Congressman Morgan Griffith of Virginia Nails Climate Scientists

Science questions man-made global warming

Congressman Morgan Griffith of Virginia Nails Climate Scientists

by Lewis Loflin

At recent hearings in the House over legislation that will prevent the EPA from regulating CO² freshman Republican Morgan Griffith asked very specific questions to so-called climate scientists the Democrats brought in to bolster their case. The results were they evaded his questions. Evasions and misinformation from climate apocalypse prophets is so common we all should be asking why. Here I will take a closer look at what Congressman Griffith dealt with and why this evasion is all too common.

Sustainable development seems to be the lynchpin of the environmental community and their dream of "transition" to a new earth-centered culture. Why do I keep asking environmentalists just what "sustainable development" is and keep getting evasions to my questions? It seems to be about the "three E's" according to its critics. What the "three E's" are really about:

Equity completes the conversion of our system of justice from equal justice to "social" justice."
Economy means the conversion of the American system of free enterprise into the emerged global economic system of "public/private partnership."
Environment is the political movement that values human beings as equal to or below the importance of nature's elements including: animals, plants and rocks.

They won't discuss the above in public because no thinking person would accept this agenda. But all throw around variations of this vague definition from the Brundtland Report of 1983, in which sustainable development is defined as:

"development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

This is simply hysteria and is predicated on the belief we are running out of everything and all civilization will collapse any day. That is simply not true. If we run out of say oil we will go to something else. If we run out of copper, we go to something else. In fact in the 1970s environmentalists claimed we would deplete something like 17 various metals and materials by 2000. It simply never happened as changes in technology reduced the use of these materials and improved mining methods along with recycling increased the supply.

The only problem for environmentalists is that "any day" scenario has failed for the last 50 years and the Greenies are growing impatient. Like Christian fundamentalists their version of the Four Horseman just continues to fail to appear, but the hysteria (excuse me 'passion') never seems to end and only changes form. As Mr. Griffith pointed out, environmentalists were crying new ice age in the 1970s.

They claimed all kinds of killer hurricanes are coming in 2005 when Katrina wrecked New Orleans only to see a record low number of hurricanes and zero that made landfall in the US in 2010. What do they do? Run back and revise their computer models now claiming the lack of hurricanes all the sudden is caused by global warming and they are coming back even worse sometime in the future. Give me a break.

They claim global warming is here only to see record cold in many parts of the world over the last three years. This included killing zoo animals in Northern Mexico and the loss of 16% of their corn crop and massive freeze damage to winter veggies in Mexico, Florida, and Texas all at once. (Winter/spring 2010-11.) This was the worse freeze in Mexico in over 60 years dropping to a low of 9 degrees F. That's in Mexico!

Now because "global warming" has become so politically discredited, they now resort to calling it "climate change." It's an absolute fact we have climate change, have had it for 4.5 billion years, and have written records on it going back centuries. Climate change will continue because the climate has never been static to begin with and is a normal facet of the environment that drives evolution. It's in the historical record and there's plenty research that debunks modern climate change dogma.

First we have to consider the research of Dr. Art Dyke from Natural Resources Canada. He studies the fossils and remains of bowhead whales (they are not extinct) and has reconstructed climate conditions in the Arctic using whale fossils. While ice spread and retreat leaves no records, whales do. To quote parts of the study:

The most common cause of death for the bowheads studied by Art and his colleagues was entrapment in the ice as it expanded in autumn. Because the whales followed the ice edge so closely, the location of their fossils indicates the extent to which the ice had previously retreated. By using radiocarbon dating, Art can determine the age of the fossils. Since fossils are only found where the ice edge once existed, their age tells Art how far the ice extended at a certain point in history....During an open period, whales from both oceans mixed freely and left their fossils throughout the length of the Passage.

