Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > August > 22
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
It’s hot and we’re all dying. Call Al.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The global warming industry is a titter at the prospect that an assembled panel of experts testifying under the Gold Dome cast doubt on the statistical models that Al Gore and other predictors of environmental doom represent as the gospel. “In the media, we hear the gloom and doom side,” said the chairman of the Georgia House’s energy, utilities and telecommunications committee, Rep. Jeff Lewis (R-White), but “there is alternative information out there.”
Georgia’s hearing Tuesday included three of the nation’s leading experts questioning the certainty of global warming. One of them, John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said the data does not support dire predictions that greenhouse gases will produce a massive warming of the earth’s temperatures over the next century. In fact, he said, temperatures in Georgia and Alabama have cooled over the past century. “I plow through the data from scratch,” said Christy. “I don’t see the catastrophes happening.”
“I believe this issue is being driven by hysteria right now,” said Patrick Michaels, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute in Washington.
While mass hysteria is the rule, some rational voices are being heard. Robert J. Samuelson, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Washington Post, took the magazine to task in the Aug. 20-27 issue for its presentation of the global warming story. Presenting it as good guys-vs. bad “can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story,” he wrote. Warming has occurred, he wrote, but the “question is what to do about it.”
Count me among the global warming skeptics. Hurricane Dean hits Mexico. A week ago we couldn’t have predicted that with absolute certainty. The results we get are based on the data fed into the models. The hysteria is way premature.
