Forum: Warming points sunward

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Al Gore won the Oscar for his movie "An Inconvenient Truth." The film's theme is that the Earth is warming alarmingly ("global warming") largely because humans produce too much CO2 and other "Green House Gasses" that trap solar heat.

There is an indisputable record that global temperatures have been rising. In the 20th century, the recorded average temperature rose 0.6 degrees Centigrade (1.08 degrees Fahrenheit), mostly before 1940. Nothing strange there. The planet has been either warming or cooling since its formation some 4 billion years ago.

Common sense tells me the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is up to something other than science when it blames most of global warming on human activity -- specifically CO2 emissions.

My suspicion rose when the United Nations hurried a summary of the IPCC findings before the report itself was to be made public in May. Was the timing a deliberate attempt to take a free ride on media exposure of the Oscar-winning movie? I got even more suspicious when I learned the summary report was written not by scientists but U.N. bureaucrats. Why rush a summary for public view when it is impossible for the public to determine if the summary reflects the report's content accurately?

To my amazement, I found several scientists whose names would appear as supporters of the IPCC report have since asked to have their names removed from the final report. Paul Reiter of Paris Pasteur Institute even threatened to sue. He is not a climatologist; not even a meteorologist. But he is a scientist, an expert in malaria who disagrees with the science behind the U.N. report. He calls it a "sham" because it included names of scientists who disagreed with the findings and who resigned. "That is how they make it seem all the top scientists are agreed," he says. His name was removed only after he threatened legal action.

Just because one is a scientist, one doesn't become an instant climatologist. Many cited in the IPCC report were meteorologists who have trouble predicting local weather beyond a couple of days even with live satellite support from the heavens.

A climatologist is a different breed of scientist who studies precipitation cycles, solar activity, and global shifts through long periods of time gleaned from geological discoveries, including those from ice core samples.

Climatologists have discovered grapes were growing in Greenland, which was indeed green, during the Medieval Warm Period (AD 800-1300). Then came the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1900) and Greenland turned white and a new warming period began. In a study published in 2003, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration concluded that solar radiation has increased 0.05 percent per decade since the 1070s.

Two separate NASA landings on Mars showed the ice cap at the southern pole (frozen CO2) has been receding as a result of solar activity. If the sun is warming Mars it should also be warming the Earth unless some unknown phenomenon directs any increase in solar radiation only toward Mars.

There is some hope, however, that the human-induced global warming doctrine may end up in the ash bin of history. London's TV Channel 4 recently aired a documentary called "The Great Global Warming Scandal." According to film reviews, it is a devastating blow to the U.N. report and to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." Scientists from MIT and major universities in various countries, including some whose names also appear in the U.N. report, explain in plain language that the current warming of the globe results from natural solar cycles -- not from human activity. In fact, the globe will begin cooling again soon as solar flares diminish as they have done for millennia. I'll be watching to see if the documentary will find its way to U.S. TV channels.

ALI F. SEVIN

Fort Washington, Md.