The Global Warming Scam?

I gotta say I agree with this more than I do that creepy new free Youtube movie HOME. That thing was awful. And I was pretty disheartened back when I learned about how Al Gore is pretty much making a killing on carbon credits (which is such a crap idea to support in the first place, like buying your soul into heaven). You can’t just pay someone to use part of that money to plant a tree and suddenly the poison you put into the environment doesn’t count anymore.

I believe in environmentalism for the simple fact that its the right thing to do. I don’t need to be scared stupid with crap propaganda like the Day After Tomorrow. I certainly don’t need to hear that “humanity is a cancer” screed again either. That’s taking it more than a few steps too far. That’s like those wackos like Prince Phillip who said if he was going to be reincarnated he wanted to come back as a killer virus to wipe out the overpopulation. I think this documentary raises a valid point about the position some of these policies are forcing third world nations in to, and I’m certainly to glad to be more aware of that whole side of the story now.

I definitely think we need to detoxify our environment, and treat our planet with much greater respect. But I don’t think I can listen to the doom and gloom apocalyptic fear mongering stuff seriously anymore. I want to save species, protect wildlife and natural beauty, and definitely eat and live healthier. I think we do a lot more damage to other human beings, than we do to the Earth as a whole. I think we’re a lot more fragile, and as you look at the sky rocketing cancer rates I think that is the truly urgent reason to get things on track immediately, just in case you are the type who really does need to be threatened with mass extinction in order to do the right thing.

You can read all about the backlash here on the Wikipedia page about the film. Here’s how the filmmaker defends his piece in the Telegraph:

“On March 8, Channel 4 broadcast my programme. Since then, supporters of the theory of man-made global warming have published frothing criticism. I am attacked for using an “old” graph depicting temperature over the past 1,000 years. They say I should have used a “new” graph – one used by Al Gore, known as the “hockey stick”, because it looks like one.

But the hockey stick has been utterly discredited. The computer programme used to generate it was found to produce hockey-stick shapes even when fed random data (I refer readers to the work of McIntyre & McKitrick and to the Wegman Report, all available on the internet). Other than the discredited hockey stick, the graph used by us (and published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the standard, accepted record of temperature in this period.

A critic claims that one of the graphs cited by us, illustrating the extraordinarily close correlation between solar variation and temperature change, has since been “corrected”. It most certainly has not. The graph was produced by Prof Eigil Friis-Christensen, the head of the Danish National Space Centre, who says it still stands. But if the global-warmers don’t like that graph, there are plenty of others that say the same thing.

No one any longer seriously disputes the link between solar activity and temperature in earth’s climate history. I urge readers to look up on the net: Veizer, Geoscience Canada, 2005; and Soon, Geophysical Research Letters, 2005.

In the film, we used three graphs depicting temperature change in the 20th century. On one there was an error in the dates on the bottom. This was corrected for the second transmission of the programme, on More4, last Monday. It made no difference. Global-warmers can pick whichever graph they like. The problem for them remains the same. The temperature rise at the beginning of the century (prior to 1940, when human emissions of CO2 were relatively insignificant) was as great, most graphs show greater, than the temperature rise at the end of the century.

So what else do they hit me with? Prof Carl Wunsch, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who appeared in the film, later claimed he was duped into taking part. He was not.

The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks have been so feeble. The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide ‘drives’ the earth’s climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to admit, the ice-core data says the opposite. Temperature change always precedes changes in CO2 by several hundred years. Temperature drives CO2, not the other way round. The global-warmers do not deny this. They cannot.

During the post-war economic boom, while industrial emissions of CO2 went up, the temperature went down (hence the great global-cooling scare in the 1970s). Why? They say maybe the cooling was caused by SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were back then. Why isn’t it perishing cold?

Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong.”

All together, pretty interesting. And I still think that protecting our environment is a good thing, a great thing even. I just don’t want to see corporatism hijack another good cause, and pervert it into another cash cow that they’ll just milk dry, and leave dead on our front yard.

So what do you think? Did this video make you think of things any differently? Did you see HOME and think it was incredibly annoying too, btw? I think Planet Earth is by far the best of the best when it comes to an Environmental Doc. The images are so gorgeous, how much inspiration do we need to get our act together, anyway?