Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Global Warming Nonsense

A few years back Michael Mann published a graph of temperatures that resembled a hockey stick laying on its side, with a rapid increase over the last century. His data and methods have been repeatedly challenged and debunked, though true believers refuse to admit what could only have been intentional fraud. Reading the MSM one would think that global warming caused by humans was an accepted fact, yet the facts themselves don't agree. We may be in a warming period (it's too early to tell as temperatures have only risen a little over half a degree over the last hundred years) but that fits a trend that we know has been going on forever. NASA,which is a big man-made global warming proponent, acknowledges that over the past millennium the earth's temperature has risen and fallen several degrees having nothing to do with humans. They note for example that:
Unusually low solar activity between 1645-1715 likely triggered the 'Little Ice Age' in regions like Europe and North America ... During this shift, winter temperatures cooled as much as 2 to 4 degrees F - enough to freeze rivers and alter agriculture, economy, disease, etc. Yet they go on to add that: Changes in the sun's energy was one of the biggest factors influencing climate change during this period, but have since been superseded by greenhouse gases due to the industrial revolution. So a four degree change is natural, but we somehow know that a much smaller one is not? We know that prior to the Little Ice Age things were warmer than they are now. The Vikings settled Greenland and grapes were grown in England. (Note: The Little Ice Age is now thought to have covered the entire earth not just the northern hemisphere. Volcanic activity may have also contributed. Much of the recent cacophony about unnatural disaster centers around computer models and simulations done by global warning alarmists. These predict an increase in temperatures of several degrees in the next hundred years, changes they claim would be catastrophic, caused by human activity. (Some don't think higher temperatures would be so bad). Without even going into the problems with bias in computer models, we can't even build a model that will duplicate past known data. Why then should we have any faith in their predictive abilities?

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