Al Gore told graduates of Carnegie Mellon University they could become part of the next “hero” generation. He told them we already had two: the founding fathers generation and the one that defeated fascism in World War II. Gore said, “You, I hope and expect, will be called upon to be part of the third hero generation in American history,” by solving the problems associated with, you guessed it, global warming.
“We face a planetary emergency,” Gore said, repeating his robotic, alarmist predictions. “The concentrations of global warming pollution have been rising at an unprecedented pace and have now given the planet a fever.” No, Al, you are the one giving us a fever. As I have reported to you in this column, temperatures are actually down the last 10 years; according to the very same sources Gore cites in his movie.
Gore also attributes hurricanes to global warming, and he had a lot of scientists believing him until they started doing their research. Tom Knutson is a prominent federal scientist who has raised concerns about the effects of global warming on hurricanes. Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have become symbolic of out-of-control warming, according to the disciples of Gore. Knutson decided to study the issue. He’s with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J., and in the past has warned about the harmful effects of global warming. He has even accused the Bush administration of censoring him and others on the issue. According to his new study, he argues “against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.” His study is based on a computer model.
Naturally, other global warming alarmist scientists, who make a living off creating panic and the subsequent government grants, were quick to criticize Knutson’s model, which makes the point I and many other skeptics have made all along. Computer models are only as reliable as the data fed into them. I can make a computer model say anything I want it to say by deciding what data to include and what to omit.
Computer models aside, it’s impossible to ignore reality. After Katrina in 2005, Gore and the other alarmists told us each hurricane season would be longer and more intense. It just hasn’t turned out that way. In 2006 and 2007 the seasons were noneventful. All the predicted death and destruction never materialized. That’s not to say that we will never have another severe hurricane; it’s just to say that global warming has nothing to do with it.
In fact, the evidence of the nonexistence of global warming is mounting at a rate that it can no longer be ignored. Recent fuss over the polar bear’s habitat concentrated on the loss of sea ice in the Arctic sea over the last several years. That data stopped with information from last summer. It conveniently chose not to include the fact that in a 10-day period in October and November of 2007, the ice was reforming at a rate of 58,000 square miles per day. That’s a total of 580,000 square miles of new ice. They also conveniently omitted the fact that the polar bear population in 1969 was 12,000 and now it’s 25,000. Hardly the number for an animal on the brink of extinction.
What’s fascinating is watching the likes of Al Gore out there trying to paddle against the torrent of evidence flooding down the information highway that disputes everything he has been saying.
He didn’t create the Internet, but he did create global warming.
