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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (22977)	3/14/2008 3:08:48 PM
From: DizzyG	Respond to of 224769

You do understand that we are talking about "Man-Made Global Warming", right? "I guarantee you that people in Australia don't think it is a scam." Australia's weather is irrelevant with respect to "Man-Made Global Warming". Stop trying to push off anecdotal evidence as a basis for conclusions on a global scale. If there was "Man-Made Global Warming" we'd all be experiencing a "a heat wave which beats all records". Nice try, Kenneth...but no banana for you. Diz-

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (22977)	3/14/2008 4:21:50 PM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 224769

Eight Reasons Why ‘Global Warming’ Is a Scam Written By: Joseph L. Bast Published In: Heartlander Publication Date: February 1, 2003 Publisher: The Heartland Institute -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When Al Gore lost his bid to become the country’s first “Environment President,” many of us thought the “global warming” scare would finally come to a well-deserved end. That hasn’t happened, despite eight good reasons this scam should finally be put to rest. It’s B-a-a-ck! Similar scares orchestrated by radical environmentalists in the past--such as Alar, global cooling, the “population bomb,” and electromagnetic fields--were eventually debunked by scientists and no longer appear in the speeches or platforms of public officials. The New York Times recently endorsed more widespread use of DDT to combat malaria, proving Rachel Carson’s anti-pesticide gospel is no longer sacrosanct even with the liberal elite. The scientific case against catastrophic global warming is at least as strong as the case for DDT, but the global warming scare hasn’t gone away. President Bush is waffling on the issue, rightly opposing the Kyoto Protocol and focusing on research and voluntary projects, but wrongly allowing his administration to support calls for creating “transferrable emission credits” for greenhouse gas reductions. Such credits would build political and economic support for a Kyoto-like cap on greenhouse gas emissions. At the state level, some 23 states have already adopted caps on greenhouse gas emissions or goals for replacing fossil fuels with alternative energy sources. These efforts are doomed to be costly failures, as a new Heartland Policy Study by Dr. Jay Lehr and James Taylor documents. Instead of concentrating on balancing state budgets, some legislators will be working to pass their own “mini-Kyotos.” Eight Reasons to End the Scam Concern over “global warming” is overblown and misdirected. What follows are eight reasons why we should pull the plug on this scam before it destroys billions of dollars of wealth and millions of jobs. 1. Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate. More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” (Go to www.oism.org for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism. 2. Our most reliable sources of temperature data show no global warming trend. Satellite readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to within 0.01ºC, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error. 3. Global climate computer models are too crude to predict future climate changes. All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers’ expectations, modelers resort to “flux adjustments” that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says “climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.” 4. The IPCC did not prove that human activities are causing global warming. Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC’s latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about predicting the future climate: “The Earth’s atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.” 5. A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization. Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD), which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland, were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the “climatic optimum,” was even warmer and marked “a time when mankind began to build its first civilizations,” observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study for Consumer Alert. “There is good reason to believe that a warmer climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today.” 6. Efforts to quickly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions would be costly and would not stop Earth’s climate from changing. Reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990’s levels by the year 2012--the target set by the Kyoto Protocol--would require higher energy taxes and regulations causing the nation to lose 2.4 million jobs and $300 billion in annual economic output. Average household income nationwide would fall by $2,700, and state tax revenues would decline by $93.1 billion due to less taxable earned income and sales, and lower property values. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocol by all participating nations would reduce global temperature in the year 2100 by a mere 0.14 degrees Celsius. 7. Efforts by state governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are even more expensive and threaten to bust state budgets. After raising their spending with reckless abandon during the 1990s, states now face a cumulative projected deficit of more than $90 billion. Incredibly, most states nevertheless persist in backing unnecessary and expensive greenhouse gas reduction programs. New Jersey, for example, collects $358 million a year in utility taxes to fund greenhouse gas reduction programs. Such programs will have no impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. All they do is destroy jobs and waste money. 