Recently, former Jackson Mayor Kane Ditto took Kelley Williams to task for his earlier piece on climate change. Unlike Kelley, the mayor has little scientific training. But not to worry, he says, because he’s on the side of 97 percent of scientists who agree with climate change. Let’s examine that. If the question is stated as: do you agree with climate change? Then count me in with the 97 percent. How else could the massive polar ice cap have retreated from the northern USA leaving behind the land of lakes and other glacial evidence 10 thousand years ago? But if the question is asked: do you agree that mankind caused the climate to change by burning fossil fuels? Then you would get a very different response. Did man affect the climate (anthropogenic climate change or ACC) so much as to end the last ice age? I don’t think so, nor do thousands of scientists.
Next the mayor says that future generations would benefit if we fixed ACC. Well, we all hope for the best for our children and grandchildren. But an ACC advocate put it best: “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon you control life.” Not satisfied with attempting to control one-sixth of the US economy with Obamacare, they now aim to control another big chunk with the energy segment. They attempted to do this with the Paris Climate Accord. Had we not withdrawn from that agreement we would have been at a distinct economic disadvantage versus China, who are exempt from restrictions for many years.
The mayor also takes exception to Mr. Williams referring to “anybody and everybody who acknowledges ACC as alarmist.” What a switcheruski! Al Gore, the high priest of the ACC cult, said in his 2006 Inconvenient Truth that we have “just 10 years to avoid a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin.” Well, 10 years has long since come and gone, and we’re still here. The Green New Deal advocates are now repeating the same alarmism. The latest scare is that billions will face “unlivable” heat in 50 years if global warming is unchecked. But the alarm that best tickled my fancy was comparing global warming to being in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog! Now, who are the alarmists? Few voters have climate change high on their list of priorities, so ACC advocates say they must be scared into action.
My personal belief is that the long, long term trend is that the globe is slowly warming. It has been doing so since the last ice age over 10 thousand years ago. There have been several blips along the way. For example, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) a thousand years ago had temperatures warmer than today. And the Little Ice Age (LIA) four or five hundred years later had the opposite. Over the years scientists and the media have frequently changed positions on climate. In 1975, the New York Times reported that “a major cooling was widely considered to be inevitable.” The ACC crowd has chosen the end of the LIA as the starting point for many of their calculations because it conveniently coincided with the start of the Industrial Revolution. Starting from a low point obviously helps their projections. It would have destroyed their argument if they had started with the MWP.
Here are a couple of quotes from ACC leaders in their private communications: “I certainly believe the MWP was warmer than the 18th century — the equivalence of the warmth in the post 1900 period.” Another: “We have to get rid of that MWP.” Those communications and many more were uncovered during Climategate, when the files of leading ACC scientists were hacked in November 2009. The Daily Telegraph, one of the largest publications in the UK, said it was “the worst scientific scandal of our generation.” The Atlantic magazine said that “the stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.” The hackers found that the ACC scientists had manipulated data, had warned each other to be careful of potential probes by people using the freedom of information acts, had marginalized climate scientists who disagreed with them, and attempted to control the editorship of climate publications. So the ACC leaders were down but not out. After lying low for a while they have resumed their efforts for this “bureaucrat’s dream.” Expect the alarm bells for this hoax to continue ringing.
Peter Gilderson, Madison.
