By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun
Theodore Kupfer’s attack on my remarks last week in these pages about President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord cannot be allowed to pass without comment.
Mr. Kupfer cites Svante Arrhenius as the originator of the theory of the greenhouse-gas generation of global warming in the 1890s. Arrhenius predicted in an 1896 paper that doubling carbon-dioxide emissions would increase temperatures by six centigrade degrees but ten years later reduced that estimate by two-thirds, and even that has proved to be unfounded.
Arrhenius’s perspective was of someone trying to promote milder temperatures in Sweden, by increasing greenhouse gases, and concluded that it would take at least 3,000 years for any such hoped-for warming to come to pass. It is doubly bizarre for Mr. Kupfer to cite him as a source in that Arrhenius, one of the founders of the Nobel Prize, which he quickly received for chemistry, is chiefly known as a leader of the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene.
Arrhenius lobbied the government of Sweden successfully to create the Swedish Institute for Racial Biology in 1922, which trained and inspired a number of the leading champions of Nazi racial ideas in the Thirties. He said and did nothing that contradicts anything I wrote here last week about climate and carbon dioxide.
Mr. Kupfer accuses me of over-frequent recourse to the adjective “unestablished,” but that is an unexceptionable word in challenging what is claimed to be, in Al Gore’s infamously inaccurate phrase, “settled science.” Mr. Kupfer advocates moderation in these matters, calls for caution, and assimilates me to the extreme advocates of climate disaster, such as Naomi Klein (a Marxist who knows nothing about science but is rubbing her hands in contemplation of the collapse of capitalism).
Yet Mr. Kupfer effectively follows in the footsteps of the leaders of the climate-alarm movement who claim everything is proved and beyond debate and that we have either to dismantle our economies, live under thatch, bicycle between points, abolish carbon use and carbon dioxide itself other than in photosynthesis (to ensure we have oxygen to breathe), or await the consummation of the suicide of earthly life.
Mr. Kupfer’s only substantive complaint about what I wrote is that I understated the rise in global temperature in the past two years. I thought it sufficient to acknowledge that they were “relatively warm years.” They were El Niño years of an artificial spike in warming, as he must know, the first such years since 1998. I accept that they seem to have been the warmest years ever, but these statistics are subject to subsequent adjustment and are, in any case, aberrant.
My basic point of the gradual and inconclusive nature of the data to date — my debunking of the hysterical claims of the climate alarmists — stands. The world temperature declined by a fifth of a centigrade degree between 1880 and 1910, and by a tenth of a degree between 1940 and 1970. There was minimal human emission of carbon dioxide in the earlier period and a 40% increase in the second, and yet the results are similar.
There has been no significant recorded global warming at the mid-troposphere, by satellites, balloons, or ocean registers, in this century. The graph that Mr. Kupfer used in his rebuttal of me is the NASA-GISS version, which differs sharply from the same tendentious organizations’ graph of eight years ago.
None of their climate models explain the hiatus of the past 20 years, if the recent El Niño is omitted. There are also wide variances of figures in surface temperatures recorded by various independent government agencies. If the major El Niño years of 1998 and 2016–2017 are factored in, the relationship of the figures Mr. Kupfer cites to carbon use is, I regret to confirm to him, unestablished.
Since electricity can’t be stored and has to be used immediately, the whole idea of covering the landscape with windmills and solar panels (almost all manufactured in and imported from China despite candidate Obama’s promise of green American jobs in huge numbers) was nonsense. Traditional energy sources have to be maintained for when the sun isn’t out and the air is still.
That is to say that the entire Obama policy of the Paris pledge to reduce carbon use by 28% by 2030, which would be pursued by the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, was impossible and, in normal policy parlance, insane.
@ Felix Quigley: Felix, I I agree with you 100 per cent about the environment and the need for humans to have a more enlightened, better educated view of it, and to have more compassion for other species.
However, I no longer feel contempt for those who disagree with me. Perhaps I have mellowed in my old age. I have come to realize, although it is difficult for me sometimes, that I should respect other people who disagree with me. Their contrary views do not necessarily mean that they are bad people or ill-intentioned.
For this reason, I respect Yamit although I disagree with her.
This was good. “The truth about global warming – Dr. Patrick Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, provides insight into the debate over climate change and the political games played to create policy.” with Mark Levin, Fox News.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5sGtj7QKQ
Adam and I are not laughing because what you are saying and the way you are saying it is not funny. In fact Adam and I are scared very much by what is happening in this world. We probably differ on why but we are not laughing. I personally find what you are doing disgraceful.
The birds in these types of areas have existed inside a very narrow temperature band. They therefore are very sensitive to temperature.
Also from what you have written it seems certain that you do not understand nature, and you make that common mistake of imposing human consciousness on that of an animal, and this has one other fatal end result…the human you represent does not take responsibility for nature.
Perhaps I should not have included Adam above, but I certainly am very, very concerned and to be truthful scared….not for me personally, but for the future in general.
Then when I see an intellectual lout mincing important knowledge, that is evidence, evidence which needs to be answered in detail and it needs a lot of detail because the article I quoted from is very detailed, another emotion comes to the fore…contempt!
@ adamdalgliesh:
Experts on Climate Change Assessment: ‘Every Conclusion of This Latest Government Report Is False’
adamdalgliesh Said:
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. ”
“Credo quia absurdum” reflects those attaching themselves to the pseudoscience of man-made climate change.
Felix Quigley Said:
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF ANIMAL SPECIES HAVE BECOME EXTINCT THROUGHOUT HISTORY ALL BY NATURAL CAUSES. mAN HAS DESTROYED HUNDREDS AND ALSO SAVED HUNDREDS DUE TO HUMAN INTERVENTION. ON THE FACE OF THE BIRD EXAMPLE IN PERU NO CREDIBLE PROVEABLE DATA IS SHOWN OR EXPLAINED. MAYBE THE FOOD SOURCE BECAME SCARCE MAYBE THEY FLEW OFF TO DIFFERENT HABITANT ANOTHER MOUNTAIN POSSIBLY NOT INVESTIGATED. BIRDS FLY AND CAN ALWAYS FLY TO AREAS MORE IN KEEPING WITH THEIR SURVIVAL,,,, ATTRIBUTING THEIR FINDINGS TO RISE IN TEMP IS ON IT’S FACE ABSURD. EVEN IF TRUE CAN THEY THEN ATTRIBUTE INCREASE IN TEMP ATTRIBUTED TO HUMAN CAUSES? STUPID JUNK SCIENCE. WHAT ABOUT OTHER SPECIES OF BIRDS WHO MAY THRIVE WITH HIGHER TEMPS??? Ice age will return before any of the dire warnings by global warming cultists see their projections come true.
As Hegel said, “We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.” Not very scientific Huh? That’s Commies for ya 🙂