Global Warming: A Planet in Crisis?
By Gailon Totheroh and Dale Hurd
CBN News
December 15, 2007
CBNNews.com - United Nations officials have increasingly insisted that the world is facing a climate catastrophe. World leaders have compared the threat from climate change to World War II, World War III, and the apocalypse.
'This is Not a Normal Time'
"This is not a normal time," Former Vice-President Al Gore told a Senate committee. "We are facing a planetary emergency."
Gore also says "the climate crisis is by far the most dangerous crisis our civilization has ever faced."
Greenpeace spokesperson Stephanie Dunmore adds, "We already know that millions of lives are at stake from climate change, and more we learn about the climate system the worse the news gets."
The rhetoric over the planet's temperature has never been hotter. But simply agreeing that the Earth is warming is no longer enough.
Leading UN climate officials like Yvo de Boer, are now calling failure to act on climate change "criminal."
"Failing to recognize the urgency of this message and act on it would be nothing less than criminally irresponsible. Failing to act would constitute a direct attack on the poorest of the poor," he said.
A Greenpeace commercial compares indifference to climate change to leaving a baby to drown in a bathtub. A commercial by the Ad Council compares it to leaving a child in front of a speeding locomotive.
"The name of the game in climate change or in any other scientific issue that competes for public money is called exaggeration," says Climatologist Pat Michaels.
Michaels has worked with the U.N. climate panel, and even believes that human activity has warmed the earth through the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. But he's still labeled a "climate criminal" by some on the fringe because he doesn't believe in an apocalyptic scenario.
"It's got to be the worst thing in the world unless we do something about it. Because if you come to and go in front of a congressional committee that's going to fund a research project, if you say 'it's not the end of the world unless you do this,' you're not going to get funded," Michaels said.
Scare stories about climate change have warned of just about everything from polar bear suicides to world bankruptcy to infertility to the death march of penguins.
Steve Schneider, a lead IPCC author, said, "Don't be poor in a hot country. Don't live in hurricane alley. Watch out about being on the coasts or in the Arctic. It is a bad idea to be up on the high mountains with your glaciers melting and losing your water supply. And if you are in the Mediterranean climate you are going to have a fire season in the summer and that is really going to be a problem."
The crux of the climate change crisis scenario is the belief that much of the ice in Greenland is going to melt, causing the Earth's ocean levels to rise more than 20 feet, according to Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth.
Michaels calls Gore's movie Science Fiction. He says it was warmer a hundred years ago, and that there's nothing in the history books about catastrophe back then.
"Greenland was warmer in the first half of the last century, from 1915 to 1965 than it was in the last decade and nothing happened. Nobody noticed. In fact the only thing I saw was a book called Arctic Riviera which talked about the greening of Greenland and how wonderful it was," he said.
Where Christians Stand on the Issue
But the apocalyptic climate change narrative is the new orthodoxy for many people, including some Christians.
A national poll released last month found that 84 percent of Evangelicals support legislation to reduce CO2 levels. And 64 percent say that action to fight climate change should begin immediately.
But renowned MIT professor Richard Lindzen, a climate change skeptic, says the Earth is dynamic enough to withstand a rise in temperature.
"Essentially the alarm is based on the notion that the earth is very badly designed, and without mans intervention would fall apart," he said.
When British education officials wanted to show Al Gore's film, An inconvenient Truth, to British school children, opponents took the matter to court, and the British court determined that there are nine key scientific errors in the film, including three errors that go right to the heart of the apocalyptic view of climate change:
-The court said the scientific evidence shows the Earth began warming before the increase of CO2 into the atmosphere
-Melting ice in Greenland would not cause a sudden dangerous rise in ocean levels
-Ice in the Antarctic is now growing, not shrinking.
It's also important to know that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were not in this decade, but in the 1930s. And some scientists believe we're actually headed into a global cooling period. But dissent is increasingly drowned out. Some compare climate change skeptics to holocaust deniers.
Michaels warns that when the climate change apocalypse fails to materialize, the real victim will be the reputation of science.
He said, "I think the rhetoric that's going on right now is really going to damage science in the long term when people realize the world didn't come to an end. The Earth's going to get warmer. We're gonna live."
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