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How Can We Know What's True?

All this can be checked. I didn't even change the names. "Mann" is Michael
Mann; his co-writers on that hockey stick report are Raymond Bradley and
Malcolm Hughes. "Steve" is Stephen McIntyre, and the writer of the report I'm
working from is Ross McKitrick, who is a climate scientist. Their report is a
chapter in Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming, edited by
Patrick J. Michaels.

Do you know how True Believer scientists respond to this? Just like the
ignorant New Yorker writer. There's no attempt to answer any specific charge.
They simply dismiss any disagreement by saying, "All the smart scientists agree
that global warming is happening; anybody who denies it is just a crank, and
you should ignore them."

This is exactly the kind of bias that President Bush's enemies accuse him of
having during the run-up to the Iraq War. They claim that Bush and his
people only believed the intelligence reports that told them what they wanted to
hear, and ignored the rest, claiming that "everybody knew" things that were
false.

That's not what happened with Bush (but you don't actually have to prove
accusations against President Bush these days). But with the Hockey Stick
Hoax it can be proved -- yet the very same reporters pay no attention at all.
It's "not a story."

In other words, the very people who attack Bush as a liar are actually behaving
exactly as they accuse Bush of behaving.

Global Warming vs. Climate Change

If you pay close attention, you'll find that Global Warming alarmists are not
actually saying "Global Warming" lately. No, nowadays it's "Climate Change."
Do you know why?

Because for the past three years, global temperatures have been falling.

Oops.

The thing is, we've had twenty years since the Alarmists first raised the banner
of Global Warming. They told us that "If This Goes On" by 2010 or 2020, sea
levels will be rising so high that coastal cities will be flooded, famines will cover
the earth, and ...

Oh, you know the list. They're still making the same predictions -- they just
move the dates farther back.

It's like those millennarian religious cults in the 1800s. Religious leaders
would arise who would predict the Second Coming of Christ in 1838. When
Christ didn't oblige them by showing up, they went back to their visions or
scripture calculations or whatever they claimed and report that they
miscalculated, now it was going to be 1843. Or whatever.

Here's the raw truth:

All the computer models are wrong. They have not only failed to predict the
future, they can't even predict that past.

That is, when you run their software with the data from, say, the 1970s or
1980s, and project what should happen in the 1990s or 2000s, they project
results that have absolutely nothing to do with the known climate data for
those decades.

In other words, the models don't work. The only way to make them "work" is to
take the known results and then fiddle with the software until it finally
produces them. That's not how honest science is done.

Why are so many scientists so wrong?

First of all, there aren't all that many scientists. You hear about how
"everybody" agrees about global warming. But who is "everybody"?

I had somebody at a conference get very angry with me for even raising a
question. "I have a friend who's a climate scientist and he says that the
Everglades are definitely drying up!"

But that's not the question, I said. Global warming isn't even the question.
The question is, what is causing global warming or cooling or climate change?
Is it human Carbon Dioxide emissions or something else? Your friend is
studying aquifers in one specific area. In what way is he qualified to speak
about global climate?

The only answer I got was the answer you always get when you challenge the
roots of someone's religion -- fury, dismay, and a refusal to talk about it any
more.

That's what happens over and over. Who are the scientists who are qualified to
speak? There aren't that many. It's the relatively few scientists who are
studying paleoclimate and those who are working on contemporary data
collection and collation and analysis.

And here's where it almost gets funny. Even the IPCC, which was so heavily
biased in favor of Global Warming alarmism, could not get its pet scientists to
agree that Global Warming in recent decades is even probably caused by
human activity.

What Is Driving Global Climate?
Science isn't done by consensus. It's done by rigorous testing. When a
hypothesis -- or a computer model -- fails to correspond to the actual real-world data, you throw it out.

That's what the real climate scientists are doing. They have found, in recent
years, a very close correspondence between global climate and variations in the
amount of radiation the Earth receives from the Sun.

The light and heat we get varies depending on the distance and position of the
Earth and the amount of radiation the Sun puts out. The Earth's distance and
position seem to determine the big cycles -- the Ice Ages -- and the Sun's
variations seem to determine the smaller climate cycles.

We have historical data indicating several global warm periods. There was one
during the heyday of the Roman Empire; then there was a global cooling during
the Dark Ages (beginning about 600 a.d.) The Medieval Warming kicked in
about 950, followed by the Little Ice Age beginning about 1300.

The Little Ice Age ended in about 1860. You'll notice that most reports on our
modern Global Warming set that as their base point, and leave out all prior
warmings.

But those warm periods are real, as are the cool periods. Ice core samples from
various places around the world back it up, as do ocean floor samples. In fact,
the predictions based on the 1500-year (approximately) solar cycle are borne
out everywhere.

There's now at least as much real-world evidence supporting the solar cycle as
the cause of climate variation -- including all of today's climate variation --
than there was for, say, tectonic plates or the asteroid-caused extinctions at
the time when they were first plastered all over the media as the hottest science
news of their day.

It's not that it's really a secret. The book Unstoppable Global Warming by
Singer and Avery tells us what the media could easily have reported to us:

"On 16 November 2001, the journal Science published a report on elegant
research, done by unimpeachable scientists, giving us the Earth's climate
history for the past 32,000 years -- along with our climate's linkage to the sun"
(p. 8).

They quote Richard Kerr of Science:

"... the climate of the northern North Atlantic has warmed and cooled nine
times in the past 12,000 years in step with the waxing and waning of the sun."

