http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/b...he-debate.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html

March 8, 2010, 05:30:00 | NP Editor

If you are driving a car (say an unrepaired Toyota) and it suddenly surges up to very high speeds,
then runs out of gas, it may be true that the first 100 metres after the tank goes dry are the
fastest 100 metres the car has ever travelled. It does not follow, though, that the car is still
accelerating dangerously. Or at all.

In their attempt to repair the recent damage to their climate-change cause, environmentalists -
such as former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, whose defence of the climate-change theory appears
opposite - have begun pointing out that the last decade was "the hottest decade since modern
records have been kept."

"What is important," Mr. Gore writes, is not the errors and manipulations recently uncovered in the
work of the UN and leading climate scientist, but rather "that the overwhelming consensus on global
warming remains unchanged."

To both claims, I say, "So what?"

Since 1998, we haven't seen things heating up. One of the four main sources of worldwide
temperatures (NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) claims 2005 was hotter - slightly - than
1998. But the point is, the trend over the last 12 years been roughly flat. The earth is not
getting warmer, at least not significantly. Global warming has paused.

So think of the climate like our runaway car. Temperatures rose rapidly from 1979. Yet after 1998,
the climb seems to have run out of gas. It's been warm since, but it is no longer getting warmer
rapidly, if at all.

So what if 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since modern records began being kept 150 years ago?
That could just be a hangover from the warming between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. Before our
speeding sedan began to slow, it was still moving along at a pretty good clip, too, despite having
no more fuel.

As for Mr. Gore's claim that the "overwhelming consensus" among scientists continues to support his
alarmist view of future climate, it bears remembering that scientific truth is never determined by
a show of hands. If it were, the sun would revolve around the Earth, which would be flat.

Less facetiously (and more importantly), Mr. Gore's vaunted consensus has cracks in it that were
not there before the release last November of thousands of damning emails and computer files from
the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain and the discovery since
December of more than a score of embarrassing misstatements in the 2007 assessment report of the
UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the holy book of the current global-warming
religion.

Last month, for instance, Phil Jones, the British climate professor at the heart of the
"Climategate" email scandal, told the BBC there had been no significant warming since 1995. He
insisted the warming since then had been almost significant. And he added that the warming from
1979 to today had been statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. But the important
admission in his interview was that for the past 15 years there has been only a slight warming,
within the margin of statistical error.

If you had known for the past 15 years that global warming was on hiatus, would you have been as
worried about climate change as you were? Would you have supported politicians promising to make
elaborate, expensive changes in our way of life to avert dangerous warming?

Mr. Jones, while maintaining a "100%" belief in the warming theory, also conceded that the Medieval
Warm Period (MWP) from about 900 to 1300 may have been warmer than today. While this may sound like
hair-splitting, this concession is extremely important, because if there was a time before SUVs and
coal-fired power plants and carbon footprints that was warmer than today, that makes the rise of
temperatures in the past century potentially unremarkable.

And it makes it potentially a natural phenomenon.

For the past decade or more, climate-change alarmists have tried to deny the existence of the
Medieval Warm Period (which used to be known as the Medieval Optimal before it became politically
incorrect to think of a warm climate as desirable). Grapes grew in southern England. Norse settlers
established farms in Greenland. And the plagues and territorial wars driven by scarcity that marked
the Late Middle Ages were centuries in the future - centuries notable for their coldness during the
Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850).

This drive to erase the MWP from climate history is what led to the infamous "hockey stick" graph
that is so central to the UN's claims that our current warm period is to be feared. Scientists such
as Mr. Jones know that if they can establish that there was no other warm era in the past 1,000
years - if global temperatures were mild and stable for the first 900 years and only shot up in the
past 100 years as human production of carbon dioxide has increased - then industrialization can be
blamed for threatening a climate apocalypse and the UN (and smart, activist scientists such as
those at the CRU and IPCC) will have to be called in to help Al Gore save the planet by directing
us all how to live.

"Droughts are getting longer and deeper," Mr. Gore insists. And they may be. But they were long and
deep in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, too. And one thing that era had in common with this
one was a lack of solar activity. Sun spots then, as now, were at a minimum. Perhaps solar
calmness, not atmospheric CO2, has something to do with droughts.

The former vice-president also clings to the belief that global warming will lead to more intense
storms - hurricanes, tornadoes, torrential rains and so on - even though the links between severe
storms and global warming, like the links between global warming and Himalayan glacier melt, Amazon
deforestation, sea-level rise, African crop declines and Arctic ice melt, have been debunked, or at
the very least called into doubt.

For instance, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, last month had the fewest tornadoes
(one weak one in California) of any February since records have been kept. Last August was the
first month in nearly a century without any recorded sun spots. And since 2005, when Hurricane
Katrina struck New Orleans, there has been just one major hurricane (Category 4 or higher) to hit
the U.S. Indeed, there are fewer hurricanes now that at any time since the 1960s.

None of this, nor the recent lack of additional warming, was predicted by the computer models the
UN relies on for its forecasts of devastating future climate change which calls into question the
ability of these models - in which Mr. Gore puts so much faith - to predict climate changes, good
or bad, over the next century.

Honey bees aren't dying off because of global warming; they're dying off because of a tiny mite
that has plagued hives for decades. Polar bears aren't dying off for lack of food to eat or ice to
cling to. They aren't dying off, period.

And the devastating melt of Arctic ice in 2007? Turns out the ice did not melt "in place."
According to a recent study by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, wind
pushed more Arctic ice than usual out into the Atlantic that year where it melted simply because
that ocean is warmer than its Arctic counterpart. Not because the Arctic is warming rapidly.

Could this wind shunting have been caused by global warming? Sure. But it just as easily could have
other, natural causes.

The point is, there is no consensus on climate science. There never has been. By flinging names
like "deniers" at skeptical scientists, barring them from IPCC deliberations, preventing them from
seeing the warmers' raw climate data and keeping them from having their papers peer reviewed,
activists like Mr. Gore and the scientists who agree with them have created an artificial
consensus.

While that may be good politics, it is very bad science.

National Post

Actually, the debates over. The world is entering another ice age but
Communists like Lorne Gunther and Eric Gisin continue to say that the
climate isn't changing.

Of course, neither one of you are scientists, so it's no surprise that
you're nothing but drooling buffoons spewing incoherent propaganda.

Callisto wrote

Actually, the debates over. The world is entering another ice age but
Communists like Lorne Gunther and Eric Gisin continue to say that the
climate isn't changing.

Of course, neither one of you are scientists, so it's no surprise that
you're nothing but drooling buffoons spewing incoherent propaganda.


All the reason why we should be rounding up the Communists and shooting them.
All they do is lie. Read Gunther's columns and the gibberish that the
brainless imbecile Gisin parrots. Not a smidgen of free will between the
two.

On Mar 8, 4:19 pm, "Eric Gisin" wrote:

- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/b...chive/2010/03/...

March 8, 2010, 05:30:00 | NP Editor

If you are driving a car (say an unrepaired Toyota) and it suddenly surges up to very high speeds,
then runs out of gas, it may be true that the first 100 metres after the tank goes dry are the
fastest 100 metres the car has ever travelled. It does not follow, though, that the car is still
accelerating dangerously. Or at all.

In their attempt to repair the recent damage to their climate-change cause, environmentalists -
such as former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, whose defence of the climate-change theory appears
opposite - have begun pointing out that the last decade was "the hottest decade since modern
records have been kept."

"What is important," Mr. Gore writes, is not the errors and manipulations recently uncovered in the
work of the UN and leading climate scientist, but rather "that the overwhelming consensus on global
warming remains unchanged."

To both claims, I say, "So what?"

To claims about evidence the earth is billions of years old,
creationists say that too.

