Thomas Sowell on AGW and Science

The wise and astute Thomas Sowell has had a few words to say on the subject of the global warming hysteria in a recent commentary.

There are a number of comments of interest in his piece, but I especially like these:

People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs underway and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth.

Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few-- like themselves-- can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.

Mischief of US Climate Change Science Project

Dr. Patrick Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute. In a commentary published on 31 August in the Washington Times, he writes about having reviewed a report called Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. This report concluded that "Aggressive near-term actions would be required to alter the future path of human-induced warming." The "product lead" is Tom Karl, who heads the Commerce Department's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. and Michaels says he is a very politically savvy guy.

He says the report implies that only bad results come from global warming. This is not the case. Growing seasons become longer and higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere cause plants to grow better. Americans like warmer climates so much, they often choose to move to warmer areas of the country. It claims that the elderly are especially vulnerable to extreme heat, but Phoenix and Tampa have many elderly inhabitants and very few heat-related deaths. Generally, the report is very unscientific according to Michaels.

This is not surprising. The senior editor is Susan J. Hassol, who wrote the HBO global warming documentary "Too Hot Not to Handle," and is not a climate scientist. The executive producer is Laurie David, who orchestrated Al Gore's inconveniently false "An Inconvenient Truth." She was also the executive producer of the HBO documentary. With these two producing this document, it is hardly surprising that it is science fiction.