I love to read
Victor Hanson, as he has insightful observations, and he is cogent and precise in his writings and books. He writes a column, which you can follow (victorhanson.com) and enjoy his intellect, wit, insights, and humor.
In “The Myth of Progress” he poses several observations, parts of which are incorporated below.
I always marvel at those that are firm in their belief of global warming, climate change or whatever it is called this week or next month, while they don’t understand or know anything about scientific methods or measurements, facts don’t change their minds. There are some scientific absolute truths, like the laws of atomic weight, but much else is up for debate and exploration.
We keep hearing about global climate change is “settled science.” If this were true, the majority of arguments for settled science was used against Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin, we might now believe that the earth was created 5,000 years ago, gravity did not exist, and the planets revolved around the earth.
With blowhard Al Gore and his abomination of a movie “Inconvenient Truth,” showing the hockey stick chart indicating quickly escalating warming for North America, this has been debunked in the last 17 years with very little or negligible heating of the earth and the predicted shrinkage or elimination of polar ice caps has not occurred since their initial 1979 mapping.
In fact, the ice cap has grown in Antarctica quite a bit. The polar bear population was predicted to quickly decline in the Arctic. Researchers aren’t sure if they have increased due to insufficient data, but they do know they haven’t decreased! Anything even close to being seen as change in climate (too warm, too cold, more storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.) is suspected under the heading of “climate change” instead of normal weather fluctuations. If you look at the historical climate of the earth, it has been much warmer and much colder at different periods of time with more CO2 than any extremes experienced now as natural occurrences, without human influences. How did that happen?
Are there anomalies within the climate in the different seasons? Of course – remember the winter of 1978-79 – the freeway was shut down and nothing moved for a few days. Was that global warming then? Nobody presumed it was – it was a “bad winter” and subsequent winters were normal or even warm.
While Al Gore and others in the climate change gospel choir continue to flap their lips and cry about climate warming, reasoned scientists see little has changed. There are many scientists and climatologists that don’t believe the “Global Warming” hype. But why all the hype about global warming/climate change? It is very easy to understand, follow the money – who profits most from the spin and lies? The sources are many – alternate power and solar power providers, contributions from believers to political mouthpieces, companies supporting the “green revolution” and any other peripheral business affected by the perceived change.
This is not to say we should not be responsible stewards of the earth’s resources and do all we can to eliminate waste and decreased pollution, we have a moral and public obligation to do so. But we still don’t know where this is going – some say warmer – some say we are at the beginning of a mini ice-age.
However, saying that global warming or global climate change is settled science is, at the least untruthful; at worst, a colossal lie. All with the government’s insistence you and others must give more of your monetary resources to combat, when we have no idea on how to combat a non-existent enemy. We always attack the symptoms, never the cause – and we have no idea what the cause is at this time, if any. Could it be cyclical in nature? Could it be natural, such as volcanic action above and below sea level?
Don’t suggest that to a big believer of global warming or global climate change. They are rabid zealots of the worst kind, and usually they glean all their information from Mr. Gore, their dope smoking science teacher from school, or left leaning publications with no scientific background. Don’t bother them with facts, as in their minds, the matter is settled. We must act! But just what enemy has to be confronted is a mystery to most, but we must allocate budgets and spend money! Any time you are approached by some bureaucrat and they say “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” hold onto your wallet, do a 180-degree turn, and run, don’t walk, the other way.
The rotting of the country from within continues…
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”
Scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. In locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks.
But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.” http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses