Walter E. Williams over at Townhall.com reminds us of the folly of making predictions about something so complex, we struggle to make models that are accurate one or two days in the future.
At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
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Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “… civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 “… somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Needless to say, all of this talk about man made global warming is nothing but pure conjecture based on incomplete and overly simplistic models. We can’t even properly model past weather events with current models and all of the data we have today. Argh.
Something that has always gotten me thinking about this whole global warming thing has been the actual temperature measurements. Recently, NASA admitted that it had made errors in evaluating global temperatures based on ground station errors, satellite data analysis problems and ocean ship measurements. And that’s with all of today’s modern technology. It’s hard for me to believe that between 1900 - 1950 (and even into the 1980’s) anyone could take a very accurate measurement of global temperature. Add to that, the fact that the predictions propose disaster with only a 1-2 degree increase, which I would think, is well within the margin of error of pre-1990’s technology (one could argue, as I did, that even with today’s technology, it’s hard to get it accurate).
Furthermore, what comprises a ‘global’ temperature’? Do you take measurements equidistant from one another all over the globe? No. You get as many readings from as many places as you can, control as best you can for interference, and average it out. That leaves places (especially the vast oceans) under represented, thus skewing the average towards more heavily populated and developed areas, which also tend to be warmer. One example of this is the fact that the huge land mass at the bottom of the earth (Antartica) has been cooling quite a bit over the last 35 years, but thanks to the above mentioned problems, these temperatures have not been properly represented in global temperature averages (considering, you can even say that such a thing as one ‘global temperature’ exists).
Lastly, I do not need to tell folks that closely follow the global warming debate that none of the computer models used to predict dire catastrophes take into account the biggest greenhouse gas on our planet: water vapor. Ever wonder why the folks living in desert regions layer their clothing? That’s because the air where they live is dry, thus, while it’s very hot during the day, at night the temperatures drop way down because there is little or no water vapor to hold in the heat from the daytime. In most desert regions daytime to nighttime temperature swings can be up to 30 or 40 degrees, with a common delta being around the low 20s.
And Al Gore want’s to ‘end the debate’ so we can start acting? You’ve got to be kidding. More on GW later.
