Posted by
iceage on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 7:15:18 PM
posted from iceagenow.com
The Politics of Global Warming
Very good interview with climatologist
Dr. Timothy Ball in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
"There is another ice age coming," says Ball
10 Feb 07 - "Timothy Ball is no wishy-washy skeptic of global warming. The Canadian climatologist, who has a Ph.D. in climatology from the University of London and taught at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, says that the widely propagated "fact" that humans are contributing to global warming is the "greatest deception in the history of science."
"Ball has made no friends among global warming alarmists by saying that global warming is caused by the sun, that global warming will be good for us and that the Kyoto Protocol ""is a political solution to a nonexistent problem without scientific justification."
"Needless to say, Ball strongly disagrees with the findings of the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which on Feb. 2 concluded that it is ""very likely"" that global warming is the result of human activity.
"I talked to Ball by phone on Feb. 6 from his home on in Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, which the good-humored scientist likes to point out was connected to the mainland 8,000 years ago when the sea level was 500 feet lower.
"Q: The mainstream media would have us believe that the science of global warming is now settled by the latest IPCC report. Is it true?
"A: No. It’’s absolutely false. As soon as people start saying something’’s settled, it’’s usually that they don’’t want to talk about it anymore. It’’s very, very far from settled. The IPCC is a purely political setup.
"Q: Why should we be leery of the IPCC’s report -- or the summary of the report?
"A: Well, because the report is the end product of a political agenda, and it is the political agenda of both the extreme environmentalists who of course think we are destroying the world. But it’’s also the political agenda of a group of people ... who believe that industrialization and development and capitalism and the Western way is a terrible system and they want to bring it down.
"Q: What is your strongest or best argument that GW is not ""very likely"" to be caused by SUVs and Al Gore’’s private planes?
"A: I guess the best argument is that global warming has occurred, but it began in 1680, if you want to take the latest long-term warming, and the climate changes all the time. It began in 1680, in the middle of what’’s called ""The Little Ice Age"" when there was three feet of ice on the Thames River in London. And the demand for furs of course drove the fur trade. The world has warmed up until recently, and that warming trend doesn’’t fit with the CO2 record at all; it fits with the sun-spot data. Of course they are ignoring the sun because they want to focus on CO2.
"The other thing that you are seeing going on is that they have switched from talking about global warming to talking about climate change. The reason for that is since 1998 the global temperature has gone down -- only marginally, but it has gone down. In the meantime, of course, CO2 has increased in the atmosphere and human production has increased. So you’’ve got what Huxley called the great bane of science -- ""a lovely hypothesis destroyed by an ugly fact."" So by switching to climate change, it allows them to point at any weather event -- whether it’’s warming, cooling, hotter, dryer, wetter, windier, whatever -- and say it is due to humans. Of course, it’’s absolutely rubbish. .
"Q: Is the rising CO2 level the cause of global warming or the result of it?
"A: That’s a very good question because in the theory the claim is that if CO2 goes up, temperature will go up. The ice core record of the last 420,000 years shows exactly the opposite. It shows that the temperature changes before the CO2. So the fundamental assumption of the theory is wrong. That means the theory is wrong.
"Q: Why are sea levels rising and should we worry?
"A: Sea levels have been rising for the last 10,000 years. In fact, 8,000 years ago, sea level was almost 500 feet lower than it is today. It’’s been rising gradually over that time. It’’s risen very slightly in the modern record, but it has risen no more rapidly than it has in the last 8,000 years.
"Q: Is it not inevitable that we will have another ice age?
"A: Yes, I think there is another ice age coming, because the major causes of the ice ages are changes in the orbit of the Earth around the sun and changes in the tilt of the Earth. Those are things we’ve known about for 150 years, but we’re still telling our students that the orbit around the sun is a fixed elliptical orbit and the tilt is an unchanging 23.5 degrees. Neither of those things are correct."
See entire interview by Bill Steigerwald at:
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/steigerwald//s_492572.html
Thanks to Jim Swanik for this link