Is Global Warming the Issue–or Global Cooling?

The beginning of the 21st Century saw the media begin flooding the airways with political speechifying and TV hype about global warming and the plight of doomed polar bears on melting ice flows. Considerable propaganda built the belief that mainstream scientific opinion felt global warming is a fact and is the fault of human activity.

This isn’t saying that man has not been identified as the most destructive creature on the face of the earth, or that environmentalism isn’t important or hasn’t been neglected for far too long; it’s simply that the global warming issue is a biased agenda. There is much evidence pointing to normal periodic climate fluctuations not strictly global warming, and the non-global warming proponents have started speaking up in droves. So it needs to be asked, is there global warming or not? And is it, perhaps, not an irreversible trend? Must man own up to his part in it, or is it mostly a natural phenomenon?

Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC)

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is ostensibly a group of scientists working to assess the issues and realities of global climate change. During 2004, the group began to take a pro-global warming stance and in December 2007, the IPCC and Al Gore were jointly awarded a Nobel prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".

In January of 2005, Chris Landsea (IPCC scientist, author, and reviewer), wrote an open letter about why he felt it necessary to leave his position with the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4) Committee due to concerns about IPCC politicizing and their lack of neutrality regarding climate change issues.

In September 2006, Dr. David Whitehouse, a British astronomer and former science editor of the BBC, contacted Dr. Benny Peiser, moderator of the scholarly online Cambridge Conference Network (CCNet) at the Univ of Liverpool in UK, noting the impropriety of the Royal Society (of British scientists) pressuring journalists to ignore anyone with perspectives outside the IPCC consensus (Sept. 21, 2006, science policy archives at colorado.edu, Prometheus: David Whitehouse on Royal Society Efforts to Censor Archives; “The Honest Broker”).

On December 19, 2007, Whitehouse published an article in the New Statesman Online entitled Has Global Warming Stopped? (newstatesman.com/scitech/2007).  In it, he stated “The fact is, that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001.... the evidence shows that global warming, as such, has ceased.”

Senate Environment Committee Cautions Media to Avoid Alarmism

On September 26, 2006. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), then chairman of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, spoke to the media from the Senate floor, asking for objective reporting on global climate issues. He stated that global warming alarmism is unsupported by the weight of scientific evidence, and proposals by activists to impose a drastic global warming prevention program were unwarranted. (Senator Challenges Media to Report Objectively, Heartland Institute Staff, Environment & Climate News, May 2007 )

The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit research and education organization, which neither accepts government funds nor conducts special-interest research, issued a press release on their web site in February 5, 2008  (Expert Comment: ESA Listing for Polar Bears Unsupported by Sound Science by Harriette Johnson) stating that climate-related  media statements are not reflecting sound science. Heartland’s board of over 100 academics and professional advisors do research and peer reviews of the institute's publications. The release mentioned a number of examples, including a July 2006 Discovery Channel documentary narrated by former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, which presented only those views promoting the idea that man is destroying the Earth’s climate.

Polar Bears Not Endangered in Most Areas

On Jan 25, 2009, Canadian polar bear expert Mitch Taylor was quoted in (FCPP) Frontier Center for Public Policy, an independent, charitable Winnipeg-based think tank, “The IPCC has claimed that there is no valid perspective on climate except their own. The arctic has experienced a warming period sufficient to reduce sea ice and harm some polar bear populations. People love polar bears and will contribute to environmental organizations that claim to be saving them. Polar bear research and conservation efforts (funding) have greatly increased following the increased public profile. Because the story is intuitive, it has been an easy sell…, even [at] senior government levels”.

Taylor indicated that polar bear populations in many other areas were not only not decreasing, but were growing.

Dissenting Voices Being Raised in the U.S. Media

The March 22, 2009 Washington WorldNetDaily.com (no author) article entitled “Shocker: Global warming simply no longer happening,” says it all.  In a same day reprint of the article, the OrthodoxyToday.org blog (Orthodox.net.com) said simply “The Global Warming Cultists will not like these latest developments.”  This is because a major spokesman against global warming is former NASA climatologist Roy W. Spencer, now with University of Alabama, Huntsville.

Spencer makes a good case:  “Remember that phrase, ‘the Earth's greenhouse effect keeps the Earth habitably warm?’” he asks. “I'll bet you never heard the phrase that is, quantitatively, more accurate: ‘Weather processes keep the Earth habitably cool.’”  He can say this with confidence because his own tracking records show global temperatures have been falling for at least the last five years.

Spencer’s February 26, 2007 article in the New York Post is entitled “Not That Simple – Global Warming: What We Don’t Know.” UAH climatologists Spencer and John Christy are the principal investigators compiling data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites on global temperature trends since 1978. Their data indicate that average global temperatures have only been increasing about 0.14 degrees C. per decade. This is actually at the low end of climate model projections.

So it would seem that just as much evidence has been gathered by reputable scientists to refute global warming, and possibly to assert both periodic climatic fluctuations, and even global cooling. Things are beginning to clarify as hacked emails have begun to surface that global warming is a fraud, according to an article in World Net Daily. Doubtless it will clarify over time as data recording continues, but global warming is nowhere near the foregone conclusion it has been painted to be.