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Exposing the global warming racket
By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, February 18, 2007
We've seen the ominous imagery a thousand times -- the smoke-belching power
plants, huge cliffs of ice cascading into the sea and sad polar bears adrift
on shriveling ice floes. We've had the official Gospel of Catastrophic
Global Climate Change preached at us so often by the mainstream media our
pets have it memorized. All together now: The planet is getting hotter.
Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Fragile species are
disappearing. Coral reefs are dying. Hurricanes are more powerful. Droughts
are more prolonged. Floods and heavy rainstorms are more numerous.
According to Al Gore and a chorus of the planet's top climate scientists,
blame for all of the above -- plus every bad, annoying or odd natural event
that happens on Earth from now until the Sun implodes -- can be pinned with
certainty on global warming caused by 200 years of mankind spewing excess
CO2 into the air. But is it really true that New York City will be
two-stories deep in ocean water in a century or two? No one knows. Despite
what Professor Gore says, the science of climate change is still far too
complex and uncertain for most scientists to understand the present, much
less predict the distant future. Most ordinary citizens -- i.e., the
scientifically challenged -- are even more in the dark about what or whom
to believe about global warming, thanks in large part to the mainstream
media, which, with few exceptions, have become willing press agents for
global warming alarmists. But most people would stop their global worrying
if they looked at the big picture and long run. For starters, we are at the
tail end of an ice age that began about 40 million years ago. Ice sheets
like the one that covered most of the Northern Hemisphere until about
20,000 years ago have come and gone in 40,000- and 100,000-year cycles.
Unless man-spewn greenhouse gases do raise Earth's temperature and keep it
there permanently, or unless Mother Earth fixes her own wobbly axis or
smooths out her eccentric orbit around the sun, we have a rendezvous with a
future ice age no matter how many carbon taxes we implement or SUVs we
drive. Also, please stop worrying about the planet's 67,000-plus glaciers
melting. Glaciers have retreated and advanced for eons. If every glacier
not on Greenland or Antarctica disappeared in 1,000 years -- and no one is
saying they will -- sea level would rise about 18 inches. By the way, about
90 percent of all of Earth's ice is in Antarctica -- and it's not
shrinking. As for those rising sea levels? It's not so scary if you know
they've been rising for the last 18,000 years -- when they were about 400
feet lower -- thanks to the melting of millions of square miles of glaciers
that existed during the last ice age. In the past 100 years, according to
global warming worrywarts, average sea levels have gone up about 174
millimeters -- 1.7 millimeters a year. That's .06 inches. Not too
impressive when you know the Himalayas are still rising an average of
nearly 5 millimeters each year and Australia is drifting toward the tropics
at about 50 millimeters per year. Of course, according to the global
warming lobby, if we don't do something now to slow CO2 production, sea
levels will surge and life is going to get hotter and harder for our
grandchildren, who because of fossil-fuelish mankind will never get to hug
a polar bear. But as we all know -- or should by now -- there are five
times as many polar bears today as there were 50 years ago. Bill
Steigerwald is the Trib's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983.
E-mail him at: [email hidden].