Since 1998, we haven't seen things heating up. One of the four main sources of worldwide
temperatures (NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) claims 2005 was hotter - slightly - than
1998. But the point is, the trend over the last 12 years been roughly flat. The earth is not
getting warmer, at least not significantly. Global warming has paused.

Even if true, it's after heating up for 150 years, something you
denialists will not admit.

So think of the climate like our runaway car. Temperatures rose rapidly from 1979. Yet after 1998,
the climb seems to have run out of gas. It's been warm since, but it is no longer getting warmer
rapidly, if at all.

So what if 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since modern records began being kept 150 years ago?
That could just be a hangover from the warming between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s.

Those isotopes proving the earth is billions of years old? Just put
there by God to fool us!

Before our
speeding sedan began to slow, it was still moving along at a pretty good clip, too, despite having
no more fuel.

As for Mr. Gore's claim that the "overwhelming consensus" among scientists continues to support his
alarmist view of future climate, it bears remembering that scientific truth is never determined by
a show of hands. If it were, the sun would revolve around the Earth, which would be flat.

It's worth remembering a scientific consensus doesn't come about by
scientists waking up one day and all deciding "I agree." It's after
years and years and overwhelming evidence.

Less facetiously (and more importantly), Mr. Gore's vaunted consensus has cracks in it that were
not there before the release last November of thousands of damning emails and computer files from
the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain and the discovery since
December of more than a score of embarrassing misstatements in the 2007 assessment report of the
UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the holy book of the current global-warming
religion.

So how many national science academies have changed their position?
How many scientific organizations? Zero and zero.

Last month, for instance, Phil Jones, the British climate professor at the heart of the
"Climategate" email scandal, told the BBC there had been no significant warming since 1995.
He
insisted the warming since then had been almost significant.

Yes, but you deny there's been ANY warming.

And he added that the warming from
1979 to today had been statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. But the important
admission in his interview was that for the past 15 years there has been only a slight warming,
within the margin of statistical error.

If you had known for the past 15 years that global warming was on hiatus, would you have been as
worried about climate change as you were?

Well, yes. I'd be concerned whatever has slowed the rate of warming
will play out, and warming will take off again, and I'd be worried we
didn't take advantage of this opportunity to do something.

Would you have supported politicians promising to make
elaborate, expensive changes in our way of life to avert dangerous warming?

40 cents a day?

Mr. Jones, while maintaining a "100%" belief in the warming theory, also conceded that the Medieval
Warm Period (MWP) from about 900 to 1300 may have been warmer than today.

Lie. He said no such thing.

While this may sound like
hair-splitting, this concession is extremely important, because if there was a time before SUVs and
coal-fired power plants and carbon footprints that was warmer than today, that makes the rise of
temperatures in the past century potentially unremarkable.

And it makes it potentially a natural phenomenon.

And pigs "potentially" can fly.

- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -

For the past decade or more, climate-change alarmists have tried to deny the existence of the
Medieval Warm Period (which used to be known as the Medieval Optimal before it became politically
incorrect to think of a warm climate as desirable). Grapes grew in southern England. Norse settlers
established farms in Greenland. And the plagues and territorial wars driven by scarcity that marked
the Late Middle Ages were centuries in the future - centuries notable for their coldness during the
Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850).

This drive to erase the MWP from climate history is what led to the infamous "hockey stick" graph
that is so central to the UN's claims that our current warm period is to be feared. Scientists such
as Mr. Jones know that if they can establish that there was no other warm era in the past 1,000
years - if global temperatures were mild and stable for the first 900 years and only shot up in the
past 100 years as human production of carbon dioxide has increased - then industrialization can be
blamed for threatening a climate apocalypse and the UN (and smart, activist scientists such as
those at the CRU and IPCC) will have to be called in to help Al Gore save the planet by directing
us all how to live.