8. The best strategy to pursue is “no regrets.” The alternative to demands for immediate action to “stop global warming” is not to do nothing. The best strategy is to invest in atmospheric research now and in reducing emissions sometime in the future if the science becomes more compelling. In the meantime, investments should be made to reduce emissions only when such investments make economic sense in their own right. This strategy is called “no regrets,” and it is roughly what the Bush administration has been doing. The U.S. spends more on global warming research each year than the entire rest of the world combined, and American businesses are leading the way in demonstrating new technologies for reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions. Time for Common Sense The global warming scare has enabled environmental advocacy groups to raise billions of dollars in contributions and government grants. It has given politicians (from Al Gore down) opportunities to pose as prophets of doom and slayers of evil corporations. And it has given bureaucrats at all levels of government, from the United Nations to city councils, powers that threaten our jobs and individual liberty. It is time for common sense to return to the debate over protecting the environment. An excellent first step would be to end the “global warming” scam. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joseph L. Bast is president of The Heartland Institute.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (22977)	3/14/2008 4:24:24 PM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 224769

The Global Warming Scam whatreallyhappened.com Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research. A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes. Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years." [Telegraph] Global warming and melting polar ice caps are not just problems here on Earth. Mars is facing similar global changes, researchers say, with temperatures across the red planet rising by around 0.65 degrees over the last few decades. [Register] Neptune has been getting brighter since around 1980; furthermore, infrared measurements of the planet since 1980 show that the planet has been warming steadily from 1980 to 2004. As they say on Neptune, global warming has become an inconvenient truth. [World Climate Report] Looking at annual global temperatures, it is apparent that the last decade shows no warming trend and recent successive annual global temperatures are well within each year's measurement errors. Statistically the world's temperature is flat. The world certainly warmed between 1975 and 1998, but in the past 10 years it has not been increasing at the rate it did. No scientist could honestly look at global temperatures over the past decade and see a rising curve. It is undisputed that the sun of the later part of the 20th century was behaving differently from that of the beginning. Its sunspot cycle is stronger and shorter and, technically speaking, its magnetic field leakage is weaker and its cosmic ray shielding effect stronger. So we see that when the sun's activity was rising, the world warmed. When it peaked in activity in the late 1980s, within a few years global warming stalled. [Telegraph] Okay, take notes, there will be a quiz at the end of class. First of all, greenhouse effect is not a bad thing. Without it, our planet would not support life as we know it, as the average temperature would be too cold to support liquid water. Water vapor is the single most potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, trapping more heat than carbon dioxide and methane put together. Estimates of the impact of water vapor on global warming vary widely from a minimum of 60% of all greenhouse effect to 98% of all greenhouse effect, but even at the minimum of 60%, that leaves 40% of greenhouse effect to be shared by all other chemicals combined, including carbon dioxide and methane (which has ten times the greenhouse capacity pound for pound as carbon dioxide). Now then, looking at Carbon Dioxide, we find that only .117% of atmospheric carbon dioxide is directly attributable to human technology such as automobiles. .117% is a rather small amount. If we were to measure out .117% of a football field, it comes out to 4.212 inches, barely long enough to get off the touchdown line. So, if humans ceased all technological activity, we would still see 99.883% of the carbon dioxide remain in the atmosphere, assuming all other factors remain stable (which is, of course, silly.) Over the last few years, there have been very careful studies in Antarctica which clearly show global temperatures rising together with atmospheric carbon dioxide. Global warmers have sent me several of these research papers with the usual "Ah HA!" type comment, but on reading the papers it is clear that the global warmers stopped at the abstract, because what these recent studies show is that Carbon Dioxide levels increased AFTER the rise in global temperature. Let me re-state that. Studies of Antarctic ice show that the Earth would get warmer, and THEN Carbon Dioxide levels would increase. And there is nothing at all mysterious about this. Carbon dioxide is a very unique chemical in that it is more effectively dissolved in liquids in lower temperatures. Normally, air will hold more water when warm, sugar will dissolve in water more quickly when warm, but carbon dioxide will escape from solution as the temperature rises, which is why your beer will soak your shirt if it is too warm when you open it. So, as the sun warms the Earth (as recorded in the ice) carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans and lakes bubbles into the sky like too-warm soda pop fizzing over the top of the glass, and as the Antarctic ice reveals, winds up in the atmosphere. Now, this is not to say that I think we should waste our planet's resources. Quite the contrary, I think we need to be very careful of what we have, because we are not likely to get a replacement planet any time soon. But the global warming "hype" is exactly that, hype to sell products and policies. If you want to do something about the damage to the planet caused by oil, STOP THE WARS BEING FOUGHT OVER IT! Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. [Pacific Free Press] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. [DailyTech 2/27/2008] 1975: We were doomed because of global cooling Click image for full size -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- See also: Global warming on other planets S 2191: The Carbon Credit Enslavement System List of global warming activists, now skeptics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (22977)	3/14/2008 4:26:05 PM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 224769

Media Promote Global Warming Fraud aim.org AIM Column \| By Cliff Kincaid \| February 5, 2007 Now how many people read until almost the end of these articles to discover that the scientific evidence is not yet available? When it comes to Iraq, our media have been preoccupied with the issue of whether there was adequate intelligence to justify the invasion and if policy-makers made up evidence before the war. But on the matter of global intervention to stop global warming, there seems to be no need for scientific evidence to justify what is shaping up as a global carbon tax of 35 cents a gallon of gas on the American people. It's difficult to figure out which is the bigger fraud-the U.N. or our media. Incredibly, the much-publicized United Nations climate change report, which blames global warming on people, has no published science to back it up. The front page Washington Post story about the report waited until the 20th paragraph of a 21-paragraph story to mention that the "detailed scientific documentation" for the claim is not yet available and won't be released "for a few months." A New York Times account waited until the 40th paragraph of a 44-paragraph story to disclose that "thousands of pages of technical background," supposedly the basis for the alarming conclusions, would be released later in the year. Now how many people read until almost the end of these articles to discover that the scientific evidence is not yet available? The odds are that many people didn't get past the sensational New York Times headline, "Science Panel Calls Global Warming 'Unequivocal.'" Clearly, we are supposed to accept all of this on faith. In fact, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is officially sponsored by the U.N. Environmental Program, which once organized an "Environmental Sabbath" program so people could pay homage to the planet. The program included an exercise for children to sit around a tree, hold hands, and meditate. The coverage of the IPCC report demonstrates how mainstream journalists have abandoned even a pretense of objectivity. This reflects the influence of such figures as Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who, at the recent so-called National Conference on Media Reform, said that the media should not cover both sides of the global warming debate. However, some scientists are raising the alarm. Canada's National Post reports that astrophysicist Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young scientists, says the IPCC's work is based on "speculation" and that he believes global warming is caused more by solar activity than the release of greenhouses gases like CO2. The IPCC's decidedly unscientific approach has come under attack from Harvard University physicist Lubos Motl, who declared, "In the past, scientists had to do their research before the implications for policymaking could have been derived from this research." Mocking the U.N. process, he commented, "Today, the vastly superior postmodern scientific method of the IPCC members allows them to publish the summary for policymakers first." A Google search of current news, however, turned up only two places where Motl's criticism of the IPCC was mentioned-a story carried by Fox News and attributed to Brit Hume, and a CNSNews.com story. Hume cited the CNSNews.com report. The CNSNews.com story by Kevin Mooney also quoted Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, as saying that issuing a conclusion before producing the evidence for that conclusion is completely improper and that a business which issued a report in such a fashion would be investigated by the government for fraud. Senator James Inhofe, ranking Member of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, called the IPCC report "the corruption of science for political gain" and said the process is completely lacking in scientific integrity. He notes that page 4 of "Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work" includes the following: "Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter." This means that the scientific data may be altered to conform with what has already been published. Instead of highlighting the lack of scientific data to support the man-made global warming assertions, our media are trying to discredit critics of the report by trying to tie them to oil companies. Such stories never mention the billions of federal dollars being showered on advocates of the man-made global warming theory. Pandering to the alarmists, Samuel Bodman, the Secretary of Energy in the Bush Administration, accepted the IPCC report and urged "global solutions" to the alleged problem. One such "global solution" is a global carbon tax, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, administered and even collected by the U.N. One U.N.