Nothing Changes..... Except Maybe the Weather

"Global ________ presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. Your stake in the decision we make concerning it is of ultimate importance: the survival of ourselves, our children, our species."

These words could have been but were not written by Al Gore.

These words could have been but were not written by a "scientific" member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

These words were in fact written by Lowell Ponte, an influential member of the International Research Technology Corporation. Mr. Ponte wrote these words in 1975, and the missing word from the above passage was not warming. The missing word was COOLING.

I have just finished the introduction to Ian Plimer's book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science, and I am hooked to say the least.

Here a few gems from the introduction:

"To reduce modern climate change to one variable (CO2) or, more correctly, a small proportion of one variable (i.e. human-produced CO2) is not science, especially as it requires abandoning all we know about planet Earth, the Sun, and the cosmos."

"Temperature measurements using ground-based thermometers, ballon-mounted radiosondes and satellite-mounted microwave sensing units all show that no warming has occurred since 1998. Once the urban heat island effect with ground thermometers and the 1998 El Nino are considered, there has been little warming since 1979."

"If we change the time scale and look at the last 6 million years, for 3 million years it was warmer than now. For the other 3 million years there was an increase in the magnitude of high-frequency warm and cold cycles. During the last three warm cycles, it was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than now. Past natural climate changes have been partly cyclical and partly unpredictable and have nothing to do with human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere."