Weather Banter - View Single Post - Global Warming: How History Is Being Manipulated to Undermine Calls for Action

Lloyd Parker

In article ,
(Lloyd Parker) wrote:
In article .com,
wrote:
Weather From HELL!!! CO2 Storms!!! wrote:
http://www.hnn.us/articles/30148.html

10-16-06
Global Warming: How History Is Being Manipulated to Undermine Calls for
Action By Spencer Weart

Mr. Weart is Director of the Center for History of Physics at the American
Institute of Physics.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate

Informed people now understand that global warming is perhaps the most
severe challenge facing the well-being of human society in the coming
century. ...

I appreciate the way the way he says "perhaps" here. That sure covers a
wide range of possible opinion about the likelihood. But this first
sentence is the last place in Weart's essay/advertisement that such
appropriate restraint appears

... Only a dwindling minority of Americans now denies this ...

LOL - I'd love to see how he counted the # of people who deny the
"perhaps" statement, if that's what he really means.

... (an even
smaller fraction believe that we are regularly visited by space aliens)...

Well, the observational record about space aliens visits is perhaps
stronger than the observational record's role in answering the question
of whether or not global warming will be the most severe challenge
facing the well-being of human society in the coming century.

But those who deny it include powerful people, whose interests or ideology
are threatened by government regulation of the fossil fuels ...

LOL - giving the keys to our economy to central planners is not
something to taken lightly by any informed person. Those who are
interested in economic well-being and the blessings of liberty, be they
weak or powerful, do indeed have interests that are threatened by the
wrenching changes proposed in the CO2-climate policy arena.

... that are the
main source of the danger we face.

What happened to perhaps? Now it's simply "the danger we face"?

History is often used in these arguments. Its role can be direct, as when
global-warming denialists assert that not long ago scientists were
"spectacularly wrong" in claiming that not warming but a new Ice Age
threatened us. So writes, for example, the columnist George Will, quoting
from news magazines of the early 1970s. However, when people checked the
history they found that Will, following a practice common among
denialists, "cherry-picked" a few items that served his purpose from a
much larger body of evidence.1 Here's the real history. In the 1970s
scientists discovered that climate can be catastrophically variable; they
didn't agree on what would come next; but they all agreed that they knew
too little at the time to make a confident prediction. ...

Weart may have some reason to ignore contrary evidence, and maybe it's
a better reason than the real(biased)climate.org advocates he cites. By
1960, the notion of creating a thermostat -- in the form of a Bering
Straight dam -- was mainstream enough for John Kennedy, the week before
he was elected President of the USA, to answer question from Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists regarding the dam idea. Extra urgency was
attached to the military implications at the time. For example, the
Russian government considered diverting Arctic water down along the
Canadian and US west coast. It was his research on arms control and
weather modification that Lowell Ponte credited with prompting his
interest in global cooling, which resulted in his 1976 book titled "THE
COOLING: Has the next ice age already begun? Can we survive it?" His
bibliography includes many journal articles and scholarly books,
monographs and reports, including work by many authors whose names are
easy to recognize as active in the current debates, too.

Is that Lowell Ponte, right-wing radio talk show host?

Please read the following quote from p. 237 of Ponte's book, and let me
know if it sounds any different than the consensus view portrayed by
the calamitologists today:

Please read the following:

http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/ponte.html