The New York Times is giving lip service to a letter signed and sent by 100 scientists to the UN Global Warming conference in Bali. The letter essentially said that climate change is natural, unstoppable, and attempts to control climate change rather than adapt to it only serves to make the problem of adapting to it much more difficult as vast sums of time and money are diverted to attempting the impossible when the same resources could be productively employed in solvable problems. When what is perhaps the least conservative major newspaper in the world gives space to global warming “skeptics” and doesn’t add the seemingly obligatory condemnation of said skeptics to the report I think it’s a sign that the debate is rapidly changing in favor of the skeptics. I knew this would happen. Anthropogenic global warming is based on cherry picking data to fit a bogus climate model. It was only a matter of time before it collapsed because, unlike Darwinian fairy tales of mud to man evolution over billions of years, climate change does happen quickly enough to observe over practical lengths of time. For instance, there hasn’t been any net global warming in almost 10 years yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased substantially over that time. The computer models of CO2’s effect as a greenhouse gas are simply and (now) demonstrably wrong.
Contrarians vs. Bali
December 14, 2007, 10:29 am
By John Tierney
We always need contrarians to challenge orthodoxy, so it’s good to see a few scientists raising questions about the established wisdom at the Bali conference on climate. But I’m such a contrarian myself that I have to quibble with them.
More than 100 scientists, including veterans of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and some prominent names like Freeman Dyson, Richard Lindzen and Reid Bryson, signed a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations arguing that the U.N. conference at Bali “is taking the world in entirely the wrong direction.” You can read the full text here. The letter warns that mandating drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions would be futile, costly and “constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems.” The letter urges a focus on adaptation:
It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.
I understand the need for societies to become adaptable (and to be rich enough to deal with unexpected changes). I understand why trying to mandate cuts in emissions may turn out to be a futile strategy, if only because people won’t go along with the cuts. But I don’t understand why it’s impossible to stop climate change. Geoengineers have just started working on this problem, and already they’ve got some rough schemes that look affordable. Give them a couple decades . . .