India Disputes Man-Made Global Warming Alarmism

Back in June 2008, India produced its National Action Plan on Climate Change in which it disputed the UN IPCC and Al Gore claim that man has caused global warming and it will become a disaster. Sensibly, India believes it is important to save its people from poverty and to join the developed nations such as the United States of America in producing the per capita CO2 emissions that translate into the good life. Indian scientists looked for reasons for concern in the actual climate of India and found nothing unusually alarming. They found no evidence for man-made warming.

Indian scientists noted that in a century, the average surface temperature had risen 0.4 degree, but did not think that reason for alarm. They examined the quantity of rain, floods, droughts, and the growth and recession of Himalayan glaciers. Al Gore specifically claimed that the recession of Himalayan glaciers was catastrophic. The Indian scientists found that some glaciers were retreating, but that others were advancing. They concluded that a number of hypotheses about why some were advancing and some were retreating simply needed yet to be evaluated.

V. K. Raina is India's leading glaciologist and he says only 5o of 9,575 glaciers in India have been studied carefully. However, nearly 200 years of general data seems to indicate to him that nothing abnormal has occurred with respect to the Himalayan glaciers. He believes that a few sensationalists are hyping the retreat of some glaciers to cause alarm.

The President of the Geological Society of India, B. P. Radhakrishna, believes that global warming has occurred as part of the natural glacial-interglacial cycle of the earth. He believes that man can and will adapt to such changes of the earth's climate as will naturally occur. He does not believe man can control the climate by reducing CO2 emissions.

Even the Indian engineer and economist Rajendra Pachauri, the UN IPCC Chairman has said that he will look into the "apparent temperature plateau so far this century."

I believe there are some wise men in India.

Carroll - Gore's nutty idea

Al Gore proposed last week that the United States "commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years."

This man is truly insane. I shudder to think what would have happened to the United States if he had become President as he so nearly did. No, I am not saying that this man is simply wrong. I am saying that he is in this world, but he is not connected to it. He has no judgment, no wisdom, few powers of observation, and he is much less intelligent than George Bush. One has to wonder at the severe lack of judgment also generally found in those managing our newspapers and television news programs which has kept them from taking Al Gore to task for this nonsense.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages of the Rocky Mountain News, has correctly identified Al Gore's call to kill oil, gas, and coal power generating plants as the equivalent of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in this editorial. This effort, he points out, would require utilities to mothball hundreds of existing plants and institute a crash program of building solar energy, wind farm, and new electricity power transmission lines, that would cause a huge increase in electricity costs to individuals and businesses. What is more, both sun and wind are highly subject to natural variations, so they would require something like huge banks of batteries or capacitors to store energy for later use, which would be very expensive and environmentally unfriendly.

I will repeat that it is lunatic to implement such a plan, even if it were true that carbon dioxide emissions were going to be a significant problem affecting the climate in 100 years. In actuality, there is no good reason to think this will be the case anyway. This makes calling for wrenching energy infrastructure destruction programs and crash construction programs of largely untried or incredibly expensive technology an idiot's delight.