A change of Pace:

Hot, global fraud
By Obadiah Shoher

Science fiction cost pennies. The Global Warming science fiction cost hundreds of billions and calls the nations to sacrifice trillions of dollars to combat a no-problem with uncertain causes and solutions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gathered all the usual culprits whose models and predictions universally failed. Time and again accused of scientific fraud, these pundits keep resurfacing. Apocalyptic ecologic scenarios call for government intervention, and everyone in power, from leftists to imperial hawks loves ecologists. Ecological scares were common throughout the history. They gained popularity since Malthus. Who cares that he repudiated his earlier conclusions about the overpopulation threat? Ecologists (what kind of education is that?) warned of global cooling, global warming, ozone hole, asbestos threat, extinction of some rare butterfly and the fish you have never seen in supermarkets, anyway.

European forests and American buffalos are extinguished - so what? Europeans live far better than their ancestors; Americans, too. Alpine and Alaskan glaciers are intensely melting since nineteenth century, well before the first electric bulb, gas heater, or car appeared. The Ice Age ended only 10,000 years ago, and the Little Ice Age - just a century ago. The temperatures are rising now because they were historically low 150 years ago. Ice caps are melting because they hugely increased since sixteenth century. Ice ages come and go in cycles, apparently related to solar activity. Mechanisms are entirely unclear: for example, periods of low sunspots often surprisingly correlate with volcanic activity on Earth.

Current temperatures are historically low, and their increase is normal. What is the increase, anyway? The ecologists debated it at the conference. That’s right, the conclusions are based on debate; estimates ranged several times. Good for leftists, bad for scholars. Theories are expected to be proven with something more sound than vociferousness. So perhaps global temperatures will increase a few degrees over the century. I love warm weather. People in cold countries would enjoy the change. Africans, they are technologically unable sustain the exploding population whatever the climate. Jews, we developed Gaza and Negev, and would bear a few more degrees. Rising sea levels? Dutch people built dams for centuries. It’s better to be warm than to suffer the energy consumption levels of Neanderthals.

Carbon dioxide increase coincided with industrialization. Cause-and-effect relationship is dubious. In warmer periods, carbon dioxide increases about 50% from the glacial levels. Current concentration is slightly above that norm, but the norm is average. Most likely, in some periods the average increase was greatly exceeded. On the geological time scale, the current carbon dioxide levels are very low. Humans contribute hardly 3% to the natural output of carbon dioxide, at least half of which gets regenerated in plants and dissolved in oceans. To claim that a system so well balanced and adaptive as Earth could be destabilized by 1% change is preposterous