GOP leading candidates sign up as disciples to Al Gore

At the Des Moines Register “debate” this week, Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, and McCain raised their hands to the question whether they believe that global warming is a real problem caused by people. I wouldn’t expect any better of the latter three, but I am disappointed in Romney. Thompson, Paul, Tancredo, Hunter, and Alan Keyes (who is not a candidate under the official definition and should not have been included in the debate) did not raise their hands.

I saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” last weekend, along with a movie taking the opposite side of the issue (I forget its title at the moment, it featured mainly British scientists). The weakest moment of the Gore movie was when he said that all the climate change on the earth for the last 650,000 years—the comings and goings of the ice ages, everything—was driven by fluctuations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This seemed so fantastically unlikely to me that the movie lost credibility with me from that moment, not to mention the cult-like consciousness the movie seeks to create by making the viewer identify with Gore as the avatar of anti-global warming. The movie did present worrying facts about melting in Greenland and Antarctica and how that would flood areas where hundreds of millions of people now live. But is such melting really occurring, and is it caused by man?

The strongest evidence that it is not caused by man, presented in the other movie, is the fact that from 1945 to 1975, when world carbon emissions were undergoing an unprecedented increase, global temperatures dropped, strongly suggesting that increased temperatures are not driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide. The movie then showed the very close parallel between sunspot activity and temperatures on the earth over a period of centuries. The conclusion was that current global warming is caused by increased sunspot activity and has nothing to do with manmade carbon emissions.

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N. writes:

You write: “The movie then showed the very close parallel between sunspot activity and temperatures on the earth over a period of centuries. The conclusion was that current global warming is caused by increased sunspot activity and has nothing to do with manmade carbon emissions.”

A small but significant nit: If I understand the theory behind the theory propounded in the film correctly, the postulate is that the energy put out by the sun varies over time, and that sunspots are a result of this or at least strongly correlated with solar output. So when the output of the sun decreases slightly, there are fewer sunspots, (as seen in the “Little Ice Age”), whereas when the output increases, there are more sunspots (as seen currently).

Thus the sunspots themselves are not drivers of planetary climate, however they are correlated with the changes in solar energy output, and those changes drive planetary climate.

LA replies:

Thanks for the clarification. It’s funny that so often people speak of changes in “sun-spot” activity, whereas what they really mean is changes in solar output, period. The sun, which is slightly more important in the cosmic scheme of things than human civilization, varies in the amount of heat and light it sends out, and this affects temperatures on earth.

The man-made global warming theory thereby appears as a typical product of liberalism, denying the fact that human life is shaped by realities transcending human choice.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2007 01:50 AM | Send