Science & Public Policy Institute

EXCERPT:

The scare: Jonathan Leake, in The Times of London on 26 October 2008, says:

1. The Arctic icecap is “shrinking at record rates” even in the winter;
2. “The period in which the ice renews itself has become much shorter”;
3. The “even more alarming” cause of the thinner ice is warmer seas rather than warmer air;
4. “The Arctic is likely to melt much faster than had been thought”;
5. “The summer icecap could vanish within a decade”, according to unnamed “experts”;
6. The Northwest Passage was open in the summer of 2008 for the first time in 30 years;
7. Arctic sea ice is half of its 1976 thickness;
8. “Now the ice is just collapsing”. as shown by “satellite-based observations”;
9. In September 2007 the Arctic icecap had “lost an extra 1.1 million square miles;
10. The icecap was “43% smaller than it was in 1979, when satellite observations began”;
11. Less ice means less sunlight reflected harmlessly back to space and so more warming;
12. “The process accelerates until there is no more ice to melt”; and
13. A scientist has said: “This is one of the most serious problems the world has ever faced”.

The truth: This article, like so many on “global warming”, is rooted in the naïve fallacy that the fact of warming tells us that the cause is anthropogenic rather than natural. We begin this Scarewatch, therefore, with a few truths about how much warmer the climate was before humankind could possibly have affected it significantly (or at all).

THE REST HERE

THE FULL PDF REPORT HERE

Popularity: 29% [?]