Irena Sendler died this week. You probably haven't heard of her. She was a Polish social worker in WWII tasked with helping the Jewish people forced into Warsaw's ghettos by the occupying Nazis. 500,000 Jews were made to live in an incredibly small area not built to hold that kind of population, resulting in outbreaks of various diseases. The Nazis didn't care. To them, the ghetto was simply a staging area, as the Jews were all to be sent to concentration camps for extermination.
Ms. Sendler soon took on a different mission, however. As the Nazi extermination plan became evident, she became part of a group of people who quietly smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto and hid them with Christian families. They used ambulances, hiding children under gurneys, in burlap sacks, little ones in toolboxes and older ones in coffins when necessary.
When her activities were found out, the Gestapo arrested her, tortured her and when she wouldn't give up her contacts or the location of the list of rescued children she'd kept, they slated her for death. Fortunately, her fellow conspirators were able to bribe a guard and get her out.
She continued saving children and in all was credited with having saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi gas chambers. The real names of the children and their family information she kept buried in a jar in a friend's garden.
She was never proud of her amazing acts. "In 2005 Irena Sendler reflected: 'We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true – I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little. I could have done more. This regret will follow me to my death.'"
Of all the tragedies of Irena's story, one is very recent. Her very real, very courageous actions should have been honored in 2007 with a Nobel Peace Price. She had been nominated for it. Instead, the prize went to a man who made a partially fictional slide show on global warming. Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
As you can see above, I'm not a holocaust denier. I also believe we landed on the moon and that the earth is spherical in shape. People who question human-caused global warming are often likened to people who hold irrational beliefs. That's simply a pressure tactic, along with a way of trying to control the dialogue. I don't give in to pressure, only to facts.
What are the facts about Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"? His slide presentation, book, and movie are all seriously misleading. For a brief but excellent review of 25 misrepresentations in the book, visit Iain Murray's article, "
Gorey Truths." One of the big shockers Gore used was the now famous "Hockey Stick" graph showing mean temperature changes in the Northern hemisphere over the last millennium. That graph has been thoroughly debunked. For a very readable explanation, see Orson Scott Card's "
All in a Good Cause." For a deeper scientific treatment of the issue, see Steve McIntyre's work on the issue
here. How about the impressive hydraulic lift shot in the movie version of "An Inconvenient Truth" when Al Gore shows a graph that correlates carbon dioxide levels to temperature for hundreds of thousands of years? He chose the scale very carefully; when you zoom in on that graph, in most cases temperature actually rises before carbon dioxide levels do, sometimes as much as a millennium before.
Solar activity correlates much better to temperature changes than carbon dioxide levels do.
For graphs showing this correlation, please visit
here and
here.
In fact, Gore's slide show is full of pseudo science, questionable data and outright lies designed to stir people up. The goal seems to be twofold. First, Gore is making a lot of money from the panic from various sources, including a
green hedge fund that gives him a huge stake in keeping the global panic going. Secondly, Gore and other global warming activists seem very committed to global socialism, and the global warming scare is a perfect vehicle for the
institution of socialist policies. How bold is that claim? Not very, if you listen to
Christine Stewart, Canada's former environment minister: "Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." On another occasion, she said, "No matter if the science is all phony, there is still collateral environmental benefits to global warming policies."
What about all that scientific consensus on human-caused global warming? Consensus is a political term in this case. Science isn't about consensus. It's about proposing a hypothesis, confirming or disproving that hypothesis through experiment and other data collection, and providing that research to the scientific community. If the proof can be replicated independently and repeatedly, and the hypothesis describes and accurately predicts real world phenomena, it becomes a theory. That theory stands only until a better one comes along. Even allowing the use of the phrase scientific consensus, however, Mr. Gore has a significant problem, as discussed in detail in point 24 of Iain Murray's article, "
Gorey Truths." There really isn't any consensus at all.
Finally, much of the scare about global warming is based on projections about the future created by computer models. These models, again according to Al Gore, show that human interference is much stronger than any natural cycles. Really? Somehow I doubt that even the worldwide output of every tailpipe and smokestack in the world compares to the power of the sun. "T
he Sun's energy output is about equal to 77 billion megatons every second. The entire power-generating capacity of the earth equals about 60,000 megatons per year, so in one second the Sun produces over a million years' worth of energy for the earth. If the Sun derived its energy by burning coal, it would take only 18 hours to burn a mass of coal equal to the earth. And the Sun has been doing this for 4.6 billion years. " I digress, however. Simply put, the models global warming activists use are flawed. There hasn't been any global temperature increase since 1998 or so. From 1998 to 2007 is the warmest decade on record,
they say, and then attribute that not to human causes, but to the Pacific current El Nino. Currently, global warming is stalled by the cooler current, La Nina. Oh, and by the way,
new ocean data added to warming models say the earth may not warm for ten or fifteen years, but after that, it's going to skyrocket. Maybe. NASA's deep ocean probes meant to prove global oceanic temperature rise seem to be indicating just the opposite, and we may be headed into a period of global cooling.
The short version is this: The more hard data scientists obtain, the less accurate previous models of warming are shown to be. Also, the data seems to indicate natural factors solidly override any hypothesized human-caused ones. Perhaps Nature likes to make a liar out of Al Gore. In any case, I fail to believe the models, because I simply don't think we have enough data to be sure of anything yet, and I don't think our models are able to handle a system as complex as global weather. This is something
global warming activists work hard to suppress.
My opinion on Global Warming falls very much in line with Michael Crichton's Author's Message in
State of Fear:
"We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history, to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it. In every debate, all sides overstate the extent of existing knowledge and its degree of certainty.
"Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century. The computer models vary by 400 percent, de facto proof that nobody knows; and
"Before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it is reasonable to require that those models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years. Twenty would be better."
Yes, he's a science fiction writer, but he also happens to be a trained scientist.
I do not know what the future holds. I submit that no one else does either, and that we need to work harder to find out before we do anything that would cripple the already weakened U.S. economy or prevent developing nations from producing and using the energy they need to join the modern world. Hysteria about and faith in global warming prophecies should be replaced with the healthy skepticism any critical thinker should use in evaluating scientific data. There's enough contradictory evidence to make a reasonable person sincerely question what the media and Al Gore tells her.
I question Mr. Gore's data, his methods and his motivation as I should and anyone should. I know Irena Sandler saved 2,500 Jewish children. Her work isn't doubted except by actual Holocaust deniers. So, as I join in mourning her passing, I also find it tragic that her much more deserving work didn't win her the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
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