Rady Ananda
Activist Post
January 28, 2012
Today, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from 16 distinguished scientists addressed to political candidates entitled, No Need to Panic About Global Warming.
“Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now,” they write, a fact that “is known to the warming establishment…”
The piece directly attacks the notion that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the globe, concluding with:
Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of ‘incontrovertible’ evidence.
The term ‘incontrovertible’ refers to a policy statement of the American Physical Society which states, “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.”
These guys are no lightweights. The group includes a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, the aerospace engineer who designed Voyager, past and present editors of scientific journals; professors from Princeton, Cambridge and MIT, and the president of the World Federation of Scientists.
This letter propels my shift from ardent warmist to lukewarmist, to, eventually, full blown skeptic, it seems.
In 2006, I was amused at the irony of my global warming action on a street corner in frigid temperatures, though I understood that anecdotal data is not a mathematically sound method of discerning trends. A slick patch of ice at the curb prompted warnings from me that people heeded probably far more than my warmist sign. My inner sadist was even more amused when people didn’t absorb my ice patch warning, though I still feel a little guilty by the hurt look in one guy’s eyes when he caught me snickering as he slip-slided away.
My own doubts about global warming did not begin until Climategate 2009, when the University of East Anglia was caught publishing false data showing temperature increases. Significant errors in a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where it grossly exaggerated glacial retreat, also raised a question.
But I held fast to the belief that global warming must be real because forests are being denuded, deserts are growing, mass tracts of prairie and wetlands are being converted to asphalt and concrete, and the toxicity of our atmosphere is directly attributable to 15 centuries of military and industrial pollution.
In 2010, an independent investigative body told the IPCC to stop lobbying on behalf of global warming programs. Members of the IPCC were also ordered to reveal their financial connections to such programs. In the end, the warmists were found innocent of any wrongdoing.
Rady Ananda is an investigative reporter and researcher in the areas of health, environment, politics, and civil liberties. Her two websites, Food Freedom and COTO Report are essential reading.
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