Global Warming Alarmists Are the Ones Full of Hot Air

JANUARY 27, 2004
By GREGORY J. RUMMO

     THE FRIGID TEMPERATURES that continue throughout the Northeast and the ice storms that pushed into the Deep South earlier this week causing mayhem and death on the interstates failed to faze the global warming alarmists, some of whom came out of hibernation to write letters to the editor at several newspapers where my column on the topic ran a few weeks ago.

One letter writer actually wrote that the colder than usual weather was further evidence of global warming. While my previous column was not meant to be a serious thesis on the topic of global warming, this one is.

What we know is that the earth’s average temperature has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last century.

The National Academy of Sciences reports on their website: “This warming has been particularly strong during the last 20 years, and has been accompanied by retreating glaciers, thinning arctic ice, rising sea levels, lengthening of growing seasons for some, and earlier arrival of migratory birds. In addition, several other data support that conclusion.”

If you stopped reading there—as most of the knee-jerk, junk scientists do—you’d be terribly misled.

NASA has been monitoring the temperature of the lower layers of the atmosphere since 1979. Since this encompasses the same “last 20 years” of the National Academy of Sciences’ report of a “particularly strong” warming trend, certainly balloon measurements in the atmosphere should support this postulate.

What the data shows is not warming but cooling: “The lower [troposphere] data are often cited as evidence against global warming, because they have as yet failed to show any warming trend when averaged over the entire Earth. The lower stratospheric data show a significant cooling trend…In addition to the recent cooling, large temporary warming perturbations may be seen in the data due to two major volcanic eruptions: El Chichon in March 1982, and Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991.”

This finding is in keeping with those of Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, who points out, “a study of carbon dioxide and temperatures over the last 11,000 years that was analyzed in both Science and Nature in 1999 found that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tends to follow not precede a rise in temperature.”

“The bulk of the temperature rise in the 20th century took place before 1940 while most of the carbon dioxide emissions took place after 1940 and coincided with a slight cooling between 1940 and 1975.”

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of meteorology at MIT, in his testimony before a Senate committee in 2002 agreed, stating, past climate changes were either “uncorrelated with changes in carbon dioxide or were characterized by temperature changes which preceded changes in carbon dioxide [levels] by hundreds or thousands of years.”

So what has caused the “warming” over the last century and other warming-related phenomenon such as the shrinking polar ice caps? To many scientists, it’s rather obvious.

In December 2001, a story appeared on ABC News.com. Entitled “Red Planet Warming,” it reported that high resolution images taken by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor showed that the levels of frozen water and carbon dioxide in Mars’s polar ice caps dwindled dramatically—by more than 10 feet over a single Martian year (equivalent to about two earth years). Since there aren’t any people on Mars, it’s difficult to pin the blame for Mars’s warming on human activity relating to the combustion of fossil fuels.

The culprit is “solar warming”—a periodic increase in the sun’s output of energy. That would explain why the surface of our planet has grown warmer. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Two years ago, Science published a study based on tree ring analysis that demonstrated similarities between increases in global temperature the last century and the Medieval Warm Period—a period lasting from 1330 AD to 1600 AD in which similar increases in temperature occurred. For those of you who are world-history challenged, that was before the invention of the internal combustion engine and the SUV.

Commenting on the study, Edward Cook of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said, “We don't use this as a refutation of greenhouse warming, but it does show that there are processes within the Earth's natural climate system that produce large changes that might be viewed as comparable to what we have seen in the 20th century.”

In other words, the global warming alarmists—not this journalist—are the ones filled with hot air. n

Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist. Read all of his columns on his homepage, www.GregRummo.com. E-Mail Rummo at  GregoryJRummo@aol.com