• Als Spam markieren
• Beitrag melden

• 
  Diese Gruppe Alles

• Archiv
• RSS-Feeds

• Kontakt
• Hilfe
• Impressum
• Datenschutz

Plus Ça (Climate) Change

The Earth was warming before global warming was cool.

BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s,
it was an ice-free farm country--grass for sheep and cattle, open water for
fishing, a livable climate--so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000
people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures
had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward
across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive.

Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in
history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to
A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of
the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to
1850, the Little Ice Age.

During the 20th century the earth did indeed warm--by 1 degree Fahrenheit.
But a look at the data shows that within the century temperatures varied
with time: from 1900 to 1910 the world cooled; from 1910 to 1940 it warmed;
from 1940 to the late 1970s it cooled again, and since then it has been
warming. Today our climate is 1/20th of a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it
was in 2001.

Many things are contributing to such global temperature changes. Solar
radiation is one. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high,
according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing
Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite
the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red
Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has
increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn
Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes
that "the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is
responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming."

Statistics suggest that while there has indeed been a slight warming in the
past century, much of it was neither human-induced nor geographically
uniform. Half of the past century's warming occurred before 1940, when the
human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now. And
while global temperatures are now slightly up, in some areas they are
dramatically down. According to "Climate Change and Its Impacts," a study
published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice
mass in Greenland has grown, and "average summer temperatures at the summit
of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade
since the late 1980s." British environmental analyst Lord Christopher
Monckton says that from 1993 through 2003 the Greenland ice sheet "grew an
average extra thickness of 2 inches a year," and that in the past 30 years
the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has grown as well.

Earlier this month the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
released a summary of its fourth five-year report. Although the full report
won't be out until May, the summary has reinvigorated the global warming
discussion.

While global warming alarmism has become a daily American press feature, the
IPCC, in its new report, is backtracking on its warming predictions. While
Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" warns of up to 20 feet of sea-level
increase, the IPCC has halved its estimate of the rise in sea level by the
end of this century, to 17 inches from 36. It has reduced its estimate of
the impact of global greenhouse-gas emissions on global climate by more than
one-third, because, it says, pollutant particles reflect sunlight back into
space and this has a cooling effect.

The IPCC confirms its 2001 conclusion that global warming will have little
effect on the number of typhoons or hurricanes the world will experience,
but it does not note that there has been a steady decrease in the number of
global hurricane days since 1970--from 600 to 400 days, according to Georgia
Tech atmospheric scientist Peter Webster.

The IPCC does not explain why from 1940 to 1975, while carbon dioxide
emissions were rising, global temperatures were falling, nor does it admit
that its 2001 "hockey stick" graph showing a dramatic temperature increase
beginning in 1970s had omitted the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming
temperature changes, apparently in order to make the new global warming
increases appear more dramatic.

Sometimes the consequences of bad science can be serious. In a 2000 issue of
Nature Medicine magazine, four international scientists observed that "in
less than two decades, spraying of houses with DDT reduced Sri Lanka's
malaria burden from 2.8 million cases and 7,000 deaths [in 1948] to 17 cases
and no deaths" in 1963. Then came Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring,"
invigorating environmentalism and leading to outright bans of DDT in some
countries. When Sri Lanka ended the use of DDT in 1968, instead of 17
malaria cases it had 480,000.

Yet the Sierra Club in 1971 demanded "a ban, not just a curb," on the use of
DDT "even in the tropical countries where DDT has kept malaria under
control." International environmental controls were more important than the
lives of human beings. For more than three decades this view prevailed,
until the restrictions were finally lifted last September.

As we have seen since the beginning of time, and from the Vikings'
experience in Greenland, our world experiences cyclical climate changes.
America needs to understand clearly what is happening and why before we sign
onto U.N. environmental agreements, shut down our industries and power
plants, and limit our economic growth.

* Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the
Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His

* column appears once a month.

--

"Mr. Carter, thank you for making me a Republican, because of your
incompetent handling of the Iranians, the stagnation and your cozying up
with every dictator, thug and Islamic terrorist there is. But more
importantly, I find it to be vile, you know, because you're black at heart.
It's hard because you're an anti-semite, and let me explain why I think
you're a bigot, a racist and an anti-semite."

-- A C-SPAN caller, to President Jimmy Carter.

Antworten