Last June I found myself somewhere over Central America at about 37,000 feet in a 757, en route to the Andes Mountains in Peru for an annual missionary trek that I have been a part of since 1999. While getting a cup of coffee in the galley in the rear of the aircraft, I struck up a conversation with a Peruvian who wanted to know what a Gringo was doing traveling to his country for the eighth time in ten years. I explained that our treks through the mountains to visit different villages of indigenous Quechua often took us through passes or pasos de portachuelos at the edge of snow fields starting around 16,000 feet.
In ten or twenty years all the snow and ice will be gone from the Nevados of the Cordillera Blanca because of global warming, he said to me in Spanish.
So when I arrived a day later in the city of Huaraz in the Callejon de Huaylas, I was curious to see if in fact the glaciers had retreated and if the snow cover was reduced from prior years. What I learned was in fact, just the opposite—from my own photographs and from the testimonies of the people with whom I spoke over the next two weeks.
Despite the ‘consensus’ of scientists that we are told agree that global warming is a fact, I observed more snow on the mountains, the glaciers had seemingly grown in size, and the climate had become noticeably cooler. The locals—virtually all of them farmers—confirmed this. And last year was in fact the first year we had hiked through the Cordillera Negra—the more temperate and dryer range of the Peruvian Andes—and experienced cloudy days with wind-blown chilling rains.
Consensus is a dangerous thing. Remember the great scare over Y2K, when some of the most brilliant minds of our generation arrived at a “consensus” that predicted the end of the world at midnight on December 31, 1999?
In a similar vein we have the economic crisis of 2008—a grand mal version of the Bernie Madoff-Ponzi Scheme that duped some of the best minds of the finance world. The consensus of a majority of leading economists and bankers that included the then Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was that the economy was sound only months before the world imploded.
As many governments of the world including the United States are poised to burden their citizens with a carbon tax, perhaps now would be a good time to reconsider whether the consensus is again very badly mistaken.
I am speaking about the consensus over anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon dioxide-induced global warming—or should I say what used to be called ‘global warming’ until the data that poured in over the last several years showing that the earth has cooled drastically has made its hysterical proponents employ the classic bait-and-switch use of the term ‘climate change’. Now any meteorological anomaly—can serve as ‘evidence’ for Apocalypse Now.
The consensus over climate change is largely based on suspect computer models that cannot predict the weather a week into the future let alone the state of the world’s climate decades from now. Much of the science is junk science and almost all of the data is subject to interpretation by humans many of which have their own ideologically driven agendas. This has been used to rally support from celebrities who along with the government are only too willing to help support the funding of pet research projects. There’s a religious, cult-like component requiring belief in “Gaia” or “Mother Earth” embraced by global warming proponent and billionaire Sir Richard Branson and movie director M. Night Shyamalan among others. And a complicit and largely science-challenged gaggle of mainstream journalists is all-too willing to cooperate in the cause-celebre.
Climate change should neither portend the end of the world nor should it come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Earth’s climate history. There have been long epochs of warmer climate on the earth during the Medieval Warm Period, for example, which spanned 400 years from 1000-1400, and decades of colder climate such as the Little Ice Age, which spanned from the 16th to the mid-19th centuries.
It seems a touch arrogant for us humans to presume that because we have witnessed minor warming during the 20th century that this is unusual or worrisome. The book of Genesis reminds us: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.” Who is to say that a slightly warmer earth would not be beneficial to mankind? During the Medieval Warm Period, infant mortality rates shrank throughout Europe as swamps dried up and the population of mosquitoes—vectors for a number of fatal diseases—shrank markedly.
My observations in the Peruvian Andes last June have been born out by a number of other scientists.
David Deming a geophysicist and Adjunct Scholar at the National Center for Policy Analysis and an Associate Professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, writing in the Washington Times on December 10 stated, “…The last two years of global cooling have nearly erased 30 years of temperature increases. To the extent that global warming ever existed, it is now officially over. This year began with a severe spell of winter weather in China.
Observers characterized it as the largest natural disaster to hit China in decades. By the end of January, blizzards and cold temperatures had killed 60 people and caused millions to lose electric service. Nearly a million buildings were damaged and airports had to close. Hong Kong had the second-longest cold spell since 1885. A temperature of 33.6 degrees Fahrenheit was barely higher than the record low of 32 degrees F set in 1893. Other countries in Asia also experienced record cold…”
But not even colder than normal weather can dissuade the ‘climate-change’ fear mongers. After Nature published the results of a computer model showing that nearly the entire Antarctic continent had not cooled over the past 50 years, as the real-world observational data showed, but had warmed instead, Christopher Monckton, Chief Policy Adviser for the Science & Public Policy Institute commented that the analysis in the ‘warming Antarctic’ paper, “depends not on actual temperature measurements, nor on other observations from the real world, which unequivocally show that Antarctica has been cooling for half a century, but on statistical ‘interpolation’ of made-up data between the rather sparse observations from Antarctic research stations.”
Ironically, the point may be moot. Fred S. Singer, President and Founder of Science and Environment Policy Project explains, “Not long ago we learned that a cooling Antarctica was ‘consistent with’ greenhouse warming and thus the skeptics were wrong. So a warming Antarctica and a cooling Antarctica are both ‘consistent with’ model projections of global warming. Our foray into the tortured logic of ‘consistent with’ in climate science raises the perennial question, what observations of the climate system would be inconsistent with the model predictions?”
Deroy Murdock, a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, explained in December that the year 2008 was the coldest since 1997. With the winter of 2008-2009 barely underway, Murdock listed among other meteorological phenomena; an 8-inch snowstorm in New Orleans, a half-inch of snow in Malibu, three-inches in Las Vegas and snow across southern Brazil. He also cited temperature data showing that last summer was the third-coldest on record for Anchorage, Alaska causing a 13.5% expansion of Arctic sea ice—an area about the size of the state of Texas.
Murdock asked Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a physical chemist and retired Navy meteorologist, “So, is this all just propaganda concocted by Chevron-funded, right-wing, flat-Earthers?” Hertzberg’s answer was interesting. “As a scientist and life-long liberal Democrat, I find the constant regurgitation of the anecdotal, fear-mongering clap-trap about human-caused global warming to be a disservice to science.”
Murdock quotes from a letter written to British members of Parliament last October from Imperial College of London astrophysicist and long range forecaster Piers Corbyn: “Global Warming is over, and Global Warming Theory has failed. There is no evidence that CO2 drives world temperatures or any consequent climate change…According to official data in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been colder than that year, yet CO2 has been rising rapidly.”
He adds, “That evening, as the House of Commons debated legislation on so-called ‘global warming,’ October snow fell in London for the first time since 1922.”
Gregory J. Rummo
Gregory J. Rummo has an M.S. in chemistry. He is a businessman, syndicated columnist and the author of two books; “The View from the Grass Roots,” and “The View from the Grass Roots, Another Look.” Contact him through his website, http://GregRummo.com/
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