No Basis In Reality
Daniel Botkin has been studying the environment for 40 years or so. His credentials are impressive: he is president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He developed a computer model of forest growth that is widely used by global warming scientists. And he is openly declaring the doomsayers from the true believers in global warming is not based in science – or even in reality.
Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life–ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.
Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20% to 30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming–a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age–saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.
We're also warned that tropical diseases are going to spread, and that we can expect malaria and encephalitis epidemics. But scientific papers by Prof. Sarah Randolph of Oxford University show that temperature changes do not correlate well with changes in the distribution or frequency of these diseases; warming has not broadened their distribution and is highly unlikely to do so in the future, global warming or not.
The key point here is that living things respond to many factors in addition to temperature and rainfall. In most cases, however, climate-modeling-based forecasts look primarily at temperature alone, or temperature and precipitation only. You might ask, "Isn't this enough to forecast changes in the distribution of species?" Ask a mockingbird. The New York Times recently published an answer to a query about why mockingbirds were becoming common in Manhattan. The expert answer was: food–an exotic plant species that mockingbirds like to eat had spread to New York City. It was this, not temperature or rainfall, the expert said, that caused the change in mockingbird geography.
He decries the dramatic yet baseless pronouncements and says that many of the people sounding the loudest alarms know full well that they are not telling the truth:
Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.
One can dryly note that this same tactic is widely used in totalitarian regimes. Kind of a striking resemblance at that. Read the whole thing. Botkin does not doubt there is warming, but believe the "scientists" who are screeching warnings of doom are leading society down a very bad path indeed. Bad science makes bad policy. What Botkin is worried about – as I am – is that the "solutions" to global warming being touted so passionately are actually more harmful to the earth than a few degrees of temperature. (Botkin also mentions the orangutans as an example.) The biofuels fraud is only one example I have posted about. The much-praised "alternative energy" actually produces more carbon emissions than petroleum-based fuels. So you have a calculated deception leading to what is actually a worse situation.
Go read what Botkin wrote.
Energy, Environment, Junk Science, Left Wing, Science | Gaius October 21, 2007
By NortonPete, October 21, 2007 @ 8:29 am
I did read the full text It was an easy read and thanks for the find.
I think I can send this to a few people who might be reasoned with.
But sadly there are those who feel that if lightening burns down a forest its ok because its natural, but if man builds a fire in his fireplace its pollution.