Sixty nails in climate alarmism's coffin

By Jerry Shenk

There are plenty of well-credentialed, objective, if little-publicized, climate skeptics, but few who are able to present their material in layman’s terms to an audience of curious, unschooled, but receptive climate truth-seekers.
A new resource provides a point-by-point review and response to each of the climate industry’s claims, citing the “normalcy” of much of their “alarming” data.  
In an entertaining, easy-to-read, elegantly-written, meticulously-researched, well-documented and illustrated 143-page book (including citations) entitled “Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know,” geologist Gregory Wrightstone presents a clear picture of the climate alarmism that attracts cynical big-government advocates and grips much of the scientific community, complicit media and the gullible among us.
Wrightstone employs government sources, peer-reviewed publications and other scholarly works to reassure readers that our Earth has become healthier and more prosperous because of rising carbon dioxide and temperature levels, rather than in spite of them.
The book details sixty inconvenient facts. Considering the climate alarmists’ persistent clamor about “scientific consensus.” Arguably, Inconvenient Fact #31 should have appeared first: “Science is not consensus and consensus is not science.”  
Wrightstone’s droll observation about the financial incentives driving many career-invested scientists to mislead or overstate the “catastrophic” potential of climate change, often without historical or even scientific context, is spot on: “Fund it and they will find it.”
The book documents as facts that global warming is not happening at anywhere near the rates predicted by climate doomsayers, and that forewarnings of abnormal extreme weather events related to climate change simply haven’t occurred.  Wrightstone makes a persuasive case that the “settled science” of global warming -- alternately, climate change, extreme weather (or pick the term du jour) -- is neither settled nor, in many cases, even science.
Some highlights: Only a trace gas, carbon dioxide isn’t the primary greenhouse gas; CO2’s warming effect declines as its concentration increases; and CO2 is plant food, so more of it means moister soil, fewer droughts and forest fires, a greener Earth, more plant growth and more food for humans and animals.
Wrightstone also reveals anxiety over rising temperatures to be just another climate alarm shibboleth.  Humans didn’t cause 800,000 years of constant, normal, cyclical temperature changes, including the past 10,000 years, 6,100 of which were warmer than today.  In fact, warming has paused for nearly two decades despite marginal increases in CO2.
Indeed, warmer climates are better than cold ones for humans and most animal species. World-wide, annually, there are far more cold-related than heat-related deaths. Moreover, in addition to a greener Earth, increased CO2 and higher temperatures together provide other shared benefits, including longer growing seasons, more crop cycles and greater human food security.
Wrightstone’s book serves to reinforce beliefs already held by most practical people: Climate does change -- that’s indisputable -- but, rather than spending trillions to “fix” it, practical people would first examine observable evidence and, if persuaded, they would adapt -- just as prehistoric Homo sapiens did entering and exiting the last ice age. 
One suspects that, for the left, climate alarmism is just agitprop, another temporary pretense to achieve other policy goals.  Progressives’ solutions to an alleged environmental "crisis" are to raise taxes, grow government, hamstring capitalism, and relinquish national sovereignty.
Not coincidentally, those are the same policies the left always pursues, "urgent, time-critical" global environmental "catastrophes" aside.
Presented in a format that allows readers to decide, Wrightstone’s book is well worth the time to read.  Most importantly, perhaps, it will, in understandable, usable terms, provide informed skeptics the information they need to resist the progressive alarmists who preach to us all.