-sponsored report suggests a global tax amounting to 35 cents a gallon. An international conference to promote global taxes, dubbed "solidarity levies," is being held in Oslo, Norway, from February 6-7. An international tax on airline travel is already being implemented. One of the biggest state delegations to the conference comes from South Korea, whose foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, took over in January as U.N. Secretary-General. A supporter of "solidarity levies" to fund global causes before he became U.N. chief, Ban thinks the IPCC report requires an immediate response from the international community. A special climate change summit, where President Bush could be pressured to endorse a global carbon tax, may be held later this year. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (22977)	3/14/2008 4:31:54 PM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224769

The mammoth global warming scam Tuesday, 11th March 2008 More evidence from the International Conference on Climate change last month which produced the Manhattan Declaration (see post below) of the way in which scientists who are sceptical about man-made global warming find their work is suppressed. A detailed piece on the website of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works reports: During the conference, scientists revealed the lack of tolerance science journals and institutions have exhibited for skeptical climate views. ‘We [fellow skeptical scientists] talked mostly of work and upcoming papers and went through the standard ritual of griping about journal editors and the ridiculous hoops we sometimes have to jump through to get papers published. But some of the guys had absolute horror stories of what happened to them when they tried getting papers published that explored non-‘consensus’ views. Really outrageous and unethical behavior on the parts of some editors. I was shocked,’ wrote conference participant Dr. William M. Briggs, a climate statistician who serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review, on his blog on March 4. (LINK) Prominent Hungarian Physicist Dr. Miklós Zágoni, a former global warming activist who recently reversed his views about man-made climate fears and is now a skeptic, presented scientific findings at the conference refuting rising CO2 fears. Zágoni’s scientific mentor Hungarian scientist, Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist, resigned from his post working with NASA because he was disgusted with the agency’s lack of scientific freedom. Miskolczi, who also presented his peer-reviewed findings at the conference, said he wanted to release his new research that showed "runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," but he claims NASA refused to allow him. ‘Unfortunately, my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results,” Miskolczi said according to a March 6 Daily Tech article. (LINK) [Note: Clarification from original posting. Miskolczi worked with NASA, not Zágoni.] Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, noted that many of his scientific colleagues did not attend the conference because they “feared their attendance might affect their employment.” D’Aleo described the fear of retribution many skeptics face as a “sad state of affairs.” But D’Aleo noted that he believes there is ‘very likely a silent majority of scientists in climatology, meteorology, and allied sciences who do not endorse what is said to be the ‘consensus’ position.’ Other scientists have echoed these claims. Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, asserted in December 2007 that skeptics have a much harder time publishing in peer-reviewed literature. ‘Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,’ Paldor, who was not in attendance at the New York conference, wrote in December. From this post, and in particular if you follow the links, you will find a wealth of other information which illuminates the mind-blowing scale of the global warming scam and how it has been perpetrated — for example, that proponents of MMGW have been funded over the past decade to the tune of $50 BILLION whereas the sceptics have received a meagre $19 MILLION. In other words, MMGW is a giant cash cow for scientific researchers, while those who refuse to latch onto the poisoned udder find they risk professional suicide. Even so, the number of scientists now ‘coming out’ to declare that MMGW is a monumental fraud is growing by the day. In such nations as Germany, Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia, Argentina, New Zealand, Portugal, and France, groups of scientists have recently spoken out to oppose and debunk man-made climate fears… Atmospheric Physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and a founding member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, also announced his skepticism on February 18, 2008. “Sorry folks, but we're not exactly buying into the Global Hysteria just yet. We know a great deal about atmospheric physics, and from the onset, many of the claims were just plain fishy,” Peden wrote. (LINK) In January 2008, environmental scientist professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder and director of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, announced publicly that he considered CO2 related climate fears to be ‘dangerous nonsense.’ Domingos, who retired in 2006, has more than 150 published articles in the research fields of Thermodynamics, Numerical Methods in Fluid Mechanics and Meteorological Forecast. ‘There are measurable climate changes but there is also an enormous manipulation in reducing everything to CO2 and equivalents. The main gas producing the green house effect is water vapor. The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning,’ Domingos said… In addition, at least one scientist publicly pondered reconsidering his view of man-made climate fears after Senate report of 400 scientists was released in December. ‘It (the Senate 400 scientists report) got me thinking: I'm an environmental scientist, but I've never had time to review the “evidence” for the anthropogenic causes of global warming,’ wrote environmental scientist Professor Rami Zurayk of the American University in Beirut on December 27, 2007. (LINK) ‘When I said, in my opening speech for the launch of UNEP's (United Nations Environment Program) Global Environment Outlook-4 in Beirut: “There is now irrevocable evidence that climate change is taking place...” I was reading from a statement prepared by UNEP. Faith-based science it may be, but who has time to review all the evidence? I'll continue to act on the basis of anthropogenic climate change, but I really need to put some more time into this,’ Zurayk wrote. Oh dear. How many once-stellar scientific reputations are about to come crashing down over this? Let’s start with the Royal Society and work steadily downwards… spectator.co.uk

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (22977)	3/14/2008 4:34:14 PM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 224769

SPEAKING FREELY - ASIA TIMES The global warming scam By Derek Kelly, PhD atimes.com Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing. Scam, noun: a swindle, a fraudulent arrangement. A chronology of climate change During most of the last billion years the Earth did not have permanent ice sheets. Nevertheless, at times large areas of the globe were covered with vast sheets of ice. Such times are known as glaciations. In the past 2 million to 3 million years, the temperature of the Earth has changed (warmed or cooled) at least 17 times, some say 33, with glaciations that last about 100,000 years interrupted by warm periods that last about 10,000 years. The last glaciation began 70,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. The Earth was a lot colder than it is now; snow and ice had accumulated on a lot of the land, glaciers existed on large areas and the sea levels were lower. 15,000 years ago: The last glaciation reaches a peak, with continental glaciers that cover a lot of the sub-polar and polar areas of the land areas of Earth. In North America, all of New England and all of the Great Lakes area, most of Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota and the North Dakotas, lie under ice sheets hundreds of meters thick. More than 37 million cubic kilometers of ice was tied up in these global sheets of ice. The average temperature on the surface of the Earth is estimated to have been cooler by approximately 6 degrees Celsius than currently. The sea level was more than 90 meters lower than currently. 15,000 years ago to 6,000 years ago: Global warming begins. The sheets of ice melt, and sea levels rise. Some heat source causes approximately 37 million cubic kilometers of ice to melt in approximately 9,000 years. Around 9,500 years ago, the last of the Northern European sheets of ice leave Scandinavia. Around 7,500 years ago, the last of the American sheets of ice leave Canada. This warming is neither stable nor the same everywhere. There are periods when mountain glaciers advance, and periods when they withdraw. These climatic changes vary extensively from place to place, with some areas affected while others are not. The tendency of warming is global and obvious, but very uneven. The causes of this period of warming are unknown. 8,000 years ago to 4,000 years ago: About 6,000 years ago, temperatures on the surface of Earth are about 3 degrees warmer than currently. The Arctic Ocean is ice-free, and mountain glaciers have disappeared from the mountains of Norway and the Alps in Europe, and from the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada. The ocean of the world is some three meters higher than currently. A lot of the present desert of the Sahara has a more humid, savannah-like climate, with giraffes and savannah fauna species. 4,000 years ago to AD 900: Global cooling begins. The Arctic Ocean freezes over, mountain glaciers form once more in the Rocky Mountains, in Norway and in the Alps. The Black Sea freezes over several times, and ice forms on the Nile in Egypt. Northern Europe gets a lot wetter, and the marshes develop again in previously dry areas. The sea level drops to approximately its present level. The temperatures on the surface of the Earth are about 0.5-1 degree cooler than at present. The causes of this period of cooling are unknown. AD 1000 to 1500: This period has quick, but uneven, warming of the climate of the Northern Hemisphere. The North Atlantic becomes ice-free and Norse exploration as far as North America takes place. The Norse colonies in Greenland even export crop surpluses to Scandinavia. Wine grapes grow in southern Britain. The temperatures are from 3-8 degrees warmer than currently. The period lasts only a brief 500 years. By the year 1500, it has vanished. The Earth experiences as much warming between the 11th and the 13th century as is now predicted by global-warming scientists for the next century. The causes of this period of warming are unknown. 1430 to 1880: This is a period of the fast but uneven cooling of Northern Hemisphere climates. Norwegian glaciers advance to their most distant extension in post-glacial times. The northern forests disappear, to be replaced with tundra. Severe winters characterize a lot of Europe and North America. The channels and rivers get colder, the snows get heavy, and the summers cool and short. The temperatures on the surface of the world are about 0.5-1.5 degrees cooler than present. In the United States, 1816 is known as the "year with no summer". Snow falls in New England in June. The widespread failure of crops and deaths due to hypothermia are common. The causes of this period of cooling are unknown. 