Global warming predictions challenged

WASHINGTON: John Coleman, the founder of American TV’s Weather Channel, has challenged Al Gore’s dire predictions that the planet is in peril because of global warming.

In a speech to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, Coleman said, “There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.”

He said for the past ten thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period, which might well be called nature’s global warming because the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes.

“Mr Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming. Well, it is simply not happening,” Coleman added.

Decline: Coleman said there was a significant natural warming trend worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s as a solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer sunspots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline.

The Earth has cooled for almost 10 straight years. “So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?” he said. The cooling trend, he claimed, is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it.

He said he had dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including UN reports and the bottom line was: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. There is no other issue.

He said the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings are flawed, as is their science. The hypothesis is wrong and the data is manipulated.

The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming. It is a natural component of the Earth’s atmosphere and has been there since time began, absorbed and emitted by the oceans and used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis.

“Nothing would be green without it. And we humans, we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas,” Coleman said.

June 15, 2008
Edward C. Armbrecht Jr.

Energy alternatives are the future -- will W.Va. lose out?

With regard to recent Daily Mail editorials regarding "the myth of global warming" and Henry Payne's diatribe against Sen. Rockefeller (Daily Mail, June 4), I'd like to make a few comments.

For many years, and until recently, those of us who have been alarmed at the growing evidence about the warming of the planet have felt it necessary to fight back when anyone suggested that our concerns might be meaningless. We pointed out that our scientists were more numerous, more prestigious and far more independent than the opposition's. We kept lists of statistics and quotations and articles that proved our point and whipped them out at a moment's notice. Friends, especially in West Virginia, often avoided the subject in our presence.

Recently, however, the tide of opinion has turned. Global warming, in large measure caused by man's activity, is now recognized as the greatest threat to our quality of life, our health and safety and to our economy!

It is now evident that the debate is over. The fact of the crisis is accepted: world leaders, national and state political leaders, CEOs of the majority of U.S. and world corporations, and the scientific community, including social and health disciplines, are working to address the problems this crisis presents. They are not sitting around grasping at straws seeking any harebrained idea to say it isn't so with the sole purpose of defending the status quo; they are determining how the crisis will affect their businesses, their constituencies, their shareholders and, most importantly, their heirs and how they can rise to the challenges.

Evidence of this change can be seen daily in the press, even in the Daily Mail news pages.

* Exxon no longer pays "scientists" to debunk global warming.

* The world's insurance companies are looking at the impact of rising waters on coastal properties.

* AEP, Duke Energy, BP (now called BeyondPetroleum), among others, are looking for ways to expand into alternative forms of energy.

* Wal-Mart planned to sell 1 million compact fluorescent bulbs, and has now sold almost 2 million.

* The automotive industry (belatedly in the United States) is testing fuel-cell and electric technologies to replace oil.

* European countries such as Germany and Denmark are far exceeding their alternative-energy goals.

* Rooftops all over the world are fitted with solar panels to heat water.

* Chicago requires all alleys to be paved with porous surfaces to prevent sewer system overload and return water to the aquifer.

* New York and Phoenix are building roof gardens to cut back temperature-driven fuel costs.

* While "green" building is not new, suddenly the extra costs have been greatly lowered and pay-off times greatly reduced. Even the West Virginia School Building Authority has decided that while all new buildings should use green solutions, at least one new school per year will achieve LEED Silver certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the national building standard).

This trend is beginning to grow in West Virginia's public sector. The publications that report these breakthroughs are increasingly printed on recycled paper with benign inks.

My point is not that Payne and the Daily Mail editors are wrong - the juries of the world have decided that. My point is that they've become irrelevant.

Unfortunately they continue to fuel the fire started by certain energy-related businesses. By attempting to disprove what national and world businesses accept and seek to address, they keep our state's economy firmly in the 20th, if not the 19th, century. While the problems of global warming are being addressed by others, we are falling further and further behind in creating the technology that will keep our energy products viable not just for years, but for decades.

They waste their money on advertising meaningless slogans. (How can coal, which is almost entirely carbon, be described as "carbon neutral"?) They pursue obsolete technology instead of mounting our own West Virginia "man-on-the-moon" project, combining the talents and dollars of industry, government and educational institutions to develop technologies that will keep carbon out of the atmosphere to show world energy users that coal can be included in their energy plans for as long as coal supplies last! And that West Virginia is the place to come for the solutions to the world's energy crisis. It's good that AEP is seeking a model for carbon sequestration, but a shame that they have to use German technology.

Anyone who reads the economic magazines of the world knows that billions are being spent on research for alternative energy sources. I read recently that West Virginia exports 70 percent of its coal. As a longtime retailer who depended on having what my customers wanted when they wanted it, I would be scared to death to know that 70 percent of my customers were spending billions to try not to use what I had to sell.

If the United States had initiated meaningful gas mileage standards in the 1990s, does anyone doubt that Detroit could have developed hybrid technology instead of Japan? Would these automakers now be close to bankruptcy if our country had supported energy research back then and forced them to develop competitive products?

It seems to me that our coal industry should learn from this recent history. It seems to me that the Daily Mail should seek world energy leaders and climate scientists to publish rather than, as they did on June 9, a communication vice president of an industry trade group.

This is why it is so sad to read Payne and Daily Mail energy editorials. They are giving support to our business leaders to continue down the increasingly lonely path of denial that ensures our place at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Armbrecht is a retired retailer.

http://www.sundaygazettemail.com/Opinion/Op-EdCommentaries/200806140860