MISFIRE

Usually columnist Bingo Dejaresco puts bullets on target with his engrossing and interesting column. But his column on global warming was a misfire. Mr. Dejaresco is an avid fan of Al Gore’s movie, “The Inconvenient Truth”. While this is an entertaining film with a lot of facts and striking images, it contains some serious flaws. Instead of an academy award for best documentary film, Al Gore should have won the award for best science fiction movie.

American author Mark Twain once wrote in “Life on the Mississippi”.

In the space of one hundredand seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles… any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Gore has taken a “trifling investment of facts”, irresponsibly thrown in a truck load of conjecture and created a world panic. This is bad enough, but it gets worse. Global warming has become such a popular fad that anyone who disagrees with Gore is punished. Scientists who disagree with global warming not only are ridiculed but many have had their research de-funded and even had threats on their lives. Millions are being spent on spreading Gore’s fairy tale and those trying to expose the distortions and lies are being ruthlessly silenced and crushed.

Gore claims scientists have “100% consensus on Global Warming”, Richard S. Lindzen, atmospheric Physicist, states that is “flat out incorrect”. He also said, “….I can not stress enough-we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climatic change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future."

“Alfred P. Solan, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, states, “A general characteristic of Mr. Gore’s approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all changes as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”

Gore supporter, Social Scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that all the scientific papers on global climate change, between 1993 to 2003 (Web of Knowledge Database) “supported Al Gore’s view.” Examination of these papers revealed out of 913 research papers by top scientists only 13 supported that view.

Roy Spencer, University of Alabama research scientist, criticized Al Gore’s findings in an open letter. “Temperature measurements in the artic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930’s… before most greenhouse gas emissions” He also states references global warming, “…we have no idea how much you can attribute to mankind.”

Tim Ball, climatology professor University of Winnipeg, revealed Gore’s cooking of scientific facts to suit his bias agenda, “The survey Gore cites was a single transect across part of the Artic basin in the month of October during the 1960’s when we were in the middle of a cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology”.

Chris de Fretas, Associate Professor University of Auckland, “There is evidence of global warming, but warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it.”

David Deming, Professor of Geology University of Oklahoma, “The amount of climatic warning that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause-human or natural-is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria.”

Khabibullo Ismailovich Abdusamatov, Russian Academy of Science, “Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy, almost throughout the last century, growth in its intensity.”

Sallie Baliunas, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “The recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air.” He continues,” There is no reliable evidence for increased severity or frequency of storms, droughts or floods that can be related to the air’s increased greenhouse gas content.”

I can literally fill this paper with similar quotes from reputable scientists that say NONscientist, tree hugger, Al Gore is wrong. Why is this an important issue? First because people here are terrified. Dumaguete City will be under 20 feet of water in the near future unless we stop driving our cars and farting. Second, and more importantly, history proves government policies based on this misinformation and hysteria will cause massive inflation and job loss.

I do not care that they are considering Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize for “saving the world” with his documentary. They gave President Jimmy Carter a Nobel Prize for doing almost nothing; they might as well give Al one for doing absolutely nothing. I just want my readers to do some research before they buy this load of panic-crap.