Climate Change – What do we really know?

In July 2013 I published a blog titled “Global Warming”. We do not hear that term today, 6 years later. Now “Climate Change” is in vogue. In 2006 Al Gore from the USA travelled around promoting something called “An Inconvenient Truth”. It was all about global warming and the impact it was having on the world. A drastic, cataclysmic type impact.

In my last blog I said my next article, this one, would focus on science. With climate change the number 2 issue facing Canadians this election (Global News report, Oct 9) I felt it is timely to relook at this issue.

One afternoon last week as I drove through Barrie, school kids were out walking the streets with posters related to climate change. Probably a lot of this recent activity is a result of Greta Thunberg’s speech at the United Nations on September 23rd. She is a 16 year old from Sweden who’s speech hinted at ‘us’ as evil, destroying her world, and that ‘we’ can never be forgiven. She and many others are very passionate about the climate change issue.

Recently a friend shared an article from a climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe, who has been working in this field for many years. Some of you may know her husband, Andrew Farley, a pastor who speaks on the WDCX radio station weekly. There is a lot of research in the climate change field by many scientists, including Katherine, resulting in much bad news.

Recently our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, as part of his re-election campaign was in the far north talking about climate change, as a bad thing. If I lived in the far north I think that I would welcome climate change (global warming) as it means the north would be warming, growing larger trees, becoming farm land, providing jobs and helping the northern economy. But, that is my opinion.

Let’s try to ignore all the opinion and hype for a few minutes and look at some of the history and facts. From that you can draw your own conclusion. I am going to focus primarily on those who say mankind is not the cause of climate change. I am doing this as that is the ‘underdog’ today, and also because that is what I believe from the research I have done. Having some knowledge is always better than just following the crowd which is what a lot of people, especially the young, are doing. Certainly the media would not build up the issue; they only tell what is really happening around the world, and are perfectly un-biased. NOT!

• In 2013 Forbes magazine did a survey of earth scientists and engineers. 36% said they think mankind is causing global warming problems. That is only 1/3 of scientists!
• In 2018 Forbes published a new report, not mentioning the previous one but now focusing on the increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air. CO2 is the primary component of global warming (climate change).
• Mr Gore, 2006, used a chart from NASA which showed the ocean temperature have risen about 0.7oC in the past 140 years.
• ScienceDaily on July 17 2019 published an article explaining how inaccurate temperature measurement were for the first half of this time period. Do we really know the temperature change?
• Nature magazine published an article on Oct 31, 2018 claiming the oceans are warming drastically due to man-made emissions. On Sept 25, 2019 they retracted (deleted/removed) that article. Why? They are not warming as previously stated.
• Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, commenting on the Nature article said “Climatology is littered with examples of bad statistics, going back to the infamous Hockey Stick graph and beyond.” NOTE – the hockey stick graph refers to Al Gore’s dire presentation I previously mentioned.
• Sadly, whenever something is retracted it is a very small article and certainly not on the front page, so few people see it and go on believing the previous article’s untruth.
• Principia Scientific International, Feb 9, 2017 has an article written by an industrial chemist explaining why carbon dioxide cannot be causing the warming of our oceans. He summarizes his explanation by saying “In short, our influence on our climate, even if we really tried, is minuscule!”
• American Thinker published an article on Aug 4, 2014 which looked at climate change over the past 120 years, from mankind’s perspective. The article reported that the New York Times in Feb 1895 published an article saying geologists thought the world is freezing up, an ice age is coming. By 1902 the glaciers were melting which was bad news. 1912 they flipped back to an approaching ice age and in 1923 the Chicago Tribune said the “Arctic ice will wipe out Canada.” The Washington Post said the same in 1923. By 1929 the Los Angeles Times said we are getting warmer again. It goes on and on, every 5 years or so, flipping between warming and cooling. We seem to be in an extended warming period right now, at least from the media’s voice.
• “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, 2006.
• “Global-warming ‘proof’ is evaporating.  The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as ‘proof’ of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.” as published in the New York Post, Dec 5, 2013.
• New York Times, Aug 10, 1969, article by biologist Paul Ehrlich claiming it is already too late to stop the disaster of environmental problems. He claims everyone will be dead in 20 years (by 1989) “unless we are extremely lucky”.
• In many places around the earth there are active volcanoes. 20 or more are erupting all the time, continuously spewing ‘green house’ gases into the atmosphere. Around 70 a year. The United States Geological Society (USGS) says there are 1,500 active volcanoes world wide and these do not include the ones deep under the oceans.
• USGS states man-made machines create far more gases than volcanoes each year, which is big part of the justification that mankind is causing the perceived problem.

There are scientists on all slides of this issue: warming is happening and mankind is the cause; it is not happening; it is just a cycle of nature; it is happening but mankind is not the cause, …

• Some additional thoughts:
  For those who believe in evolution, the earth was much hotter in the past. If we plotted the temperature over the last 3.45 billions years if would show a strong line down!
• Oil companies and geologists in the far north have found fossils and petrified trees which are far far larger than any today. Even above the arctic circle where no trees grow today. Thus the land was far warmer in the past than today, and it was a thriving tropical world.
• All Canada and part of USA, not to mention parts of many other countries, were once under ice and snow from the ice age a few thousand years ago. The climate has been warming since then. If not we would not be here today.
• Plants breathe in CO2 the main ‘greenhouse gas’ which supposedly causes global warming. More CO2 means the plants will grow bigger, maybe faster. This is good for mankind as there are concerns we are cutting down too many forests. Thus in some ways more CO2 will help us.
• Look at a map of the world. Look at how much land in the north is unused. Look at Canada and see that almost all people live along the southern border. If Canada’s climate where to warm we would have much more agriculture. We could grow more crops. We could have more and bigger forests in the north. This all sound good for us. I know there are problems for people in warmer climate. I am not denying that. I am just saying there are benefits as well as costs. People in warmer climate will need to move north.

Finally, for those who are believers in the God of the Bible, we can look at His perspective. The Bible does talk about ‘end times’ and drastic changes in the earth. Climate change could very well be a part of that. The Bible contains no language to hint that mankind is the cause. The Bible talks about all nature groaning and struggling. Do we cause earthquakes to increase? Do we cause volcanic activity or more hurricanes and tsunami’s? I’ve not heard we cause these. It seems there is evidence on both sides of the climate change issue. Only time will tell the truth, as it always does!

I will conclude with some other huge concerns we have had. Remember the hole in the Ozone layer over Antarctica? It was growing and going to cause disaster. How about acid rain killing all our fish? The diseases of SARS, West Nile, H1N1, etc. The world is over populated and fresh water is running in short supply. It seems there is always some looming disaster the media wants us to focus our attention on, and be afraid of. Certainly we can work to solve these problems and we have. None of them have been as severe as predicted. Likewise with climate change – doom and gloom is how it appears on the surface. We will see in 10-15 years if the focus shifts elsewhere. Maybe the focus will be meteors from space that will impact earth and destroy us, so we must act fast.