This video from CBCNewsWorld called “Global Warming Doomsday Called Off” held my attention for its entire 44 minutes. It’s posted there on utube in its entirety, minus only commercials. If you want to know what all those crazy disbelieving skeptics are using for data–those crackpots who don’t share a belief in the near-universal “let’s blame mankind for global warming” faith–then watch the video.
It turns out that 1877, about the time when accurate scientific weather observations were first being made, was the coldest year in the last few thousand years. So of course things have gotten warmer since then!
Of special interest was the scientist (Nils-Axel Morner) in the Maldives, who showed physical evidence that the sea level there has actually dropped about 30 cm (roughly 1 foot) since about 1970-1975. That’s the place where the most recent UN report says there will be massive flooding because the sea level is rising. Oh, wait….
Then there was another scientist (Dr. John Christy) who has actually measured the temperature of the mass of air near the earth using satellites for the last 30 years — which showed only very slight warming over that period. And that was confirmed with the actual data gathered during that same period from weather balloons around the globe.
Dr. Christy is taking a lot of heat (pun intended) about his reports, which were greeted with hostility and skepticism, because they don’t match what is currently politically correct; i.e., they don’t show that there is much of any global warming over the last 30 years.
Surface temperatures (especially those in cities) have gone up, sure. But the temperature of the mass of the air itself (the troposphere) has not. It sort of throws a monkeywrench into the whole theory behind global warming, that of greenhouse gasses storing up heat somewhere and then heating up the surface. That’s not what the data shows.
But hey, you believe what you want.
I think all the argument over whether global warming is occurring or not obscures the real problem, which is that we are polluting our planet. We don’t have another one to go to, so shouldn’t we make a bigger effort to keep it clean and livable?
Whether the by-products of our industry are melting the ice-caps or not is a sort of irrelevant. When you can’t eat fish for fear of getting Mercury poisoning, then something is severely wrong and we need to take action. I support the Earth Organization and other environmental groups who are doing something about it.