"Droughts are getting longer and deeper," Mr. Gore insists. And they may be. But they were long and
deep in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, too. And one thing that era had in common with this
one was a lack of solar activity. Sun spots then, as now, were at a minimum. Perhaps solar
calmness, not atmospheric CO2, has something to do with droughts.

The former vice-president also clings to the belief that global warming will lead to more intense
storms - hurricanes, tornadoes, torrential rains and so on - even though the links between severe
storms and global warming, like the links between global warming and Himalayan glacier melt, Amazon
deforestation, sea-level rise, African crop declines and Arctic ice melt, have been debunked, or at
the very least called into doubt.

For instance, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, last month had the fewest tornadoes
(one weak one in California) of any February since records have been kept.

Funny, when it's brought up that the 2000s are the hottest decade
since records have been kept, you denialists always poo-poo that as a
short period of time.

Last August was the
first month in nearly a century without any recorded sun spots. And since 2005, when Hurricane
Katrina struck New Orleans, there has been just one major hurricane (Category 4 or higher) to hit
the U.S. Indeed, there are fewer hurricanes now that at any time since the 1960s.

So hurricanes have to hit the US to count as a storm?

None of this, nor the recent lack of additional warming, was predicted by the computer models the
UN relies on for its forecasts of devastating future climate change which calls into question the
ability of these models - in which Mr. Gore puts so much faith - to predict climate changes, good
or bad, over the next century.

And traffic models for LA didn't predict an earthquake would hit and
disrupt traffic some years ago either.

Honey bees aren't dying off because of global warming; they're dying off because of a tiny mite
that has plagued hives for decades. Polar bears aren't dying off for lack of food to eat or ice to
cling to. They aren't dying off, period.

Well, yes, they are.

And the devastating melt of Arctic ice in 2007? Turns out the ice did not melt "in place."
According to a recent study by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, wind
pushed more Arctic ice than usual out into the Atlantic that year where it melted simply because
that ocean is warmer than its Arctic counterpart. Not because the Arctic is warming rapidly.

Yes it is -- only the thin new ice can be so pushed by winds. Old ice
is disappearing.

Could this wind shunting have been caused by global warming? Sure. But it just as easily could have
other, natural causes.

The point is, there is no consensus on climate science.

Yeah, that 97% of climate researchers, that 36 national science
academies, and all those (every one) scientific organizations -- no
consensus, just because they all happen to agree.

On Mar 8, 9:19*pm, "Eric Gisin" wrote:
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/b...on/28gore.html

March 8, 2010, 05:30:00 | NP Editor

If you are driving a car (say an unrepaired Toyota) and it suddenly surges up to very high speeds,
then runs out of gas, it may be true that the first 100 metres after the tank goes dry are the
fastest 100 metres the car has ever travelled. It does not follow, though, that the car is still
accelerating dangerously. Or at all.

In their attempt to repair the recent damage to their climate-change cause, environmentalists -
such as former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, whose defence of the climate-change theory appears
opposite - have begun pointing out that the last decade was "the hottest decade since modern
records have been kept."

"What is important," Mr. Gore writes, is not the errors and manipulations recently uncovered in the
work of the UN and leading climate scientist, but rather "that the overwhelming consensus on global
warming remains unchanged."

To both claims, I say, "So what?"

Since 1998, we haven't seen things heating up. One of the four main sources of worldwide
temperatures (NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) claims 2005 was hotter - slightly - than
1998. But the point is, the trend over the last 12 years been roughly flat. The earth is not
getting warmer, at least not significantly. Global warming has paused.

So think of the climate like our runaway car. Temperatures rose rapidly from 1979. Yet after 1998,
the climb seems to have run out of gas. It's been warm since, but it is no longer getting warmer
rapidly, if at all.

So what if 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since modern records began being kept 150 years ago?
That could just be a hangover from the warming between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. Before our
speeding sedan began to slow, it was still moving along at a pretty good clip, too, despite having
no more fuel.

