We have been living and investing in a low-inflation environment with falling interest rates for more than 20 years. Currently, all the evidence indicates we are headed for higher inflation and higher interest rates soon.
On a sweltering September 1, James Lee entered the Silver Spring, MD headquarters of Discovery Communications with a firearm and explosives and took hostages. Unable to negotiate, police eventually shot and killed him. As his manifesto reads, Lee was angry at the human race for abusing planet Earth and its creatures, and had repeatedly protested that Discovery Channel did not take issues such as global warming and habitat destruction seriously. Lee wrote that former Vice President Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” heavily influenced his thinking.
In past summers, we have had Mr. Gore to remind us that we only have a decade or so to visit the seashore until it is literally in our backyard, but he’s in a hotspot of his own due to sexual harassment charges of which he has been cleared, but still chooses to lie low. Two decades have passed with man-made global warming and its attendant catastrophism being virtual gospel, and now Lord Gore’s disciples’ misguided faith is powerful enough to spawn what was essentially an environmental suicide bomber.
The fallout from 2009’s Climategate certainly put a chill on global warming, but did it stop the issue cold? Will Lee be celebrated by the left for resurrecting climate change?
Climategate involved 1,073 messages written by 166 scientists involved with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that were purposely leaked to a public access Web site. Some person or persons—perhaps scientific colleagues, graduate students, office workers, etc.-thought the public should know that arrogant scientists were preventing open discourse on global climate systems and ignoring data at will. The emails show top scientists conspiring to control the message that the public receives—that man-made global warming is real, deadly, inevitable and the fault of Western societies.
Their arrogance was so egregious that the Independent Climate Change Emails Review panel, chaired by Sir Muir Russell, was formed to publicly review the careers of those involved. The primary alleged conspirators were Dr. Philip Jones (Director, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia) and Dr. Neil Mann (Director, Earth Systems Science Center, Pennsylvania State University).
After six months, the Russell panel cleared Drs. Jones and Mann and colleagues of scientific misconduct charges. Internal reviews at Penn State and East Anglia agreed and allowed Drs. Jones and Mann to return to work. However, Dr. Jones moved to another position at East Anglia: in interviews with the British press, he said he received death threats, considered suicide, lost a stone in weight and started taking beta-blockers and sleeping pills. Although unsettling, it’s correct that what was presented in the emails doesn’t constitute scientific misconduct. Selective use of data and rejecting or harshly criticizing the research of others with whom you don’t agree or dislike personally is not uncommon. There was no evidence that data were wholly ignored, falsified or invented.
However Drs. Jones, Mann and others were not cleared of ethical and public relations misconduct by Russell’s panel. The peer review identified patterns of unhelpfulness, open disdain toward opposing viewpoints, extensive delays or outright evasions in response to reasonable requests, and disrespect for the statutory requirements and reputations of the universities involved. They concluded that the blogosphere demands an unprecedented openness and access to data: "like it or not, this indicates a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century." A 2010 InterAcademy Council review of the IPCC itself came to the same conclusion, noting that the 2007 IPCC report (which won the Nobel Prize) ignored opposing viewpoints and sometimes used only anecdotal evidence to support conclusions.
Most importantly, the Russell review identified the root problem: scientists had become too political. They pandered to politicians, giving all answers as “yes” or “no” and not facing up to the uncertainty that is science. For 20 years, certain climate scientists have had the ability to influence global politics and economic development based almost wholly on theoretical predictions. Outside wartime, such power had never before been accorded to scientists, and they were not going to let dissenters take it away.
Unfortunately, James Lee has just shown the world what politicalglobal warming means. Political global warming is based on environmental fear-mongering—it’s the latest incarnation of Malthus. It has an agenda where overpopulation is the ultimate source of excess carbon dioxide, with an evil, Stalinist dark side whereupon the leftist elite gets to decide who lives and dies. This has nothing to do with respectable climate science and in fact tarnishes it.
To summarize respectable current science: (1) the Earth’s global average temperature increased 0.6º C from 1956 to 2006; (2) atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased 36 percent since 1850; (3) humans are responsible, and even if we stopped allemissions now, warming will continue for 200+ years. There’s no problem with (1) and (2), since they’re derived from impartial satellite or ground-based measurements--good data are inarguable and will now be more accessible than ever. But (3) is an interpretation whichassumes that today’s computer models accurately predict long-term planetary climate, and input conditions remain static, which is totally unrealistic and every scientist involved knows it!
Here are some examples on global warming issues where there is a lot of exaggerated speculation but little scientific understanding:
Clouds reflect most of the sunlight that hits them and cool the Earth’s surface during daylight hours, but may warm it at night. The all-time low of summer Arctic sea ice coverage observed in 2007 was due to a 16 percent reduction in cloud cover. The roles various types of clouds play in the global climate are highly complex, and are the largest source of uncertainty in climate prediction models.
Many glaciers surge, meaning they have a 3-5 year active phase followed by 10-100 years of relative quiescence, and others are covered with rock debris. The cause of surges is unknown. No reliable predictions about past or future climates can be made with surging or debris-covered glaciers, yet the media shows you a surging glacier and reports that it’s moving rapidly because the Earth is warming so fast.
“Dirty” clouds filled with aerosol particles from dust, forest fires, volcanic eruptions or coal, wood or diesel fuel combustion are less likely to produce rain than “clean” clouds. Absent an active volcano or a Saharan dust storm, where are almost all of these dirty clouds on any given day? That would be over communist eastern China!
Please look into these areas and more, and arm yourself with understanding, not propane bombs and a death wish for humanity. We need honest scientific work in these fields juxtaposed with the inventiveness of the capitalist free market to guide us. Mr. Gore and Lee preach a doomsday gospel which even Drs. Mann and Jones don’t really believe!
-Dr. C. Leigh Broadhurst is a research geochemist and geobotanist.
