“Change” Is Not New

When ancient fossils of creatures that live on the ocean floor have been found in rock formations at the summit of Mount Everest, that ought to give us a clue that big changes in the earth are nothing new, and that huge changes have been going on long before human beings appeared on the scene.

The recent statement that the earth was warmer in the Middle Ages than it is today, made by the climate scientist who is at the heart of the recent scandal about “global warming” statistics, ought to at least give pause to those who are determined to believe that human beings must be the reason for “climate change.”

Other climate scientists have pointed out before now that the earth has warmed and cooled many times over the centuries. Contrary to the impression created in much of the media and in politics, no one has denied that temperatures change, sometimes more than they are changing today.

Three years ago, a book by Singer and Avery was published with a title that says it all: “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years.”

Contrary to clever political spin that likened those who refused to join the “global warming” hysteria to people who denied the Holocaust, no one denied that climates change. Indeed, some of the climate scientists who have been the biggest critics of the current hysteria have pointed out that climates had changed back and forth, long before human beings created industrial societies or drove SUVs.

It is those who have been pushing the hysteria who have been playing fast and loose with the facts, wanting to keep crucial data from becoming public, and even “losing” some of that data that supposedly proved the most dire consequences. It has not been facts but computer models at the heart of the “global warming” crusade.

Nothing is easier than coming up with computer models that prove almost anything. Back during the 1970s, there were computer models predicting mass starvation and global cooling. The utter failure of those predictions ought to make us at least skeptical of computer models, especially computer models based on data that advocates want to keep from public view or even “lose” when investigators start closing in.

On climate issues, as on many other issues, the biggest argument of the left has been that there is no argument.

The word “science” has been used as a magic mantra to shut up critics, even when those critics have been scientists with international reputations as specialists in climate science.

Stealing the aura of science for political purposes is nothing new for the left. Karl Marx called his brand of Utopianism “scientific socialism.” Even earlier, in the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet referred to “engineering” society. In the 20th century, H.G. Wells referred to the creation of a lasting peace as a heavy and complex “piece of mental engineering.”

Genuine science is the opposite of dogmatism, but that does not keep dogmatists from invoking the name of science in order to shut off debate. Science is a method of analysis, rather than simply a set of conclusions. In fact, much of the history of science is a history of having to abandon the prevailing conclusions among scientists, in light of new evidence or new methods of analysis.

When the scientists in England who were promoting “global warming” hysteria sent e-mails out to colleagues, urging them not to reveal certain data and not to let the fact become widely known that there was a freedom-of-information act in Britain, they were behaving like politicians, rather than scientists.

The huge political, financial and ideological investment of many individuals and institutions in the “global warming” hysteria makes it virtually impossible for many of the climate crusaders to gamble it all on a roll of the dice, which is what empirical verification is. It is far safer to dogmatize and to demonize those who think otherwise.

Educators who turn schools into indoctrination centers have been going all out to propagandize a whole generation with Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”— which has in fact carried a message that has been very convenient for Al Gore financially, producing millions of dollars from his “green” activities.

  • Alex Kovnat

    Everyone, whether they know it or not, has a vested interest in the global warming debate. Those who hate cars (SUV's and just plain cars alike) have an emotional vested interest in the idea of the world coming to an end from global warming, with cars (and our western way of life in general) being the cause of it all.

    If on the other hand you like driving your car, you have a vested interest in NOT having draconian fuel economy rules. So let us pray and hope Thomas Sowell is right. I'm inclined to believe the world isn't coming to an end from global warming or anything else, really.


    Al Gore and the Progressives concocted the Mother of all extortion scams..and they're not giving up…no matter what the evidence is exposing the fraud……Personally…I Love Global warming…it sure beats Global freezing your ass off…..and my plants love the extra CO2.

  • Thunder

    because an idiot wants to make, fraudulently, big money, it doesn't mean we have to finance him.
    BTW – it IS global COOLING.

  • Mik

    There is an inner contradiction in the logic in the biggest supporters of climate change. Most of the science being done by those who support the idea of climate change are also convinced that evolution is the mechanism that describes how the world as we know it has developed over the millenia. My comment is not meant to debate evolution. I only want to point out that evolution means that everything is always changing. So if a statistically proveable change is noticed in the climate, the response should be – no duh. What is the baseline data to which the climate is being compared? How does one know which climate the Earth was intended to have? Warm middle ages? Cold 17th century? Current catastrophes are regularly used to prove that things are getting worse. Katrina was the worst hurricane since Camille. But what caused Camille? The current floods are the worst in a century. But there were bad floods before. Change is inevitable. While we don't always have to like the results of change, we better get used to it.

  • TomB

    AGW has always relied on a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" (after this therefore because of this) line of reasoning, totally ignoring the same effect absent the supposed cause.

    In ancient days some of our ancestors sacrificed anything from livestock to virgins to ensure, among other things, good weather. Now we want to sacrifice the fruits of industrial society to ensure what – that we will have glaciers? This is what passes for progress?

  • http://lesbianconservative.com LesbianConservative

    So much of what comes from the Left is fundamentalist dogma. There is some perverted anti-human, self-hating psychology at work all wrapped up with an evangelical mission to save the planet from the taint of human habitation. Onward Left-wing soldier!

