Global Warming

There are many stories that do not garner any coverage by the mainstream media; and they are, in many instances, just as important as those stories that do make it to press. How does this happen? How are these decision / choices made? The agenda, of course. The agenda is what drives the decision making process. "They" push the stories that serve their political bias.

Case in point - Global Warming. How many of you heard about the tremendous snowstorm in the Sahara Desert that took place January 26 & 27, 2005? In what turned out to be the worst snowfall in over a half a century, much of the Sahara Desert (the largest desert in the world) was covered in a blanket of snow. NASA satellite photos of this can be seen here. But because this type of news story throws a little cold water on all their global warming hype, it's not newsworthy. The agenda drives the "news".

Is Global Warming Real? "Everyone" knows that the planet Earth is heating up like an overstoked sauna, right? EVERYONE! "Global warming is 'a weapon of mass destruction,' says Sir John Houghton, the former head of the British Meteorological Office, who also served with other prominent scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group convened by the UN.

"Scientists know this: The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) published a petition with 1,000 signatures saying that computer simulations show that mankind is causing a dangerous warming of the planet." Ah, yes .... man, of course. But let's be specific - cut to the chase. "American policy and American factories, power plants, and cars are largely to blame, according to UN scientists, because it’s disproportionately their exhaust that’s putting carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the air, causing the planet to heat up."

But not all Americans. More specificity is needed. Republicans ...... not Democrats. You see, Republicans are for big business, and big business only. Democrats are for the little guy ... and only the little guy. Democrats are never employed by, nor will they ever be, employed by big business. And all their stock and bond holdings in their retirement plans are invested in "Mom & Pop" operations. But, I digress... sorry.

Some (many?) "experts" say the planet’s temperature most likely will rise 6 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit this century, and then at more catastrophic levels thereafter for the next 1,000 years - due to the greenhouse effect. What exactly is the greenhosue effect? How does it work? What causes it? (Man does dummy; I already told you this; Pay attention "oh non-believer".)

Ok, ok. "The sun shines, sending us energy. Some of the energy, mostly in the form of high-frequency waves of visible light, passes through the layer of gases we call our atmosphere and hits the earth. As it does, it changes from visible light into the lower-frequency, invisible waves we call infrared energy – or heat. That’s what’s going on when the sun shines on a rock and the rock becomes hot to the touch.

Heat is then radiated from the earth back toward space. But because the frequency of infrared waves is lower, they can’t pass as easily through the earth’s layer of atmospheric gases – including CO₂, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor – and are trapped.

The heat stays trapped for a time, heating up the atmosphere and the earth below it like a greenhouse warming in the winter sun. The heat-trapping gases are called 'greenhouse gases.' The greenhouse effect isn’t all bad, though. 'The earth can only sustain life because it is wearing a light blanket of greenhouse gases,' ............ 'Without them, the planet would be 65 degrees [Fahrenheit] colder' – which is to say it would be an ice ball."

"Global warming first became big news as a doomsday scenario about 15 years ago – just as the Soviet bloc was about to collapse. A joint session of Congress held hearings on global warming as a possible threat to life on earth." (Previous to this period, the "big scare" we had was that a new Ice Age was coming.) "By 1990 President George H. W. Bush and the Senate cooperated to begin spending more than $1 billion per year to fund scientists at universities and institutes to study global warming."

"Since the UN’s global warming panel – the IPCC – was formed in 1987, it has issued three scientific assessment reports, which have all relied heavily on computer modeling. You start with an idea of how the earth’s climate works, plug in the prevailing winds, so much rainfall, so much sunlight, so many tons of greenhouse gases ... and you try to predict: If CO₂ production goes up 1 percent per year, what will the earth’s temperature be in 2050?"

Now there is a question that begs to be asked here, and the unfearing Heavy-Handed will ask it. Use your own personal experience here. How many of you watch (or listen to) the weather forecasts and try to make some decisions / plans for the next day or two based what was forecasted. How accurate were the forecasts? What about the 5 day, 7 day, 10 day forecasts you might see? How accurate were they? Be honest, now.

Here goes now, the big question that Heavy-Handed is unafraid to ask: "How in the hell can someone project what the average global temperature will be 50 years from now when they cannot get the 3 day forecast correct?" !!!!

Well "anywho", the IPCC claimed, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to vast right wing Republican to human activities.”

Interestingly, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (including astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon) in July of 2003 published a paper arguing that the 20th century had not been the warmest in the last 1,000 years. They confirmed "that from 800 to 1300 A.D., average temperatures in many regions worldwide were 2 to 4 degrees or more higher than the allegedly sweltering 20th century. It’s referred to as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and the extra warmth made life better, not worse. It is not only the arcane techniques of paleoclimatology, such as testing core samples of glacial ice for radioisotopes, that testify to the MWP, but history – such as people’s contemporary accounts of what they grew in their fields."

Such as:

Decent wine grapes grew in Merrie England. (No more, alas.) Olives grew in 13th-century Germany, where St. Albert the Great also noted abundant fig and pomegranate groves in Cologne and the Rhine valley – places too cold for those crops today. Renaissance culture awakened and flourished throughout Europe.

The MWP also explains why Greenland, now essentially a glacier, could credibly be called Greenland. It was a Danish colony, and things actually grew there.

Following the MWP, the Greenland colony died out as average temperatures plummeted 3 to 5 degrees – about 2 degrees colder than our climate today. This Little Ice Age (LIA) finally moderated but lasted in most places until about 1900. For whatever reason, many regions have warmed up about 1 degree since 1900.

The data used on "global warming" studies used such "a small number of temperature record samples to create its dramatic trend line that the margin of error is substantial." “They’re showing incomplete sets of data. If you do that, it’s easy to show the curve you want people to see. For explaining this, they called me a ‘right-wing extremist.’ I don’t care what wings are. I want to know what the facts are,” said Soon.

This is important piece of data here folks:

Soon speaks enthusiastically of logic and measurement. “One of the most important pillars of the claim that CO2 is producing global warming,” he says, “is the thermometer readings taken over the last 150 years. They show warming from 1900 to the 1940s. But the amount of CO2 produced then was negligible compared to the next period – from the 1940s to the 1970s – when there was cooling. So how can the CO2 be producing the warming? That is the contradiction. They have yet to show why this would be.”

Heavy-Handed does find that to be quite paradoxical. For you global warming, fear mongerers out there, who always want to blame George Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Tom Delay, someone, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

Since they’re astrophysicists, Soon and Baliunas know about sunspots – powerful pulses of electromagnetic energy whose effects are felt hundreds of millions of miles distant. It turns out that while increased CO2 emissions don’t correlate very well with global warming, something else does – something as far out of our control and as firmly in the hands of God as it can be: the fluctuating heat of our ultimate heat source, the sun.

Oh, no! This cannot be.

"More research is needed, but it appears that, stretching back 1,000 years, when sunspot activity went up, the earth got warmer; when the activity went down, the earth got colder."

Hmmmm....good point......
“No one in Washington gets large grants by saying something isn’t a problem. Meanwhile, the $10 billion thrown at climate modeling research in the last 15 years was wasted.”

The result from all these theories of impending doom is hard to test, "since the proof is 100 years away. In the meantime, you could argue that it has become a form of welfare for liberal scientists."

Could scientists have created a "global-warming paradigm for themselves that benefits them – as a cause and as a livelihood?"

Stay tuned. I plan to post further on this.