The Great Global Warming Hoax
Presentation to the TEA Party rally held at The Oregon State Capitol, April 15, 2010
by Gordon J. Fulks, PhD
Thank you for inviting me.
One of the foundations of American Democracy has been an adherence to basic honesty. Unlike totalitarian regimes that tell their people what to think and strongly suppress dissent, we permit an open marketplace of ideas and absolutely guarantee the right of every citizen to speak freely.
Unfortunately we have seen openness and honesty severely curtailed in recent years by those politicians and their supporters who realize that it is MUCH easier to convince people to do things against their own best interests if they do not know the facts.
Through substantial domination of the mainstream media, they say that those who call upon their government to reform are morons in the case of Tea Party participants or both morons and deniers in the case of scientists who won’t go along with Al Gore’s Global Warming.
Discussions between partisans on both sides usually degenerate into a war of words that certainly proves that the political climate is warming, while the earth’s climate is actually cooling.
Fortunately a recent event, largely ignored in the American press, has dramatically changed the Global Warming debate. The highest ranking proponents of climate catastrophe were caught in a scandal that has become known as ClimateGate. It involved the release of e-mails where scientists were discussing ways to control the scientific debate to make sure that their ideas prevailed.
They had become a sort of climate-cartel, rigging the debate. The “utter honesty” required of all scientists had long since sold out to political expediency and government contract dollars.
Doctoring data and working with others to exclude competitors does not meet the standards for honesty in any profession. Misusing scientific publications to allow publication of papers favorable to a particular point of view, while excluding other points of view, is especially damnable in science, because it prevents both the wide dissemination of newer and better ideas and the retirement of ideas that have run their course.
Scientific societies and university administrations that have become so interested in the $99 billion federal dollars (your tax dollars) spent on Global Warming that they are willing to support the politically correct over the scientifically defensible. This has eliminated ALL corrective actions against substandard scholarship.
It has also led to many attempts to persuade people that science, like politics, is governed by authority or consensus. This flies in the face of the history of science where individuals, working outside accepted belief and far beyond the accepted authorities have carried the day.
One of the earliest examples was Galileo, who suffered greatly at the hands of the Roman Inquisition. Albert Einstein, who was but a clerk in a law office, took on the 19th century Physics Establishment in a huge way.
The fundamental logic of science assumes that there exists an objective reality which can only be ascertained by honest evidence from rigorous independent testing.
Hence, nothing is ever settled until it is settled right. And everything is open to re-examination if someone believes that it has not been settled right.
Politicians fail to understand that real science requires real evidence. They can continue to pretend that their hypothesis was proved long ago. While that approach may work in politics, but it does NOT work in science.
The central theme of all Warmers is that our climate started to come apart in the middle of the 20th Century, due to man’s burning of fossil fuels. The central piece of evidence presented is Michael Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’ graph which shows an uneventful temperature history for the earth going back a thousand years, followed by a dramatic upturn in the 20th Century. The Wegman report to the National Academy of Sciences cited serious analytical errors in this temperature reconstruction.
A more recent reconstruction from Keith Briffa showing the same dramatic upturn was found to be based largely on a single and very unusual tree. For a scientist to base his conclusions on a single tree that he knows to be unrepresentative, is in my opinion, pure scientific fraud.
If that is pure fraud, what is the truth?
Many studies have shown the earth was clearly warmer a thousand and two thousand years ago during both the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. During the Roman Warm Period just before the birth of Christ, the great Carthaginian General Hannibal was able to march war elephants across mountain passes in the Alps. Such a feat is impossible today because of snow in the passes.
The Medieval Warm Period allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland. But in the colder period that followed, called the Little Ice Age, they were abruptly forced to leave or perish. They left behind one cemetery that is now permanently frozen because our climate is colder than it was then.
The earth started to slowly warm up from the Little Ice Age about 1830, and glaciers in the Alps started a gradual retreat that continued until recently.
Very recently we have seen glaciers in California, such as those on Mt. Shasta, grow dramatically.
Over the 20th Century, temperature data shows a globally averaged rise of about 0.5 C. Because this rise is so slight and the year to year variations so large, it is consistent with no net rise at all in the United States. There are two peaks in the United States temperature record, one during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and one at the end of the Grand Solar Maximum in the 1990s. The peaks are almost identical.
It became colder after the Second World War when we were greatly expanding our industrial production and escalating our burning of fossil fuels. But we did not warm up until the Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1977 which we now realize was due to a periodic shift in the Pacific Ocean, not to carbon dioxide.
The essential thing to understand is that the oceans contain the vast majority of mobile heat on this planet, not the atmosphere and therefore largely control our weather year to year, decade to decade, and even century to century. Most people have heard of the year to year cycle we call El Nino. The El Nino this winter gave us a generally warmer than usual winter in the Pacific Northwest while giving the rest of the country harsh cold conditions.
Over much longer periods, our climate experiences transitions to and from substantial ice ages. It is no coincidence that human civilization developed during one of the interglacial periods. These usually last about 10,000 years and are followed by 90,000 years of cold. We have had our 10,000 years of good luck and now face a long ice age.
Will the next ice age arrive when everyone parks his Hummer or Ford Expedition in favor of public transit? Hardly.
Even the most fanatical Warmers agree that Milankovitch Cycles involving slight changes in the Earth’s orbit are responsible for our very repetitive ice ages. Al Gore says that carbon dioxide plays a major role in these. But he fails to tell you that carbon dioxide follows changes in temperature by nearly a thousand years and is therefore a follower not a driver of our climate.
What about all the climate models that are said to predict disaster? They have all been dismal failures.
The celebrated meteorologist from MIT, Professor Richard Lindzen, says:
Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.
One of the standard fall-backs for Global Warmers is to insist that even if their theory is wrong, they are still doing so many good things for the planet that they should be allowed to continue with their scam.
BUT their political plans call for vast new taxes on energy that will seriously harm the average taxpayer and seriously damage our already damaged economy.
Furthermore, enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide is a huge benefit to every green plant and contributes significantly to our ability to grow enough food for the 6.5 billion people on this planet.
Saving the world from carbon dioxide is not the issue.
Saving the world from scientifically illiterate politicians is the issue.
Thank you for listening.