As for Mr. Gore's claim that the "overwhelming consensus" among scientists continues to support his
alarmist view of future climate, it bears remembering that scientific truth is never determined by
a show of hands. If it were, the sun would revolve around the Earth, which would be flat.

Less facetiously (and more importantly), Mr. Gore's vaunted consensus has cracks in it that were
not there before the release last November of thousands of damning emails and computer files from
the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain and the discovery since
December of more than a score of embarrassing misstatements in the 2007 assessment report of the
UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the holy book of the current global-warming
religion.

Last month, for instance, Phil Jones, the British climate professor at the heart of the
"Climategate" email scandal, told the BBC there had been no significant warming since 1995. He
insisted the warming since then had been almost significant. And he added that the warming from
1979 to today had been statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. But the important
admission in his interview was that for the past 15 years there has been only a slight warming,
within the margin of statistical error.

If you had known for the past 15 years that global warming was on hiatus, would you have been as
worried about climate change as you were? Would you have supported politicians promising to make
elaborate, expensive changes in our way of life to avert dangerous warming?

Mr. Jones, while maintaining a "100%" belief in the warming theory, also conceded that the Medieval
Warm Period (MWP) from about 900 to 1300 may have been warmer than today. While this may sound like
hair-splitting, this concession is extremely important, because if there was a time before SUVs and
coal-fired power plants and carbon footprints that was warmer than today, that makes the rise of
temperatures in the past century potentially unremarkable.

And it makes it potentially a natural phenomenon.

For the past decade or more, climate-change alarmists have tried to deny the existence of the
Medieval Warm Period (which used to be known as the Medieval Optimal before it became politically
incorrect to think of a warm climate as desirable). Grapes grew in southern England. Norse settlers
established farms in Greenland. And the plagues and territorial wars driven by scarcity that marked
the Late Middle Ages were centuries in the future - centuries notable for their coldness during the
Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850).

This drive to erase the MWP from climate history is what led to the infamous "hockey stick" graph
that is so central to the UN's claims that our current warm period is to be feared. Scientists such
as Mr. Jones know that if they can establish that there was no other warm era in the past 1,000
years - if global temperatures were mild and stable for the first 900 years and only shot up in the
past 100 years as human production of carbon dioxide has increased - then industrialization can be
blamed for threatening a climate apocalypse and the UN (and smart, activist scientists such as
those at the CRU and IPCC) will have to be called in to help Al Gore save the planet by directing
us all how to live.

"Droughts are getting longer and deeper," Mr. Gore insists. And they may be. But they were long and
deep in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, too. And one thing that era had in common with this
one was a lack of solar activity. Sun spots then, as now, were at a minimum. Perhaps solar
calmness, not atmospheric CO2, has something to do with droughts.

The former vice-president also clings to the belief that global warming will lead to more intense
storms - hurricanes, tornadoes, torrential rains and so on - even though the links between severe
storms and global warming, like the links between global warming and Himalayan glacier melt, Amazon
deforestation, sea-level rise, African crop declines and Arctic ice melt, have been debunked, or at
the very least called into doubt.

For instance, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, last month had the fewest tornadoes
(one weak one in California) of any February since records have been kept.. Last August was the
first month in nearly a century without any recorded sun spots. And since 2005, when Hurricane
Katrina struck New Orleans, there has been just one major hurricane (Category 4 or higher) to hit
the U.S. Indeed, there are fewer hurricanes now that at any time since the 1960s.

None of this, nor the recent lack of additional warming, was predicted by the computer models the
UN relies on for its forecasts of devastating future climate change which calls into question the
ability of these models - in which Mr. Gore puts so much faith - to predict climate changes, good
or bad, over the next century.

Honey bees aren't dying off because of global warming; they're dying off because of a tiny mite
that has plagued hives for decades. Polar bears aren't dying off for lack of food to eat or ice to
cling to. They aren't dying off, period.

