Heating The Debate

What debate? Well, the transformation from human-derived global warming, to a more generalized and likely reality of climate change. The Earth's climate has a habit of doing that. It does alter itself from time to time. This Globe experienced Great Ice Ages and Little Ice Ages, the little ones remarked in written, witnessed human history. There was a time when Henry VIII skated on the Thames. It's doubtful that anyone might like to try that at the present time.

The Frozen Thames, 1677

Nature is not static, it is forever changing, alterations take place and we move along with them, for there is rarely anything that human beings can do to alter what nature has designed on that scale. And before that Little Ice Age there occurred the Medieval Warm Period that lasted about four centuries. It was, in fact, warmer back then than it has been now, in what the current crop of alarmed environmentalists proclaim is the disaster of man-made global warming.

Funny thing, that; the Medieval Warm Period was a natural event that occurred before the man-made interventions of industrialization, before there were millions of vehicles crowding roads internationally, and air machines plied the skies above, before coal-fired furnaces and the guilt placed upon us by our admittedly energy-wasteful lifestyles. And if you believe in the above, and beg to differ from the conclusions reached by those who declare the science is fixed, then you're a denier.

It's an awful thing to be a denier. But people who have stated a preference for a belief in the very natural and sometimes-alarming fact that Climate Change appears to be occurring, and who also may admit to believing that human activity has some part to play in changing weather patterns, but to a minimal degree, then take heart, because there are hordes of climate scientists who believe just as you do.

The consensus is not that the conclusions reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are universally accepted as immutably correct. Despite Al Gore's equivocating statements such as "...the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work..." And "It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris covered glaciers in the Himalayas..."

And further: "...and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate", does not say much for scientific rigour, in scrupulously determining the accuracy of vital data proclaiming disaster is imminent, before publishing that data as veritable proof. Grasping at every conceivable unproven symptom that will prove their theory does not represent good science.

"In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law..." and etcetera, feeble and self-serving as it is, does not make for a feeling of confidence.

Any claims of impending international disaster brought upon us by our own stupidity and wastefulness rings hollow coming from a man whose own credentials as a committed environmentalist bringing truth and scientific probity to our attention has been irremediably tarnished by his own wasteful use of energy, and the cap-and-trade, and film and publication profits that have accrued to him. He is manifestly self-interested, not altruistic.

That said, and taking into account all the revelations that have come hard on one another about the sources of the irrefutable data, the lack of scientific integrity, the in-fighting, the absurdity of claims handily refuted, the reliance on a data-base carefully selected to produce the required result; all of it has served to raise real doubts in the minds of those who had once supported the IPPC findings.

Continued bleatings of outrage at the lack of trust in those same conclusions, the continued badinage of the principals, the revelations that the IPCC did not operate to high scientific standards, have served to prick the balloon of settled science. The less heard from the likes of Al Gore, under these circumstances, the better.