    And an interesting side note…Al Gore will be the keynote speaker at the Society for Human Resource Management on June 28th in San Diego. One has to wonder why such an organization invited him in the first place (I guess to get on the Green bandwagon) and if SHRM is now regretting the invite.

  • Keithrage

    All this climate B.S. is a vehicle for carbon tax, yes a TAX, the green movement, the W.H.O the U.N. have been infiltrated by globalists and N.W.Order elitists who want to tax the air, if you believe that carbon dioxide, the stuff you breath out, the gas that plants need to grow is now a noxious gas and should be taxed then I have a bridge in Mexico to sell to you.

  • http://www.theworldofgreasywrench.blogspot.com rich b

    Now that we're actually having a debate on Climate Change things are "heating up". These discussions should/would have happened fifteen or twenty years ago if it were not for the suppresion of evidence and outright lies by the "Warmers" in the scientific community. But at least now we're arguing and that's a good thing. As soon as Al Gore made the ridiculous statement that "the debate is over" he lost what little credibility he ever may have had.

    Not being a scientist I welcome the discussion on whether AGW is man caused or not. What I don't and never did appreciate was the agenda driven crap that was being forced down our throats in the name of money making schemes by gore and other frauds. At least now both sides are being heard and that is REAL debate.

  • Andrew G. Benjamin

    While Dr. Sowell accurately writes: "The huge political, financial and ideological investment of many individuals and institutions in the “global warming” hysteria" is behind" the hardly confirmed global warming "theory," he omits the most important and governing "investment" the liberal/leftie makes: emotional and psychological.

    If one can posit that liberalism is a religion under which all other belief systems are submerged (for example, leftist Jews are leftists first, for Judaism isn't progressive, pacifist, or inclusive, and the Jews who voted for Obama, the greatest enemy Israel had since its birth, and known to all before his election to office, proved that Israel is less important to them than Obama or their "progressive" belief), then for the leftists who clamored for war in Iraq in 1998, turning 180 degrees after 2000 to morph against the war is a relatively easy task, and for them any belief system is possible. Liberalism is "faith-based."

    The myth-maker and myth-consumer will find scripts and beliefs "transportable" as long as they meet some emotional and/or psychological need.

    Tor prove this point conclusively, listen to Al Gore…who tells you in this speech whether it was Bush Jr. who lied, or Bush's enemies lied. If Gore could lie in this video, what makes a leftie believe with all his heart that he is telling the truth in the next?

    I speak of the same Gore who stood in front of a blackboard with a hockey stick to tell us that the world will end real soon. That was years ago and we are still here and the oceans have not risen a fraction of an inch. Eventually, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions of years in the future, Al will have been proven right.


  • Drewski

    Any 9th grade science student anywhere in the world knows that the climate has changed many times over the past millions of years — I have no doubt that every climate scientist would also know that.
    The point is that man-made pollution is contributing to and accelerating the change. And if that is a left wing point of view then I guess that the American Academy of Sciences and ever other preeminent science organization on earth is left wing. Why don't you just accept the opinions of the scientists who are actually conducting the science — they are overwhelmingly in support of man-made global warming. If your argument is that they create the results to line their pockets, then I would say you are taking stupidity to a new level.
    In regards to "playing loose with the facts" if that means that making 3 known mistakes within tens of thousands over 4 decades is irresponsible then forget about believing in modern medicine because it makes an exponentially higher amount of errors. As far as 'lost' data — its still there just waiting for people like you to go visit the 1500+ temperature recording stations where the data is still stored. in regard to the "hockey stick'' — after two more independent teams crunched the data, it turns out that it was an accurate representation.

  • alzaebo

    um, the hockey stick showed temperatures rising first, then a rise in carbon, due to evaporation. the cycles lasted approx 800 years.

    every gas holds or releases heat. Infrared LIGHT is not heat. carbon merely passes that wavelength more slowly.

    the very concept of a "greenhouse" gas violates all known laws of physics.

    Two German scientists tested Arhennius' turn of the century offhand speculation about carbon. They found that only a solid wall, trapping any gas, and absorbing heat from the sun, creates a greenhouse effect. Only greenhouses act like greenhouses. (!)

    10 parts per million of any magical gas will NOT allow heat to travel one way and block it from traveling the other way. That's like asking a volleyball net to hold back the wind.

  • alzaebo

    An NOAA bureaucrat wanted to justify buying more weather balloons in 1959. He wrote a speculative report. That man was Al Gore's professor in a class in 1991. Al heard his speculation and Had An Idea. Took his 2 million dollar inheritance and turned it into 150 million, and came That Close to being a billionaire. With the help of a few friends, and fewer than 60 'scientists'. He's got… big ones, for sure.

    His compay generates the carbon credit derivatives. A $2.7 Trillion carbon credit exchange opened in London in December 2007. Well, those useless eurocredits are worth just a tad less, now. So Damn Close. But Green marketing will justify govt schemes forever!

  • alzaebo

    this originated as the Ozone hole fraud in the 80s.
    the CFC gases held responsible are too heavy to rise to the ozone layer- they end up 7 to 22 miles below the Hole. The hole is caused by solar particles striking the outer atmosphere; it grows and shrinks according to earth's wobble.

    the idea that heavy gases all pooled in one spot (on a spinning globe) and rubbed a hole in the atmosphere is ridiculous. The patent on Dupont's Freon was about to expire. Hey, we gotta replace all A/C units in the world!