Can Global Warming Be All Bad?

A recent opinion piece posted on Gloucester Township Patch has elicited a number of "at variance" comments as one would suppose. The article in question, “Unaddressed, Global Warming Will Be Local News…Everywhere,” purports to be the result of an interview with a “global warming expert.” The author, John Shields, is identified as one who writes about the clean energy sector and the ecological movement at large especially with reference to Cinnaminson residents. How that calling translated into the ability to write, “…once you grasp the gravity and immediacy of the issue (i.e., global warming), you can't not feel compelled to become an active part of the solution,” is beyond me. John seems to put a lot of stock in his so-called "global warming expert," fellow Cinnaminson resident Ed Stern, whom Shields identifies as having spent his career in clinical sociology but has transformed into a “whiz on the science of climate change” and “someone who knows.” I cannot begin to even comment on the lack of objectivity in those designations. Mr. Shields, could you not have spared us another expert, “someone who knows” so much better than the rest of us?

Allow me to move away from Mr. Shields’ opinion which is heavy on unsubstantiated information paraded before us as science and is not the real subject of my own comments anyway.

As mentioned above, an article such as the one in question can elicit various contradictory comments from believers and unbelievers alike and that’s what drove me to publish. One of the posters and I got into a little back-and-forth and I pointed to an article that posited a differing view on climate change upon which he pointed me to the Business Insider. OK, I’m game, so I bit. The link sends me to a Business Insider article from Aug. 27, 2011, titled “15 Irrefutable Signs That Climate Change Is Real." The audacity of using the word “irrefutable” in the title is enough to cause a gag sensation in anybody approaching the subject of climate change with an open mind and even a modicum of objectivity. The author of the article is reporter Dina Spector who sports a Degree in Communications from Syracuse University. Some of Dina’s other forays into important issues of our day include “REMINDER: You May Not Have Totally Missed Out On The $640 Million Jackpot,” “INFOGRAPHIC: 6,000 Years Of Makeup,” “At Least One Ticket Matched The Mega Millions Winning Numbers,” and on, and on. Do I sound skeptical? You bet. The real point here is that Dina is relying on one reference for her Climate Change article and is not objective enough to mention or point to any other viewpoints. She really has no credentials to even be writing an article on such a topic. And speaking of writing an article, that definition of her offering is extremely kind. What she really wrote was little more than a poorly worded, and apparently unedited, paragraph (where was the editor that day?).

So, where and/or what are the 15 irrefutable signs that Dina promises? Buried somewhere in the 50, or so, page report she links to on the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) website that promises to reveal many of the changes in our global climate happening all around us that are the result of the increase of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. All this is “documented in a 2007 assessment report compiled by thousands of scientists over decades of research and debate.” Now who can argue with that kind of logic? To add to the hysteria she shows us a picture of a polar bear that looks like it is stranded on a 2-foot-square piece of ice in the ocean somewhere, a scare tactic that would make Al Gore preen like the peacock he is. Excuse me if I’m not that impressed.

So, why do I have a problem with all these years and years of so-called "research and debate" put together for us by so many experts into a handy 50-page report that’s sure to put you to sleep?

Where to start? Allow me to pick "extrapolation" as a starting point.

1. To infer from values within an already observed interval.
2. A. To project, extend, expand (known data or experience) into an area not known or experienced so as to arrive at a usually conjectural (emphasis mine) knowledge of the unknown area.  B. To predict by projecting past experience or known data.

What’s wrong with extrapolation? Measurements of the sun’s diameter over the past several hundred years indicate the sun’s diameter is shrinking at the rate of 5 feet per hour. How long has this been going on and is it safe to make predictions about the sun’s future or past by extrapolation of this data? At the reported current rate the sun would have been so hot a million years ago that no life would have been possible on earth. Additionally, extrapolating backwards using the sun’s current shrinkage would result in the sun touching the earth only some 11 million years ago. The same kind of data exists for the moon and suggests a similar conclusion that if present numbers of change are extrapolated backwards we end up with the moon touching the earth not too very long ago.

So much for extrapolation; I am not implying that extrapolation is useless but the methodology that uses extrapolation to forecast the unknown past and/or the future from the known past is extremely flawed especially due to the fact that we really have no eyewitnesses that can testify as to what was happening even a hundred-thousand years ago let alone a million years ago.

So, what are climate models but the result of extrapolation, hindcasting or trend predictions? It is not my aim to present a scientific refutation to global warming and the current thinking on climate change. That has already been done, if one is willing to look at all the data objectively, including the opinions of many scientists who are not believers of the current global warming gospel. Yes, it’s true, some scientists are skeptical of what is being paraded around as irrefutable science going so far as to call it no science at all. When so-called academics go to the extreme of labeling those who question their conclusions concerning global warming and climate change as equal to Holocaust deniers, I think it’s gone too far. BTW, there are many numbers of links that can be found on a Google search that will present data refuting the “hockey stick model,” rising seas, IPCC data, global warming climate models, etc.

Also presented for your consideration is the fact that back in 1999, a team of British Scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford calculated that the strength of the sun’s magnetic field doubled during the 20th century based on information provided by the ESA-NASA spacecraft Ulysses. Is anyone willing to refute the fact that the sun’s activity is an important player and an extremely large variable when it comes to climate change on earth? Or can I call that an irrefutable fact?

In conclusion, to state categorically that global warming is absolute science and the result of human life on earth that will destroy the earth as we know it if such human activity is not radically adjusted is the height of presumption and anyone who panders to such notions deserves space on the pedestal of history that is specially reserved for the likes of Al Gore.