Global Warming

GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE CHANGE, CAP & TRADE

By Professor Thomas Hayes-Morrison ©2009

From Gainesville Tea Party December 5th Meeting

Global Warming

The question underlying all the debate in this area is “what is mankind’s role in Climate Change” (labeled “anthropogenic” change)? The question is not whether the climate is changing because climate change has always been, is, and will continue to be with us. There is a substantial amount of information about the earth’s climatic history which shows swings in temperatures, large changes in glaciers, and areas of temperate weather.

As a note, the use of the term “Global Warming” was changed to “Climate Change” by its proponents who did not want to lose an issue when scientists, as well as regular people, started noticing that the earth may not be warming.  The following are some sound bites:

1. The science is settled! – Not true. In fact, there is substantial disagreement in the scientific community as to where the climate is headed and what the potential outcomes are of the many variations possible, both short term and long term, in the earth’s climate. An illustration of the substantial disagreement in conclusions is the 2008 petition signed by 31,000 scientists stating that there is no convincing evidence that mankind’s activity has, is, or will, cause a catastrophic disruption of the earth’s climate. Claims by climate change/global warming adherents that the science is settled seem to resemble most closely the criticism of Copernicus’ theory that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun in the 14^th century. Such criticism and ridicule was generated by the church/ scientist adherents of the then settled theory (science) that the sun revolved about the earth.
2. The data is reliable and the trends in the data are clear – Not true.  Climategate is the term being applied to the information that has recently become available that the leading climatic institute in the UK, whose work has served as the basis for the U.N. and U.S. EPA position on climate change, and several of the leading scientists, to include major names in American science, who are proponents of climate change, committed major fraud by making the data fit their conclusions. It involved a coordinated effort to change the actual data, to bully peer review journals so they would not publish dissenting views, and perhaps worst of all, to destroy the original data so their work cannot be checked. Their motive would seem to be the tens of millions of dollars in grant money. No climate problem, no climate grants money.
3. The earth is warming at a rapid rate – Not true. In fact, the last ten years’ records indicate we may be in a cooling trend despite the effort to skew the data described in #2. This has been a major embarrassment to climate change proponents. See #2. The reality is that the earth’s climate runs in short, medium and long term cycles. Climate change must be understood within the context of cyclical change.

Climate Change

1. Mankind has the ability to change significantly the earth’s climate – Not true. Scientists have been unable to prove a correlation between man’s activity, most often using so-called green house gases as a surrogate for mankind’s actions, and any change in the climate. See #2. It is not clear that even if man could contribute to climate change, that such contribution could cause any significant variation from the earth’s normal cyclical changes. As a note, much of the climate change rhetoric is based on computer models that attempt to forecast 5, 10, 20, 50, and a 100 years in the future. The models seem stunningly ineffective. They are not even able to process historical data and generate “forecasts” that describe with any accuracy what actually happened. It is useful to view this within the context that we are able to forecast the weather for the next 24 hours accurately only 75% of the time.

Cap & Trade

1. Cap and Trade – What is it? It is a plan to drive up the cost of fossil based fuel generated energy in order to reduce green house gases so that global warming will be reduced. It is intended to encourage the use of “green” energy sources. See above for comments on global warming. The “trade “ refers to a plan created by Ken Lay of Enron fame to trade what are called carbon credits. It will literally enrich Al Gore further and Goldman, Sachs, among others, but will most likely not do anything other than raise costs dramatically for the rest of us. The cost of “cap and trade” is beyond reasonable comprehension. Pres. Obama has stated that “my plan will cause energy costs to skyrocket”. The consensus seems to be that utility costs for consumers will rapidly double and gasoline prices will also escalate dramatically.

On a macro level, 2.5 million jobs will be lost from base line estimates over the next 20 years and U.S. GDP will be $6 trillion below where it other wise would have been. Product prices will increase exponentially because of the increased energy costs and taxes related to supporting inefficient and ineffective energy programs. It will lead to a substantially diminished quality of life for Americans. Several European nations have instituted limited cap and trade programs with uniformly disastrous short term effects upon employment and GDP. China and India have both stated categorically they will not make hard commitments to reduce substantially the green house gases caused by their rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels. Should the U.S make such a hard commitment it will cease to be economically competitive.

You may contact Tom at tom@gainesvilleteaparty.org.