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Dispelling the Myths of Global Warming

By Dale Hurd
CBN News Sr. Reporter

CBN.com – (CBN News) - Is global warming really threatening our planet, or are the warnings about climate change just a lot of hot air? At next month's G-8 summit, there will be immense pressure on President Bush to join the fight against global warming.

Global warming is now blamed for everything from Tsunamis to hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, floods and mudslides. And most of the world's leaders now accept global warming as fact.

Dr. Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, remarked, "More and more, people around the world are aware that there is climate change. Nobody is questioning that any longer.”

And the temperature's being turned up on the United States. The European Parliament has called for trade sanctions against the United States unless it agrees to curb its carbon dioxide emissions.

Few people dispute that the Earth has warmed. But what is disputed is why it is warming, whether man is responsible, and if we should even care.

Climatologist Pat Michaels of the CATO Institute stated, “Climate changes, yes, humans have something to do with this change, but climate has changed in the past without human beings having anything to do with it. There was an Ice Age, not very long ago -- 5,000 feet of ice over Chicago, and look, here we are, thriving on a planet with an ever-changing climate.”

But environmentalists say it is now changing for the worse. They warn that rising sea levels, from melting in the Arctic, could submerge most of New York and turn the Washington monument into riverfront property.

Michele Candotti of the World Wildlife Fund Italy said, "Glaciers are melting. Our water storage system is leaking, and is leaking dramatically."

Susan Joy Hassol, the author of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report, remarked, "Climate change is happening now. This is not a distant problem. It is happening now in the Arctic, and the impacts are being felt now in the Arctic, and they'll be increasingly felt there and around the world."

But Michaels says before you buy a life raft, hold on. First of all, in the North Pole, that is ice that is floating in the ocean. If that melts at the end of summer, that means nothing to sea level. The South Pole, Antarctica is the largest ice mass on the planet. It is gaining ice, not losing it.

The Earth's temperature has been fluctuating since its creation. It was warmer 1,000 years ago than it is today, but then began to cool. Colonial America was gripped by the tail end of a period known as Little Ice Age, with some of the deepest snows and coldest temperatures in recorded North American history.

Michaels stated, ”It was cold. In Jefferson's time it was definitely colder, and Jefferson writes in his book, "Notes on the State of Virginia",‘"The snow used to lie on the ground for months at a time; now it only does so for weeks or days…’"

It lasted into the 1800s, with the year 1816 known as the "year without summer." And some climate scientists today are more worried about another ice age than global warming. But they have been drowned out by a worldwide movement that has branded global-warming skeptics as evil, even comparing them to people who deny the existence of the Holocaust.

At least part of the European Left's hatred of George Bush is his refusal to sign onto the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement among industrialized nations to lower their carbon dioxide emissions as a way to fight against global warming. But it is not all President Bush's fault - under President Clinton, the Senate killed the treaty 95 to nothing.

But at next month's G-8 summit in Scotland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair will again be pushing President Bush to finally join the global warming fight.

Blair has declared, "I think that the Kyoto Protocol is essential. It is an essential first step, I think. We then need to build on it, and one of the parts of the debate we are pursuing with the United States is if whether there are at least areas in relation to science and technology that we can agree we need major investment in, for the future."

Michaels remarked, “The reason the U.S. is doing what it's doing is because it, unlike Europe, recognizes that the Kyoto Protocol will do nothing measurable about global warming.” By one estimate, it would make a difference of only seven one-hundredths of one degree Celsius after 50 years.

Michaels asserted, ”Not seven-tenths of a degree. Not seven degrees. But seven one-hundredths of a degree - an amount too small too measure. The European answer to this is, "Well, at least we're doing something. Yes, they are doing something. They're wasting money that they could use to invest in the technologies of the future. And those technologies are not where their governments are putting their money right now. They're throwing it at solar energy and windmills. They have double-digit unemployment. It's been pointed out by many people that the biggest supporters of Kyoto in the industrialized world have the worst economies.”

Critics of Kyoto say signing onto it would erase three percent from our gross domestic product. That is over $350 billion a year.

Nevertheless, Stephen Milloy, who runs JunkScience.com, says corporations have been caving in to pressure from environmentalists. He said, “Global warming pushers are going company by company, getting corporate management to be supportive of either the KP or other GW provisions. And eventually, they're going to develop enough political support among corporations that corporations will begin forcefully lobbying for GW restrictions in the U.S.”

And Milloy says that the White House continues to send out mixed signals on global warming. He said, "The Bush administration, although they oppose the Kyoto Protocol, they hand out two billion dollars a year to researchers whose mission is to prove that GW is happening. There's no dissent coming out of there. If you publish a paper saying GW is not happening, you will not get any more funding. There is no question about that."

The Greens say we cannot go on like this, spewing carbon dioxide into the air. The skeptics answer that we will not. New technologies will eventually replace fossil fuels, if we do not cripple our economies with schemes like Kyoto.

Michaels said, ”If you are concerned about global warming, the last thing you will want to do is take money out of people's pockets to invest in technologies of the future, and the U.S. must decide how long it can hold out against a world that has decided the time has come to do something about global warming."

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