And the devastating melt of Arctic ice in 2007? Turns out the ice did not melt "in place."
According to a recent study by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, wind
pushed more Arctic ice than usual out into the Atlantic that year where it melted simply because
that ocean is warmer than its Arctic counterpart. Not because the Arctic is warming rapidly.

Could this wind shunting have been caused by global warming? Sure. But it just as easily could have
other, natural causes.

The point is, there is no consensus on climate science. There never has been. By flinging names
like "deniers" at skeptical scientists, barring them from IPCC deliberations, preventing them from
seeing the warmers' raw climate data and keeping them from having their papers peer reviewed,
activists like Mr. Gore and the scientists who agree with them have created an artificial
consensus.

While that may be good politics, it is very bad science.

National Post


Brilliant stuff

Giga2 wrote:
On Mar 8, 9:19*pm, "Eric Gisin" wrote:


Brilliant stuff

Gunter's a Communist, so you must be too.

Why is it that you Commies only like to read stuff that you want to
hear and don't care about the credibility of the author or the
content?

Callisto wrote:
Giga2 wrote:
On Mar 8, 9:19*pm, "Eric Gisin" wrote:
Brilliant stuff

Gunter's a Communist, so you must be too.

Why is it that you Commies only like to read stuff that you want to
hear and don't care about the credibility of the author or the
content?

Global Warming is a big conspiracy to enslave us. You don't need
scientists to know that much. Just ask Alex Jones at www.prisonplanet.com,
he'll tell you.

March 8, 2010

If you are driving a car (say an unrepaired Toyota) and it suddenly surges
up to very high speeds,
then runs out of gas, it may be true that the first 100 metres after the
tank goes dry are the
fastest 100 metres the car has ever travelled. It does not follow, though,
that the car is still
accelerating dangerously. Or at all.

In their attempt to repair the recent damage to their climate-change cause,
environmentalists -
such as former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, whose defence of the
climate-change theory appears
opposite - have begun pointing out that the last decade was "the hottest
decade since modern
records have been kept."

"What is important," Mr. Gore writes, is not the errors and manipulations
recently uncovered in the
work of the UN and leading climate scientist, but rather "that the
overwhelming consensus on global
warming remains unchanged."

To both claims, I say, "So what?"

Since 1998, we haven't seen things heating up. One of the four main sources
of worldwide
temperatures (NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) claims 2005 was
hotter - slightly - than
1998. But the point is, the trend over the last 12 years been roughly flat.
The earth is not
getting warmer, at least not significantly. Global warming has paused.

So think of the climate like our runaway car. Temperatures rose rapidly from
1979. Yet after 1998,
the climb seems to have run out of gas. It's been warm since, but it is no
longer getting warmer
rapidly, if at all.

So what if 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since modern records began being
kept 150 years ago?
That could just be a hangover from the warming between the late 1970s and
the mid-1990s. Before our
speeding sedan began to slow, it was still moving along at a pretty good
clip, too, despite having
no more fuel.

As for Mr. Gore's claim that the "overwhelming consensus" among scientists
continues to support his
alarmist view of future climate, it bears remembering that scientific truth
is never determined by
a show of hands. If it were, the sun would revolve around the Earth, which
would be flat.

Less facetiously (and more importantly), Mr. Gore's vaunted consensus has
cracks in it that were
not there before the release last November of thousands of damning emails
and computer files from
the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain
and the discovery since
December of more than a score of embarrassing misstatements in the 2007
assessment report of the
UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the holy book of the
current global-warming
religion.

Last month, for instance, Phil Jones, the British climate professor at the
heart of the
"Climategate" email scandal, told the BBC there had been no significant
warming since 1995. He
insisted the warming since then had been almost significant. And he added
that the warming from
1979 to today had been statistically significant at a 95% confidence level.
But the important
admission in his interview was that for the past 15 years there has been
only a slight warming,
within the margin of statistical error.