1880 to 1940: A period of warming. The mountain glaciers recede and the ice in the Arctic Ocean begins to melt again. The causes of this period of warming are unknown. 1940 to 1977: Cooling period. The temperatures are cooler than currently. Mountain glaciers recede, and some begin to advance. The tabloids inform us of widespread catastrophes due to the "New Glaciation". The causes of this period of cooling are unknown. 1977 to present: Warming period. The summer of 2003 is said to be the warmest one since the Middle Ages. The tabloids notify us of widespread catastrophes due to "global warming". The causes of warming are discovered - humanity and its carbon-dioxide-generating fossil-fuel use and deforestation. Anyone else find something fishy about the final sentence? Comments The above chronology of recent (geologically speaking) climate changes should place global-warming catastrophists (such as those who developed the Kyoto treaty) in an awkward position. Their fundamental assumption is that Earth's climate was stable and was doing just fine before the Industrial Revolution started interfering with climate's "natural" state. It is the Industrial Revolution, and in particular the use of fossil-fuel-burning machines, that has led us to the brink of environmental catastrophe due to global warming caused by increasing amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. But it is plain to see that both warming and cooling occurred numerous times before the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, all the dire predictions of global-warming consequences - sea-level rise, for example - have happened in the past. In fact, the greatest warming period was when dinosaurs walked the land (about 70 million to 130 million years ago). There was then five to 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today, and the average temperature was 4-11 degrees Celsius warmer. Those conditions should have been very helpful to life, since they permitted those immense creatures to find an abundance of food and they survived. The Cretaceous was an intense "greenhouse world" with high surface temperatures. These high temperatures were due to the much higher level of CO2 in the atmosphere at the time - four to 10 times as much as is in our air today. The biota was a mixture of the exotic and familiar - luxuriant green forests of now-extinct trees flourished within the Arctic Circle and dinosaurs roamed. The global sea level was at its highest ever during this period, peaking during the Late Cretaceous around 86 million years ago. It is certain that the global sea level was well over 200 meters higher during this time than it is today. The Earth was immensely hotter, the CO2 vastly more plentiful, and the sea levels much higher than they are today. The Earth has also been immensely colder, the CO2 much less plentiful, and the sea levels much lower than today. Fifteen thousand years ago, the sea level was at least 90 meters lower than it is today. The land looked bare because it was too cold for beech and oak trees to grow. There were a few fir trees here and there. No grass grew, however, just shrubs, bushes and moss grass. In the northern parts of North America, Europe and Asia there was still tundra. The animals were different from today too. Back then there were woolly mammoth, woolly rhinos, cave bears (the former three now extinct), bison, wolves, horses, and herds of reindeer like modern-day reindeer. The major "sin" for the global warmists is CO2. The Kyoto treaty is meant to reduce the amount of this gas so as, they say, to reduce the degree of warming and eventually return us to some stable climate system. If we look at the historical situation, however, this is cause for alarm. For one thing, there has never been a stable climate system. For another, the level of CO2 in our atmosphere is near its historic low. In the long run, the greatest danger is too little rather than too much CO2. There has been a long-term reduction of CO2 throughout the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth. If this tendency continues, eventually our planet may become as lifeless as Mars. Glaciation has prevailed for 90% of the last several million years. Extreme cold. Biting cold. Cold too intense for bikinis and swimming trunks. No matter what scary scenarios global-warming enthusiasts dream up, they pale in comparison with the conditions another ice age would deliver. Look to our past climate. Fifteen thousand years ago, an ice sheet a kilometer and a half thick covered all of North America north of a line stretching from somewhere around Seattle to Cleveland and New York City. Instead of reducing CO2, we should, perhaps, be increasing it. We should pay the smokestack industries hard dollars for every kilogram of soot they pump into the atmosphere. Instead of urging Chinese to stop using coal and turn instead to nuclear-generated electricity, we should beg them to continue using coal. Rather than bringing us to the edge of global-warming catastrophe, anthropogenic climate change may have spared us descent into what would be the most serious and far-reaching challenge facing humankind in the 21st century - dealing with a rapidly deteriorating climate that wants to plunge us into an ice age. Let's hope Antarctica and Greenland melt. Let's hope the sea levels rise. All life glorifies warmth. Only death prefers the icy fingers of endless winter. What do you think? Derek Kelly, who has been an American university teacher and a computer-software developer, is now trying to help Chinese university students speak English. (Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. 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