..."Scientists who disagree with this scenario "are being intimidated," Schmitt said. "They've seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven't gone along with the so-called political consensus that we're in a human-caused global warming." "...
Harrison Schmitt among 70 skeptics to speak at international conference
Tom Sharpe | The New Mexican
2/14/2009 -
santafenewmexican.com
Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon and a former U.S. senator from New Mexico, doesn't buy the idea that humans are causing global warming.
"I don't think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," he said.
Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled speak at an international conference next month, admitted his beliefs fly in the face of the political consensus that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon-dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.
Scientists who disagree with this scenario "are being intimidated," Schmitt said. "They've seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven't gone along with the so-called political consensus that we're in a human-caused global warming."
The 74-year-old geologist recently resigned from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration, after the group blamed global warming on human activity.
"As a geologist, I love Earth observations," he wrote in his Nov. 14 resignation letter. "But, it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a 'consensus' that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise.
" 'Consensus,' as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities."
Dan Williams, publisher with the Heartland Institute, which is hosting the second International Conference on Climate Change in New York from March 8 to 10, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society.
"I think it was one of those groups who search for extraterrestrial life ... that had taken the alarmist position — you know, the planet is going to turn into a cinder and ... we're all going to drown in icebergs next year," he said.
Williams described the Heartland Institute as a 25-year-old Chicago think tank that aims "to discover, develop and market free-market ideas to public-policy questions" on the environment, school choice, budget and tax, health care and information technology.
"We're very skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming," he said. "Not that the planet hasn't warmed. We know it has or we'd all still be in the Ice Age. But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there's disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming."
According to a news release on the conference, the keynote speaker will be physicist Nir Joseph Shaviv, an associate professor of the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who "is a leading proponent of the theory that solar and cosmic rays, not human activity, are the driving forces behind climate change."
In a Saturday interview, Schmitt expounded on what he called "indisputable facts" that global warming is the result of natural, rather than man-made, causes. He said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise.
As for rises in sea levels, Schmitt said, geological evidence indicates major changes have been going on for thousands of years. Smaller changes in sea level are related to changes in the elevation of land masses, he said. For example, he said, the Great Lakes are rising because their bottoms are rising because the crust of the earth is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers.
Even evidence of the southern and northern ice caps melting is mixed, Schmitt said.
"In Antarctica, it looks like the total volume (of ice) is increasing and if that's true, that's probably why you're getting increased ice moving away from the center of the continent and therefore these big icebergs and stuff are breaking off," he said.
Although Greenland's glaciers receded for decades, Schmitt said, they began advancing again around 2005.
Schmitt grew up in Silver City, graduated with a science degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1957, studied geology at the University of Oslo in Norway and took a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964.
In 1965, he joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a member of the first group of scientist-astronauts and the only geologist among them. In 1972, he flew to the moon on the last lunar mission, Apollo 17. He and fellow astronaut Gene Cernan descended to the moon's surface on the Apollo Lunar Module — making them the last people to walk on the moon.
Schmitt resigned from NASA to seek election to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1976 against two-term Democratic incumbent Joseph Montoya. Schmitt got an unexpected boost when Montoya, speaking in Las Vegas, N.M., compared the former astronaut to a "changito" — Spanish for little monkey — in a reference to the animals sent into orbit prior to manned missions.
Schmitt was defeated in his 1982 bid for re-election by Democrat Jeff Bingaman, who is now New Mexico's senior senator.
Bingaman and recently elected U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., both have advocated energy policies intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Today, Schmitt lives in Albuquerque, where he works as a consultant. He is an adjunct professor in the Department of Engineering Physics of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He said he is heartened that next month's conference is made up of scientists who haven't been manipulated by politics, possibly because they are not dependent on government funding.
Former Vice President Al Gore, via his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, "has certainly been at the center of this, but he's not alone," Schmitt said. "It's one of the few times you've seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it's coloring their objectivity." |