If you had known for the past 15 years that global warming was on hiatus,
would you have been as
worried about climate change as you were? Would you have supported
politicians promising to make
elaborate, expensive changes in our way of life to avert dangerous warming?

Mr. Jones, while maintaining a "100%" belief in the warming theory, also
conceded that the Medieval
Warm Period (MWP) from about 900 to 1300 may have been warmer than today.
While this may sound like
hair-splitting, this concession is extremely important, because if there was
a time before SUVs and
coal-fired power plants and carbon footprints that was warmer than today,
that makes the rise of
temperatures in the past century potentially unremarkable.

And it makes it potentially a natural phenomenon.

For the past decade or more, climate-change alarmists have tried to deny the
existence of the
Medieval Warm Period (which used to be known as the Medieval Optimal before
it became politically
incorrect to think of a warm climate as desirable). Grapes grew in southern
England. Norse settlers
established farms in Greenland. And the plagues and territorial wars driven
by scarcity that marked
the Late Middle Ages were centuries in the future - centuries notable for
their coldness during the
Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850).

This drive to erase the MWP from climate history is what led to the infamous
"hockey stick" graph
that is so central to the UN's claims that our current warm period is to be
feared. Scientists such
as Mr. Jones know that if they can establish that there was no other warm
era in the past 1,000
years - if global temperatures were mild and stable for the first 900 years
and only shot up in the
past 100 years as human production of carbon dioxide has increased - then
industrialization can be
blamed for threatening a climate apocalypse and the UN (and smart, activist
scientists such as
those at the CRU and IPCC) will have to be called in to help Al Gore save
the planet by directing
us all how to live.

"Droughts are getting longer and deeper," Mr. Gore insists. And they may be.
But they were long and
deep in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, too. And one thing that era
had in common with this
one was a lack of solar activity. Sun spots then, as now, were at a minimum.
Perhaps solar
calmness, not atmospheric CO2, has something to do with droughts.

The former vice-president also clings to the belief that global warming will
lead to more intense
storms - hurricanes, tornadoes, torrential rains and so on - even though the
links between severe
storms and global warming, like the links between global warming and
Himalayan glacier melt, Amazon
deforestation, sea-level rise, African crop declines and Arctic ice melt,
have been debunked, or at
the very least called into doubt.

For instance, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, last month had
the fewest tornadoes
(one weak one in California) of any February since records have been kept.
Last August was the
first month in nearly a century without any recorded sun spots. And since
2005, when Hurricane
Katrina struck New Orleans, there has been just one major hurricane
(Category 4 or higher) to hit
the U.S. Indeed, there are fewer hurricanes now that at any time since the
1960s.

None of this, nor the recent lack of additional warming, was predicted by
the computer models the
UN relies on for its forecasts of devastating future climate change which
calls into question the
ability of these models - in which Mr. Gore puts so much faith - to predict
climate changes, good
or bad, over the next century.

Honey bees aren't dying off because of global warming; they're dying off
because of a tiny mite
that has plagued hives for decades. Polar bears aren't dying off for lack of
food to eat or ice to
cling to. They aren't dying off, period.

And the devastating melt of Arctic ice in 2007? Turns out the ice did not
melt "in place."
According to a recent study by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in California, wind
pushed more Arctic ice than usual out into the Atlantic that year where it
melted simply because
that ocean is warmer than its Arctic counterpart. Not because the Arctic is
warming rapidly.

Could this wind shunting have been caused by global warming? Sure. But it
just as easily could have
other, natural causes.

The point is, there is no consensus on climate science. There never has
been. By flinging names
like "deniers" at skeptical scientists, barring them from IPCC
deliberations, preventing them from
seeing the warmers' raw climate data and keeping them from having their
papers peer reviewed,
activists like Mr. Gore and the scientists who agree with them have created
an artificial
consensus.

While that may be good politics, it is very bad science.


http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/b...he-debate.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html