Rant of the Week

A Global Warming Skeptic not in the Pocket of Exxon.... or is he?

For the past few years, I have been playing a little game with myself on the issue of global warming.  I would read whatever I could about it, from any source at all, and then try to find out if the writer was funded, in any way, directly or indirectly, by the oil industry. 

This was an easy task, for the most part.  Virtually every scientist who denied global warming was employed by Exxon, Mobil, or another oil or coal company, or a foundation or Institute funded by them.

Conservatives will tell you that the people who believe in global warming, like Al Gore, are funded by the "climate-change industry".  I leave it to you decide if a voluntary group of concerned citizens is more "self-interested" and more likely to lie about the subject than Exxon and Mobil and the coal companies.  It's a clever approach, though, I give you that.  A little earlier in history, they might have tried to convince you that Mother Theresa was running an "industry" of vagrant nuns looking for a handout and that poverty in India doesn't really exist.  It's all just a scam to provide for Mother Theresa's lavish memorials.

For the past year or so, I thought the game was over.  Seemed to me that a tight consensus had grown up in the field, that global warming was real, that it was caused by humans, and that it was going to cause some severe environmental problems.  Not so.  Or so.  I don't know.  But one has to be amazed at the capacity for humans of all political and social stripes to delude themselves into believing that any particular piece of knowledge is a "slam-dunk". 

In an article in Discover Magazine, a scientist not employed by the oil industry, named John Christy, of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asserts that all the scientists who say the globe is warming are wrong.  I wish I could give you a number of how many exactly are wrong, and how many are for and how many are against, and how many don't know but wish everyone else would make up their minds.... 

Wouldn't it be nice if facts could be decided by a majority.

Anyway, they are wrong and he is right, because he looked at temperatures in a different way, and got data from different sources, and his data shows that, in fact, there is a bit of cooling going on-- not warming.  And the Arctic is actually freezing, so forget all those images you saw on TV and in National Geographic. It's all the result of sun spots, and a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark has proven it.

Okay-- that last part is my deductive conclusion based on Mr. Christy's reasoning.  If we are not warming, I'm not sure why the ice is melting.  Maybe it isn't.  Maybe it just a fluke, an inversion of some kind.  Who knows? 

We have always known that hot summers are not the result, directly, of global warming.  Weather is not cut and dried and linear.  We know there will be oddities and anomalies, so Christy should stop pretending that people noticed the hot weather and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the entire globe was heating up.

Christy thinks that Africa could be saved from dire poverty if only every hut had an electric light bulb and microwave.  And there was a Walmart in the neighborhood.  Okay-- I'm making up the Walmart part.  But surely Christy is making up the microwave part.  He believes America is a grand force for good in the world-- we export "freedom", you see.

 Not sure why the people in Darfur haven't lined up to buy it yet.

 

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