The sun is setting on the global-warming crowd | NJ.com

The sun is setting on the global-warming crowd
Published: Thursday, December 02, 2010, 12:58 AM Updated: Thursday, December 02, 2010, 11:39 AM
Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger

Al Gore: Why doesn't he hang around Moose Jaw in December?

I guess all the hotels in Moose Jaw are booked this time of year.

That might explain why they're holding that international climate summit in Cancun instead.

Or perhaps they just don't like the idea of single digit temperatures as well as headlines in the local news reading "Cold, stormy winter with lots of snow expected for Saskatchewan."

The article goes on to explain that a "La Nina" event in the South Pacific is expected to cause a cold winter in Canada. Such events are part of the so-called "Pacific Decadal Oscillation." This is a phenomenon that causes huge temperature swings all over the globe but remains only dimly understood by climate scientists.

They're too busy studying manmade global warming. That's where the money is, and there's a lot of it. A study by the Science and Public Policy Institute states that the U.S. government has spent $32 billion on climate research over the past 20 years.

Spending so much on studying on greenhouse gases is a misuse of resources, says William Happer a Princeton physicist who has a habit of injecting realism into the debate over global warming.

"I think most of the current climate change is natural, but people have become so fixated on CO-2 that people no longer look at natural causes," Happer said.

Happer said a reasonable estimate is that perhaps 20 percent of the change is anthropogenic, with the rest caused by such natural phenomena as ocean currents and sunspots. That means that even a big reduction in CO-2 levels would mean just a tiny reduction in warming, he said. And that's a great argument for doing nothing.

"Whatever you do has almost no effect on temperatures but has very negative effects on people's jobs and their welfare," he said.

The negatives are becoming obvious even to our president. The liberal Huffington Post is asking "Is Obama worse than Bush on international climate change?" It seems the man who once talked about wanting electricity costs to "skyrocket" under cap-and-trade is now casting about for ways to get the economy moving again. As for the cap-and-trade bill itself, it died with the Democrats' loss in November.

And skeptics are starting to show up at these climate-change conferences. I talked to one the other day as he was about to leave Canada for warmer climes.

His name is Patrick Moore. He has a doctorate in ecology and he was among the founders of Greenpeace. But Moore left the group in the mid-1980s when "I suddenly realized all my fellow directors had no background in science." The group, which was formed in opposition to nuclear testing, had begun such causes as the worldwide elimination of chlorine, which would cause massive health problems, he said.

Moore, who is going to the conference to peddle his books challenging environmental orthodoxies, has over the years become an advocate of peaceful nuclear power. It offers the best means of producing large amounts of pollution-free and carbon-free energy.

"That's one of the great logical disconnects of our time," said Moore. "A lot of extreme environmentalists say we're going to be killed by catastrophic climate change and then they reject the one source of power that could solve that problem."

Like Happer, though, Moore thinks that problem is much smaller than advertised.

"I'm very skeptical about the catastrophic scenarios," he said. "The bulk of the evidence shows we're looking at natural patterns of climate change."

That of course brings up the infamous "hockey stick graph" that climate scientists employed to smooth over both the Medieval Warming Period during which Greenland was really green and the Little Ice Age when the Thames River in London regularly froze over.

Those wild swings over the past millennium would seem to indicate climate can change quite quickly all by itself. By the way, it's a good thing that conference wasn't held in London. The airports are digging out from a blizzard.

I suspect that's a key reason the conference is being held in a hot place. In Cancun, there's no chance of one of those embarrassing cold snaps.

But the choice of that tacky tropical location makes the climate-change crowd look like just what it has become – just another one of those trade groups holding a convention during which the members discuss how to drum up business.
ALSO, Steve Lonegan and an Americans for Prosperity group are going to Cancun and presenting a video giving a counter view of the event.