Nobel Peace Dies, or Why We Must Change on Climate Change
By Tom Syverson

November 2007

I remember when I stopped believing in the Nobel Peace Prize. When I was much younger and much more naïve, I always thought that it was the highest and most important honor one could receive, in the whole wide world. But as soon as I was old enough to understand the basic facts concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict, the sight of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat holding the “prize” alongside Yitzhak Rabin was quite enough for me. Then you add into the mix such high-caliber individuals as the inept Jimmy Carter, the fraudulent hack Rigoberta Menchu, and most recently the smug madman Al Gore. There is increasingly no good reason to think that winning the Nobel Peace Prize means anything anymore.

The timing of Gore’s “prize” was ironic, to say the least. Only three days prior to winning his “prize,” the British High Court ruled that teachers would no longer be allowed to show Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to students without issuing a disclaimer. The disclaimer would inform students that the film is a biased and partisan film that contains nine serious factual inaccuracies. The court made its decision based on evidence proving these inaccuracies as well as Gore’s classic quote, “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous [global warming] is.” The film is certainly an “over-representation,” but it is hardly factual. The film indicates that:

1) Global warming is responsible for the retreat of the Alpine glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro, when in fact scientists have conclusively demonstrated that there is no such link
2) Fluctuations in carbon dioxide levels always precede changes in global temperatures, when in fact the complete opposite is true: changes in global temperatures have always come before changes in carbon dioxide levels
3) Hurricane Katrina is somehow linked to global warming, when in fact there is substantial scientific evidence indicating that global temperatures have had no effect on hurricane frequency or intensity
4) Lake Chad is drying up because of global warming, when in fact it is drying up because of land use practices, not to mention Central Africa is currently experiencing a significantly prolonged wet period
5) Polar bears are drowning as a result of global warming, when in fact the only documented evidence of polar bears drowning occurred during an extraordinary storm and the polar bear population is actually growing steadily
6) Global warming threatens to halt the Gulf Stream and bring on a new ice age, when the vast majority of scientists who have studied the issue find the scenario highly unlikely
7) Coral reefs are being destroyed by bleaching as a result of global warming, when in fact bleaching is a natural process in which coral selects ideal symbiotic algae
Greenland is in danger of substantial ice melting that would raise sea levels by 20 feet, when in fact the scientific consensus holds that any ice melt in Greenland would be gradual and it would take centuries for sea levels to rise importantly
9) The Antarctic ice shelf is melting, when in fact only a small portion of the entire ice shelf is getting warmer and melting, with the vast majority of it growing at record levels because of a prolonged cold period

I’m not a climatologist, or a meteorologist, or anything but an undergraduate Astronomy minor. Unlike Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Melissa Ethridge, I will not pretend to have magically become a scholar of atmospheric science overnight just because of the political nature of the issue. But I can tell you what other scientists are talking about, and why you are literally being lied to about global warming.

I would like to be clear about something first. I do not deny that global temperatures have risen in recent years, and very few qualified scientists deny this either (although some do, with evidence to back it up). The idea that global temperatures are rising, that the planet is currently warming, is a well-established fact. However, the question is over what the cause in this global rise in temperatures actually is and what effect it will have on human life in the coming years. The contention of a film like An Inconvenient Truth is that global temperatures are rising drastically and catastrophically because of human activity. What may surprise many people is that some of the most prominent scientists in the world actually passionately disagree with this claim and there are enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary.

Contrary to what Gore’s propaganda film would lead you to believe, there is absolutely no scientific consensus on the theory of climate change as a result of human activity (hereon referred to as the “Gore Theory”). In fact, more than 500 scientists have published peer-reviewed evidence refuting one or more crucial aspects of the Gore Theory. Published in journals like Science, Nature, and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientific papers include evidence indicating at least one of the following:

1) That a natural moderate 1,500 year climate cycle has produced over a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age
2) That the current warming is linked strongly to changes in the sun’s irradiance
3) That sea levels are failing to rise in any important way
4) That storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with the current warming than with previous warmings
5) That human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat
6) That corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate

The easiest way to understand why human activity could not possibly be the cause of rising global temperatures is to examine the composition of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The late meteorologist Augie Auer explains that there are several different types of greenhouse gases, including water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, etc.

Water vapour is responsible for 95% of Earth’s greenhouse effect. The other greenhouse gasses make up the remaining 5%, with carbon dioxide at 3.6%. However, the vast majority of this carbon dioxide is not the result of human activity. In fact, only 3.2% of all carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from humans. Therefore human-related carbon dioxide makes up only 0.12% of the total volume of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Other human-related greenhouse gasses make up similarly insignificant percentages of total greenhouse gasses: nitrogen dioxide 0.047% and methane 0.066%.

“That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then,” Auer says. He compares the ridiculousness of humans’ changing global temperatures with greenhouse gases to trying to change the temperature of an entire bathtub with a single drop of water. He says, “It’s all going to be a joke in five years…it is time to attack the myth of global warming.”

Auer is not the only prominent scientist to disagree with the Gore Theory. Dr. William Gray is one of the world’s foremost meteorologists and a pioneer of seasonal hurricane forecasting. He has called the Gore Theory “ridiculous,” “brainwashing,” and the result of “people who don’t understand how the atmosphere works.”

On the same day that Gore was awarded his “prize,” Dr. Gray said in an enormous lecture at the University of North Carolina, “We’re brainwashing our children. They’re going to see the Gore movie and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.” Similar to the comment made by Auer, Dr. Gray added, “We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was.”

The man who founded The Weather Channel, John Coleman, says almost the same exact thing. He calls the Gore Theory “the greatest scam in history” and one that will be understood as such in a decade or two. He also goes a long way to explain how we got here, with the Gore Theory being treated by the media as scientific fact:

“Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming…their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus. Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild ‘scientific’ scenario of the civilization threatening environmental
consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda.”

To be honest, I could ramble on and on about the enormous amounts of evidence that I have read about contradicting the Gore Theory and the endless list of scientists who oppose the idea of man-made global warming. I plan on, and am in the middle of, writing more articles on the subject. It is just astonishing how well-accepted and poorly understood the Gore Theory actually is.

It’s time for politicians, the media, the celebrity elite, and more of the scientific community to start being honest about this issue. It is unfortunate that so many Americans, both young and old, have blindly listened to the fantastical apocalyptic proclamations made by Hollywood and the twisted information from biased political sources like An Inconvenient Truth and the IPCC. It is also unfortunate that such a large amount of scientists are so motivated by self-interest that they will trade their scientific integrity for politically-based research grants.

In some cases, I have read essays by scientists discussing idea that it is acceptable to lie to the public about climate change because it advances certain aspects of the environmentalist agenda. No matter what your opinions are on environmentalism and how to best solve Nature’s problems, surely you agree that blatantly lying to the public to advance the Green agenda is unacceptable. We all love the planet and want to protect it, but it is counterproductive and just plain wrong to motivate people simply by lying to them. It is an affront to science and a disgrace
to democracy.