It’s high time to recognize that carbon dioxide has been unfairly treated. Not only have the good deeds of this wonderful molecule so essential to nourish rain forests, begonias, and plants that feed God’s creatures been ignored, it has even come to be demonized as an endangering pollutant and climate-ravaging menace.
What real evidence has been offered up to support these defamatory charges? Absolutely none!
Remember that really scary “hockey stick” graph endless hyped by the U.N. IPCC and the Al Gore types to show that evil human fossil-fueled emissions have put the world at a planet-frying tipping point? Despite those rising atmospheric CO2 levels, global temperatures have been flat ever since the time before most of today’s high school students were born.
And in addition to those “carbon footprints” we are all being blamed for tracking all over the place, what ever happened to the “hot spot” global warming fingerprint that all those really smart climate models predicted would appear in the tropical troposphere high over the equator? Golly, seems like our satellites haven’t been able to find it after all.
Nope, just as our president claimed regarding the hot spot he’s in regarding the IRS scandal, “there’s not even a smidgen of evidence.” The big difference in this case is that the lack of evidence is actually true.
As a matter of fact, even the IPCC finally acknowledges that their previous estimates of “climate sensitivity” to greenhouse gases they reported in 2007 were significantly exaggerated. This has to do with projections of the amount global temperatures will increase if atmospheric CO2 concentrations were to double.
All IPCC projections of future temperatures are based upon highly theoretical and unproven computer models. The latest estimates project an average 3 degree Celsius rise with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, while real world observations indicate between 1.5 C and 2 C. If the models warmed up a lot more than the observed climate, then which of them is broke?
As former professor of meteorology Dr. Richard Lindzen at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences observed, “The latest [2013] IPCC report truly sank to the level of hilarious incoherence — it is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.”
Still, the banner claim of this most recent Summary for Policymakers (AR5) release is that “Human influence is extremely likely to be the dominant cause of observed warming since the middle of the last century.”
Remarkably, this “extremely likely” was ratcheted up from a “very likely” they claimed in their 2007 report. One can only wonder how they have become more confident that at least more than half of the temperature rise since the mid-20th century has been caused by greenhouse gas emissions, when at the same time they are less certain about climate sensitivity to CO2.
But wait a minute! Wasn’t that climate catastrophe “Earth at the tipping-point” alarm stuff supposed to be about a fossil-fueled CO2 menace? After all, isn’t climate sensitivity supposed to be one of the most important parameters because it determines how much warming . . . or cooling . . . we can expect? And now they’re saying that they really aren’t sure how much that dastardly greenhouse gas even matters?
Go figure!
While we’re at it, let’s think about another sensitive matter, namely what uncertainty-based alarm-premised government regulatory overreach is costing us. Take the Obama administration’s war on coal for example, the source of about 42 percent of our electrical power. The Institute for Energy Research has estimated that the EPA’s latest rule-making assault will eliminate 10 percent of all U.S. power.
All of this is based upon misapplications of the Clean Air Act which Congress intended to address real pollutants and is predicated upon junk climate science which even EPA’s own research has rejected.
Conclusions of a March, 2009 “Internal Study on Climate” report that the agency kept under wraps stated: “Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based upon a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
It might be a good idea to keep all of this in mind the next time you hear claims of “green” energy subsidy-seekers promising salvation from a dastardly CO2 menace. Instead, let’s finally give carbon some long-overdue credit and strip out of control government bureaucrats of powers to invoke unwarranted intrusions into our free markets, business and lives. Doing so will constitute a man-made climate change that’s truly long overdue.
Larry Bell is a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston, where he directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and heads the graduate program in space architecture. He is author of “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax,” and his professional aerospace work has been featured on the History Channel and the Discovery Channel-Canada. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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