What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
|
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
A Lot of Hot Air
The United Nations, Sierra Club, and Greenpeace are warning us that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from our automobiles and factories are causing global warming and if we do not change catastrophes will happen. It will result in the melting of polar ice caps, destruction of the world’s shorelines, intensification of storms and heat waves, and destruction of animal habitat. The alarmists tell us that we must take draconian measures by cutting back on our use of energy even though this may cost our economy billions of dollars each year, severely lower our standard of living, eliminate millions of jobs, require expenditures of an average of $1,000 to $4,000 per family in increased energy costs, raise the price of food, reduce our gross domestic product by $200 billion annually. Every single product produced with energy will rise in price. The Kyoto Treaty, which the United States refused to sign and was rejected 95-0 in the Senate, would oblige us to make the drastic changes described above and, if that did not savage our economy sufficiently, we would also have to make billions of dollars of contributions to poor countries. China, India, Brazil, and Mexico plus more than 100 other countries would be exempt.
There are two questions that need answering: (1) Is the global warming scare based on sound science? and, (2) if it is, is the proposed treaty the appropriate way to deal with it?
First, look at the science. The kindest thing that can be said for global warming theory is that scientists are not in agreement. Proponents of global warming cite as evidence the hockey stick chart that some weather models published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann produce. The model purports to show that the world was cool from about 1000 AD until about 100 years ago when, coincident with the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, it began to heat up. The chart at that point looks like a hockey stick and it has become the poster for the global warming movement. There is, however, a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program generating the chart. It emphasizes any data that produce the hockey stick chart and suppresses data that do not. Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick fed random data to the computer model and out came the famous hockey stick. The computer models are so wildly inaccurate that, according to climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels, they perform “worse than a table of random numbers when applied to U.S. temperatures.”
The ice in the polar regions of the earth is melting say the global warming prophets. Wrong. In January 2002 the journal Science published measurements of West Antarctic ice sheet. Far from melting it is growing thicker. Temperature measurements of the last 30 years show a cooling, not a warming trend. The scientific data demonstrate that there has been no effect on the ice in Greenland and Iceland which has actually been accumulating, not melting. Arctic sea ice has undergone significant changes in the last 1,000 years even before “greenhouse enhancement.” Current conditions appear to be well within historical variability. Patrick J. Michaels declares that the Arctic has been warmer than now 4,000 to 7,000 years ago and this could not have resulted from greenhouse emissions because it occurred long before the Industrial Revolution. The prophets of doom are very selective in their use of data. They say that temperatures have warmed in the last forty years and imply that the trend will continue. Yet data are available for the 1930s and 1940s when temperatures were comparable to those today and perhaps higher. Why not start their measurements there? Is it because then they could not report any net warming over the last 65 years?
How much warming is due to human activity? No one knows because there is no real evidence that it does. Only 2.7% of CO2 emissions are due to human activity; the rest comes from nature. Even if world temperatures rose 1° C there would be no cause for alarm. Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, has guessed that in the next century seas might rise 50 centimeters (19.5 inches). In the last century they rose 25 centimeters (9.75 inches) without calamities. If global warming were to occur says MIT’s Richard Lindzen, perhaps the world’s most respected atmospheric physicist, it would be accompanied by reduced rather than increased severe weather patterns.
Global warming alarmists pretend that all scientists except for a few corrupt heretics are in agreement with them. Not true. More than 4,000 scientists from 106 countries, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, signed the Heidelberg Appeal (1992), calling for a rational scientific approach to environmental problems. Many senior scientists have also supported The Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming (1992), The Leipzig Declaration (1997) and finally the Oregon Petition (1998) which received the signatures of over 19,000 scientists who said they see “no convincing evidence that humans are disrupting the earth’s climate.” A 1997 Gallup Poll of prominent North American climatologists showed that 83% of them disagreed with the man-made global warming theory.
Even if all assumptions of the ecological alarmists were correct the Kyoto Treaty would do nothing about global warming. The UN in a 1996 report stated that global warming was a fact. They left out of the report written by the scientists who did the analysis on which the report was based two critical paragraphs:
1. [N]one of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.
2. [N]o study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to…man-made causes.
The Kyoto Treaty would have miniscule influence on global warming. It might lower projected temperatures by 0.2° C by 2050, but would destroy national economies. Countries not covered by the treaty cause 70% of the human generated CO2 emissions. Multinational companies would move their factories and jobs from covered areas to the South American jungles and there would be just as much CO2 emissions as before but from a different part of the globe. Kyoto would require a monstrous bureaucracy to ration energy usage. Who would enforce it against cheaters? Increased wealth requires increased energy, but bureaucrats would allocate energy on a UN timetable and make rules about the number of hours factories could run.
If the science is non-existent or unsound and the implementation of Kyoto would have imperceptible effect on world climate, why is it being pushed so forcefully? Two words: profits and power. The US has already spent $15 billion on research in this area. Researchers do not get grants for telling us that there is nothing to worry about. Allocation of energy would become a wealth distribution system so beloved to socialists. This seems to be confirmed by a curious provision in the treaty with respect to “harmonizing of patent laws.” How does robbing a nation of its patent protection contribute to environmental protection? All this would lead to a world government in charge of all the economies of the world. President Jacques Chirac said that the first component of world governance is the Kyoto Treaty.
Count me among the corrupt heretics who do not believe that global warming is caused by human activity. Rather than commit economic hara-kiri with the Kyoto formulae it would be better to spend money on clean water for a billion people who do not have it, on sanitation, on alleviation of AIDS, malaria, and poverty. Most of the global warming comes from the hot air emitted by global warming proponents.
(Published February, 2005)
