By Rick Manning – Global warming alarmists have spent the past two decades convincing the world that carbon dioxide, particularly man produced carbon dioxide, is plunging the world into a cataclysmic heat wave that will melt the polar ice caps, flood coastal areas and generally change life on planet earth as we know it.
Every year, “scientists” whose financial grants seem to be dependent upon a contest of who can come up with the most outlandish claims emerge with more dire predictions.
You have the scientists who purportedly observed four polar bears floating dead, and two years later developed a theory that global warming was a threat to the polar bear population. His work led to polar bears being placed on the threatened list due to their survival being threatened by global warming.
Of course, the latest survey of the polar bear population shows that it is risen as much as 500% since the 1970’s from an estimate of 5,000 total bears to 25,000 in 2010. A truth that was too inconvenient to be included in Al Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary which mentions the polar bear issue.
Climate scientists have warned that the polar ice caps were disappearing (which is the basis for the polar bear worry.)
Yet, a must-read article in the New American states, “This must mean the Arctic is heating up, right? On the contrary, DMI admits little difference in Arctic temperatures between 1958 and 2009, and data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) indicates a cooling trend in the Arctic since the 1940s. Indeed, some climate scientists – even those who support the idea of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW) – are predicting Earth will experience a period of cooling for the next two or three decades.”
But, even with all of the challenges facing the global warming movement based upon the actual temperature data over the past decade, and various scientific scandals that seem to be engulfing their credibility, nothing surpasses what climate scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville announced in late July.
The entire basis of the man-made global warming claim is predicated upon the presumption that carbon dioxide gas stops energy from being dispersed into space increasing the temperature of the earth, hence the term “greenhouse gases”.
Without this claim, the entire climate change guise for regulating fossil fuels and carbon based emissions falls flat.
Without this claim, the EPA’s war on the coal industry based upon climate change loses its underpinnings.
Research by Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Danny Braswell of UofA Huntsville published in July in the journal “Remote Sensing” compared the expectations of what would occur based upon a half dozen climate models that have been used to predict doomsday global warming scenarios with what actually happened during the 18 months before and after the warming events between 2000 and 2011.”
“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said, “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
In layman’s terms, this means that the supposed greenhouse gas effect due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not actually occurring, because when the earth heats up, the heat is not trapped, but instead is released into space preventing the drastic rise in overall temperatures that are the entire justification for the massive expenditure of federal government funds for alternative energy sources.
The Spencer/Braswell research destroys the underlying assumption that environmentalists have pinned their entire global warming argument upon — that increased amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere trap heat causing the temperature of the earth to rise dramatically.
If the heat trapping effect of carbon dioxide is limited, then the entire notion of global warming is based upon a false assumption, and if the other claims of the global warming crowd are accurate, this is a dangerous mistake.
Assuming polar bears are actually threatened, but climate scientists are wrong about the reason as the Spencer/Braswell shows, means that billions of dollars in resources to save the white bears are being wasted, while the actual cause of the alleged ice melt goes undetected.
Of course, what Spencer/Braswell may actually explain is why Oceanographer Jane Eert asserts, “The guys who are running the long-term climate change models have a tough problem. They’re looking at really long time scales, and as a result they can’t look at a lot of details for each year. In order to get the results before you die, you have to fudge some things. And what they fudge is the small-scale stuff. But it turns out that probably the small-scale stuff is important, and fudging it gives you wrong answers.”
Fortunately, Spencer and Braswell actually looked at the small stuff, and the fudging of the data by these scientists to get their results has been exposed for exactly what it is — a fiction that has been driving public policy around the world for twenty years.
Rick Manning is the Director of Communications for Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Rick on Twitter at @RManning957.
