broadcast journalists. Science reporters know that they should depend on refereed scientific literature, studies that have been examined by peers prior to publication, on which to based their stories. However, the Washington Posts's Joby Warrick, in early 1999, wrote about a speech, not even a paper, delivered in San Francisco by a federal climatologist, Jonathan Overpeck. At a December 1998 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Overpeck said that the Medieval Warm Period was local, not global. It was during this period that the Vikings crossed the Atlantic to colonize Greenland and North America. It was followed by the Little Ice Age that, in turn, was reversed by a century of warming which ended in the 1940's. Greens were delighted because now they could claim that, instead of saying that the 1990's were the warmest in 600 years, they could say there were the warmest in 1,200 years. However, if Overpeck is right, a very big IF, than regional climate varies tremendously, whether or not the globe warms! Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, published a refereed paper in the journal, Climate Research, noting that temperature variability between seasons and between years has significantly declined in the second half of this century. Thus, Overpeck's reported comments are, in fact, bad news for Greens who are trying to convince everyone that a few warm years are a signal of a vast global warming. They're not. The Weather Propaganda Wars In 1999, one thing is guaranteed, the nation's print and broadcast news media will continue to report global warming as a fact supported by "most" scientists when it is not. Global warming is a theory based on flawed and incomplete computer models discredited by the same government scientist who triggered the scare campaign. Led by newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post, among others, and supported by the Cable News Network (CNN), owned by Ted Turner, the single largest, individual contributor of funding to the United Nations, along with some television networks such as NBC, the public will be told over and over again that global warming is just around the corner and responsible for every blizzard, hurricane, flood, and other natural disaster that will inevitably occur. Mobilized by the Clinton-Gore administration, U.S. governmental agencies, supported by the propaganda apparatus of the UN, will continue to maintain the party line. As 1998 came to an end, a year that was filled with weather related disasters, Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmosphere Research in Boulder, Colorado, said, "We don't have definitive answers, but there is reason to believe this is part of the signals of global warming we may be seeing." May be seeing? No definitive answers? Weasel talk! To his credit, in response to Trenberth, Jerry Mahlman, director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at Princeton, said, "There's no bad guy out there. Basically, we're getting jerked around by the same stuff that's been jerking us around for a long time." A very long time. The earth is an estimated 5.4 billion years old and it has gone through long glacial periods and others, like the Jurassic Age, when the earth was so warm it supported massive, cold-blooded dinosaurs. There is no global warming, but there is a global political agenda, comparable to the failed Soviet Union experiment with Communism, being orchestrated by the United Nations, supported by its many Green NGO's, to impose international treaties of every description that would turn the institution into a global government, superceding the sovereignty of every nation in the world. Don't believe it? Read "Our Global Neighborhood: The Report of the United Nations Commission on Global Governance." It is a chilling plan to have totally unelected, unknown UN bureaucrats determine how everyone will live. It dispenses with free speech and freedom of the press because anyone who disagrees with the UN will be in violation of its laws. Shades of Galileo when he told the Church they were wrong. Only now, it is the United Nations and the two highest officer holders of the United States of America. The Real Global Struggle Ahead This is the next great struggle for the century about to begin in the year 2000. It is being fought with all the tools of modern propaganda and it is funded by many foundations and even corporations who believe that global governance will free them from the restrictions imposed by individual nations seeking to insure the welfare of their citizens. The weather is both regional and global. The Greens are an international, i.e., global coalition. The battle that must be waged will determine the spread of democratic institutions that will protect individual human rights, not a United Nations with its own courts, its own military, its own powers of taxation. Nothing advocated by the United Nations can be taken at face value. Based on the global warming theory, nothing advocated by the nation's current leaders, nor elements of its supine mass media, can be taken on face value. You've been warned. This commentary is sponsored by William M. Dooley of Reno, Nevada.
©1999
Alan Caruba.
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