And Kerr quotes glaciologist Richard Alley of Penn State:

"The ... data are sufficiently convincing that [solar variability] is now the
leading hypothesis to explain the roughly 1,500-year oscillation of the climate
seen since the last ice age, including the Little Ice Age of the 17th century" (p.8).

We're not talking about fly-by-night wackos. We're talking about leading
scientists doing solid research.

And other scientists have found data that correlates closely with their findings
all over the world. In other words, these solar oscillations account, completely,
for the global variations.

The opposite is the case with the Global Warming alarmists. Their human-emitted Carbon Dioxide hypothesis is made ludicrous by the fact that most of
the warming since the 1860s occurred before 1940, an era when human CO2
emissions were not significant. And we had significant global cooling between
then and 1970, precisely the period when CO2 emissions were steeply rising.

CO2 really is rising, though. Any greenhouse heat effect seems to be dissipated
by a newly discovered "Pacific Heat Vent." Moreover, CO2 emissions are
provably involved in fertilizing vegetation wherever CO2 levels have risen.

Global Warming "Solutions"

We can't stop global warming or cooling. We simply don't have the power to do
it. We can't heat up or cool down the sun; we can't jiggle the Earth in its orbit
or change its position. We'd be idiots to try, even if such unimaginable powers
came within our reach.

So we'll continue, as long as the human race persists, to have ice ages and
warm periods, with relatively minor oscillations (like the Little Ice Age and our
current warm period) in between.

In fact, what we have right now, while we are not yet as warm as the peak of
the Medieval Warming (a fact that Mann and others have tried to deny or
obscure), is a superb climate that is making life better for people all over the
world. It's the cold periods that cause famines and population drops, and
promote plagues and floods.

We should be grateful.

Instead we are being hit with dire warnings, every one of which is either false
or a normal part of the Earth's history; our business should be to adapt to the
unavoidable solar-caused warming, not to destroy the worldwide economy in
order to prevent something that human activity is not causing.

Because the "solutions" proposed by the alarmists do not solve anything -- and
they admit it! The drastic proscriptions of the Kyoto Protocols, even if anybody
were actually following them, would not have had any effect on Global
Warming, even if it had been caused by human CO2 emissions.

Do you understand that? When Al Gore goes on and on about what we must
do to save the Earth, he knows -- and everybody involved with the Global
Warming alarmist movement knows -- that none of their drastic proposals
would have the slightest effect on Global Warming even if it worked they way
their fantasies say it does.

So why do they propose it? There are many personal motives, of course, but
when you look at the non-solution "solutions" they propose, the pattern is
clear: They are not trying to stop global warming. They are trying to punish the
Western democracies for being richer than the rest of the world.

There are solutions to that problem (and I believe it is a problem), but they
involve stabilizing bad governments, increasing international trade, and
making unsafe parts of the world safer so they can take part in the global
boom.

Not only that, but many of the programs the alarmists advocate are actually
needed for completely unrelated reasons. It is a mark of our folly and
blindness that we continue to be so ridiculously oil-dependent all these years
after the oil embargo of 1973.

For national security, environmental, futuristic, and personal-happiness
reasons we should be working hard to change our automobile centered culture
into more civilized patterns that invariably make people happier wherever they
are tried.

It can't be done by cutting back on automobile emissions or even by raising
taxes on gasoline -- especially because these changes are hardest on the poor
and the marginal middle class.

But I'll write about how and why we need to cut back on our destructive love
affair with that faithless mistress, the car, in another column.

What matters right here and now is that it is time for the world's scientists to
apostatize from the Church of Global Warming. It is a false religion. It is
based on lies, and its leading prophets know that it is because they're the ones
faking the data or stretching it to ridiculous lengths to pretend that the real
world hasn't already ruled against their claims.

It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false
religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught
about the demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global
Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as
another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary
movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the
data.

It is time for us to laugh at the ideologues who try to pretend that any criticism
of Global Warming alarmism is idiotic and unscientific. They are the ones who
ignore the data; they are the ones who believe on faith alone, without evidence;
and, most important, they are the ones who are trying to stifle the opposition
without answering it.

The Global Warming alarmists are the anti-science religion that is trying to
forcibly indoctrinate and convert everyone while suppressing dissent. And the
news media are their patsies, their stooges, their puppets.

Right now, let's start demanding that whenever the local newspaper or TV
stations say anything about Global Warming, they back it up with actual data
that takes into account the solar oscillations, the real climate history of the
earth, and the facts about what CO2 actually does in the atmosphere.

It's time to stop letting them pass along other people's lies. It's time for the
news media to stop doing cocktail party "research" and dig down into the
science and get it right.

Read It For Yourselves

I could not possibly array all the evidence here; you must read the books for
yourself. Unstoppable Global Warming is a highly accessible book written for
ordinary educated readers. It's the book I recommend most highly.

Shattered Consensus, on the other hand, uses the language of various
disciplines of science to a degree that makes some chapters fairly difficult for
untrained readers, though the key chapter I cited here, on the Hockey Stick
Hoax, is quite readable and worth looking at by everybody.



S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every
1,500 Years.

Patrick J. Michaels, ed. Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global
Warming.. (See especially: Ross McKitrick, "The Mann et al. Northern
Hemisphere 'Hockey Stick' Climate Index: A Tale of Due Diligence," pp. 20-49.)