BCT Editorial – 5/18/08

This page was last updated on May 18, 2008.

Warming up; Editorial; Beaver County Times; May 18, 2008.

Wow, two global warming editorials within nine days! Could global warming editorials come to push aside some of those smoking ban editorials? <g>

For more detailed comments, please read “Manmade Global Warming.”

Apparently the Times editorial board still hasn’t received the memo telling them that global warming should now be referred to as “climate change.”

As the May 9^th editorial, this one draws no distinction between so-called manmade global warming – uh, climate change – and natural global warming.

The editorial says, “The Associated Press reported the department had concluded what biologists have been saying for years — the bear is on the way to extinction because of the rapid disappearance of the Arctic sea ice upon which it depends.” “[O]n the way to extinction?” That’s BS! While declining in some areas and increasing in others, the overall polar bear population has been growing since at least the 1980s.

As I noted previously, current data indicates there’s been no warming for the last eight to 10 years. To cover their behinds while still sounding the alarm, the manmade global warming believers recently issued a warning that we may not experience warming for another 10 –15 years because of a cyclical change in ocean currents that tend to reduce the atmospheric temperature.

The fact we’re hear to argue this topic speaks to the credibility of doomsayers. If doomsayers of the 1970s had been correct, we’d be having this discussion from the middle of an ice age. You may recall these folks claimed manmade particulate pollution was reflecting too much of the Sun’s energy back into space, thus reducing the Earth’s temperature. In the late 1960s, we were told we’d all starve to death within the next couple of decades due to overpopulation and an inability to produce enough food for everyone. In the mid- to late-1980s, we were told the oceans would be dead within 10 years. Remember when we were told DDT was the bane of mankind, only to have millions of people die from malaria that could have been prevented by spraying DDT to kill the malaria-carrying mosquitoes? Last year, after more than 40 years of DDT hysteria, the World Health Organization reversed its position. What new data changed the WHO’s mind? None. All of the DDT science has been well documented since the 1960s. How many million people died unnecessarily because of DDT consensus?

In science, the burden of proof is on the person making a hypothesis. Today’s manmade global warming believers have turned that time-proven approach on its head. Instead of proving their hypothesis, their position is skeptics must prove the manmade global warming hypothesis is wrong.

Finally, if the science is so cut and dried, as the Times would have us believe, why won’t the manmade global warming believers debate the issue? If you believe their claims, they should be able to kick the butts of skeptics in a scientific debate. Instead, these folks unilaterally claim the issue is decided – by them – and label anyone who disagrees as “an alliance of crackpots, gadflies, media exploiters, political opportunists and conspiracy theorists, anti-global warming deniers.” That’s not the action of people confident in their position. To date, the manmade global warming evangelist-in-chief, Al Gore, has refused to debate anyone on this topic. Why?