...Art and his colleagues have found a significant number of bowhead fossils scattered throughout the length of the Northwest Passage dating from approximately 10,000 years ago. This abundance of fossils coincides with the warmest part of the Holocene (modern) era. At that time, it was approximately three degrees warmer than average temperatures in the mid-twentieth century...

In other words the Northwest passage has been open several times over the last 10,000 yeas and was open last time 3000 years ago. I don't think we were using fossil fuels in ancient Egypt or Sumer. Read the entire report at :
http://www.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/com/elements/issues/12/fossil-eng.php

A study by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics including work by included work by David R. Legates, director of the University of Delaware's Center for Climatic Research shows warming much greater than present has occurred in the recent historical past. Modern climate alarmists claim it's warmer than the Little Ice Age that ended around 1850 and we should be alarmed, well, it should be warmer.

The so-called "Hockey Stick" of Michael Mann of the University of Virginia claims "that global air temperatures remained fairly constant from 1000-1900 A.D., then increased dramatically in the 20th century." This is simply false. Dr. Legates says,

"Although [Mann's work] is now widely used as proof of anthropogenic global warming, we've become concerned that such an analysis is in direct contradiction to most of the research and written histories available. Our paper shows this contradiction and argues that the results of Mann...are out of step with the preponderance of the evidence."

It was the research of this same Michael Mann that Virginia Attorney Ken Cuccinelli has sought copies of, which he refuses to disclose to the public. Setting aside the fact tax payers paid for his work, it's a violation of the scientific method not to present the data so others can verify his claims. On August 30, 2010 Judge Paul Peatross Jr. threw the case out on a technicality claiming there was no proof of an intention to defraud the taxpayers. To quote,

"The nature of the conduct is not stated so that any reasonable person could glean what Dr. Mann did to violate the statute ... The Court ... understands the controversy regarding Dr. Mann's work on the issue of global warming. However, it is not clear what he did that was misleading, false or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia."

This has been a pattern in so-called global warming research is the refusal to release data and methodology while expecting the public to buy their agenda on blind faith. What else does the University of Delaware have to say? To quote,

...(they) also confirmed that the Medieval Warm Period of 800 to 1300 A.D. and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900 A.D. were worldwide phenomena not limited to the European and North American continents...while 20th-century temperatures are much higher than in the Little Ice Age period, many parts of the world show the medieval warmth to be greater than that of the 20th century...

The full article can be read at http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2003/legates041003.html.

Here is a partial extract from the hearings:

WASHINGTON - Science and politics rarely play nicely together, and a House hearing Tuesday on a bill to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions proved no exception. Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on energy and power demanded the hearing in the hope of slowing the inexorable progress of the bill, known as the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011...is expected to approve the bill later this week.

The measure would overturn the E.P.A.'s finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pose a threat to public health and the environment and would bar the agency from writing any regulations to control them.

...committee Democrats rounded up five eminent academic climatologists who defended the scientific consensus that the planet is warming and that human activities like the burning of fossil fuels are largely responsible...The scientists themselves, when given the rare opportunity to speak, tried to steer clear of policy matters...

Representative Morgan Griffith of Virginia, a freshman Republican and an avowed skeptic on climate change, noted that ancient temperature records indicate periods of warming during the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations and again during the rise of the Vikings, and wanted the scientists to explain just how warm it got during those eras.

Mr. Griffith also wanted to know why the ice caps on Mars were melting and why he had been taught 40 years ago in middle school that Earth was entering a cooling period. "What is the optimum temperature for man?" he asked. "Have we looked at that? These are questions that, believe it or not, I lay awake at night trying to figure out."

The scientists promised to provide written answers.

In other words they didn't answer the question then and never will. These kinds of evasions will simply continue to discredit their claims and they are to blame right or wrong. When they pretend that even asking a question is treated as heresy, that amounts to a religion based on faith, not verifiable scientific proof. Ref. At House E.P.A. Hearing, Both Sides Claim Science, March 8, 2011 New York Times.

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