Last time I wrote about global warming, I said this:

I won’t claim the climate isn’t changing.  That much is obvious.  But I have yet to see anyone show that we’re causing it.  What’s more, I have yet to see anyone show that the climate would stop changing if we (magically) completely eliminated pollution tomorrow – and there’s certainly practically no evidence that we can actually reverse it.

As it turns out, I was wrong; the climate isn’t really changing.

I suspect some of you are staring at your screen with your jaw on the floor.  Allow me to elaborate.  You know the CRU?  The group which was at the forefront of the pro-Anthropogenic-Global-Warming movement?  The group whose e-mails were leaked, displaying their scientific misconduct to the world?

Their director, Phil Jones, has temporarily resigned from his position while the whole thing is investigated.  What’s more, he has publicly admitted that not only is global warming not caused by man, but nothing significant is happening!

But don’t take my word for it.  In his interview with the BBC, he admits that since 1995 there has been no statistically significant planetary warming.  He goes on to quibble over “almost significant” and “over longer periods of time”, in an effort to still support his pro-AGW stance, but then he says this:

Of course, if the [Medieval Warming Period] was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

Forbes.com points out that “A Nature study last year showed water temperatures in the Indonesia area were the same in medieval times as they are today.”

In other words, there is, in fact, evidence that the MWP was just as warm as we see things today, which means our current warmth is not unprecedented.

Why does this all this matter?  Well, people who think global warming is man-made always point to greenhouse gases as the cause.  Since 1995, we’ve increased our yearly GHG production by 26%; however, this has had no effect on planetary temperatures.

So if greenhouse gases don’t actually affect the planet’s temperature, and if there have been similar warm periods in the past, then what evidence remains to support AGW?

Jones also states something else:

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view.

The director of the Climate Research Unit believes the debate is not over.  How then can Gibbs, the White House press secretary, make the statement he made back in December?

… on the order of several *thousand* scientists have come, uh, to the conclusion that, uh, climate change is happening.  Uh, I don’t think that’s, uh, anything that is quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.

Even the CRU didn’t really know whether climate change is happening, or whether it’s man-caused.  (If they were sure, there would have been no reason to engage in all the scientific misconduct they did.)

I, for one, am uncomfortable making policies based on such controversial opinions.

There are plenty of reasons to reduce pollution, so it’s complete and utter nonsense to base any pollution-reducing measures on whether global warming is happening (or even on whether it’s our fault).  (Here I’m referring to the Copenhagen conference, whose stated goal is, according to Gibbs, to “stop and reverse climate change”.)

Update: I came across this book review by Freeman Dyson which you may find interesting.  It reviews two “global warming” books and points out some things they’re ignoring.

It seems politicians are abandoning the phrase “global warming” in favor of the more ambiguous “climate change”.  Here’s a two-minute clip of a White House press conference, and a transcript of it:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs

Reporter 1:  Climate change.  Why is it a good idea for the President to arrive near the beginning of the climate talk negotiations, as opposed to the end, when the ultimate deal is going to be struck?  And secondarily…

Gibbs: Well… (more…)

I just read a few articles, and thought I’d share them with you, and some brief thoughts.  Feel free to comment on one or all of them.  Some of them are fairly old, but that’s ok

• Orson Scott Card finally came back from a hiatus writing his WorldWatch column.  I no longer agree with his political views.  He’s gone from “I don’t like Obama for his policies” to “I don’t like Obama because I’m accusing him of breaking every single promise he’s ever made, and some he hasn’t.”  OSC used to provide support for his arguments.  Now he makes unsubstantiated claims.  One quote that shows OSC’s viewpoint (which I disagree with):

Now [Obama has] shown us that he’s a radical leftist at heart and all his promises — every one of them – were lies. But he’s still relatively harmless domestically because he’s such an incompetent leader, unable to hold his course or persuade even his followers.

• This opinion column in the Wall Street Journal compares global warming to a religion – and I agree completely.  Supporters of the idea of global warming don’t seem to care about the evidence; to them, any and all climate changes are evidence of global warming, even if that evidence is global cooling.  One choice quote:

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

• A commentary in the LA Times on the continual Democratic accusations that the Bush administration lied about Iraq.  The summary?  Democrats conveniently forget that the word lie implies intentional deception; nobody has ever shown that to be true of the Bush administration (and in fact, in 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found the claim to be false, as did the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report a year later).  One choice quote:

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

• A blog post about moral consequences.  Politicians of all colors seem to claim that if they were in charge, things would be better, but they all forget that the things they don’t do carry their own consequences.  Personally, I think (my) religion drives that into us fairly well.  This blog post is not inherently political in nature (that is, the poster does not claim any particular political viewpoint), but is instead simply an examination of moral consequences, and uses various real-world examples.  One choice quote:

If you adopt the notion of “doing no harm”, aren’t you then responsible for harm that comes because of what was left undone, or done some other way?