Cool on the "Scientific Consensus" of Global Warming

In all likelihood, most Americans heard the scientists' cry for reform and the apoctolyptic warnings of planetary demise in last week's release of the 2007 Global Warming report.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said the report represented a tipping point in the accumulating data on climate change, even though the basic message of the document — that human activity is creating dangerous warming — was widely accepted.

"Feb. 2, 2007, will perhaps be remembered as the day" when global thinking about climate change moved from debate to action, he said. "The focus will shift from whether climate change is due to human activity, to what on earth are we going to do about it."

There seems to be full agreement that the earth is warming. However, in his recent article for the American Thinker, writer J.R. Dunn shrewdly raises a significant and apparently unanswered scientific question:

One curious element involves certain facts that, on first consideration, would appear to be crucial but never seem to come up in debate. I have spent several years trying to track down the actual values of two numbers - the annual amount of carbon dioxide emitted by all human activities, and the amount of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere. There are as many answers as there are sources, the first ranging from 3 billion to 28 billion tons, the second from 750 billion tons to 2.97 x 1012 tons, a number so large that there's no common English word for it. Variations of this size - up to three orders of magnitude - suggest a serious lack of basic knowledge. The fact that it never comes up suggests that scientists are well aware of this.

He also provides fascinating historical context for the current climate changes:

Despite the insistence of Al Gore and friends, this is far from the first time the Earth has ever passed through a climatic warming period. In fact, one occurred relatively recently, the medieval warm period, more commonly known as the Little Climatic Optimum (LCO), a period stretching roughly from the 10th to the 13th centuries, in which the average temperature was anything from 1 to 3 degrees centigrade higher than it is today.

Well, I can't quote the entire article here, but Mr. Dunn gives interesting details of the impact of the above mentioned Little Climatic Optimum, including its effect on crop fertility, health, travel and the plague. It really is worth a read.

And, there are still scientists willing to publicly oppose the global warming consensus. Quite a few, as a matter of fact. Dr. Timothy Ball, a Canadian climatologist, has been persecuted for standing up against the tide of global warming frenzy. His article, originally published in the Canada Free Press, is also well worth a read.

One wonders if anyone remembers the Global Cooling scare of the 1970s. Dr. Ball writes about it here:

Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has kn warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

I am not a scientist, in fact, I don't even have a very good mind for science, but since when did "scientific consensus" and "theories widely accepted by scientists" become equivalents for the scientific method and fact? I, for one, reject the popular theory that the sky is falling because Man is making the mercury rise...until it is proven using solid science rather than political hype.

Update: Someone at the Weather Channel is even suggesting that meteorologists who express skepticism that man has played a significant role in causing global warming and its alleged catastrophic ramifications, ought to be stripped of their AMS certification. Where is the tolerance, the freedom of speech, the space for meaningful debate here?