Hope and Fail

Claiming ‘little dispute’ on global warming

In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, President Obama took an interesting turn, claiming that confronting climate change leads to world peace. We can understand how, for those who fear man-made global warming, this would make sense. But the president took it a step further:

There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement — all of which will fuel more conflict for decades.

The president, and the White House, may not agree with those who challenge the climate change dogma, but he cannot claim there is “little scientific dispute” about global warming with a straight face.

As the Foundry blog at Heritage points out:

Interestingly, the more attention the Climategate scandal receives, the firmer the Obama administration is that the scientific consensus is, in fact, a consensus. First Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson and now President Obama. But the truth is there is a lot of scientific dissent refuting the claim that doing nothing will result in more natural disasters. It’s easy to blame hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, floods, tornadoes and every other natural disaster on manmade global warming since they’re all climate-related but the correlation simply isn’t there. There is no consistent long-term pattern. Climatologist Roy Spencer pointed out after Hurricane Katrina that we had similar hurricanes in a less industrialized world: “Certainly, the previous huge hurricanes that we had in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, didn’t have anything to do with mankind’s production of CO2 because we hadn’t produced very much by then, and I find it just irresponsible that anyone would claim that this hurricane was caused by global warming.”

What’s more, Republicans on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works have issued a report with more than 700 scientists questioning the consensus on man-made global warming.

And with the recent revelation that many leading global warming scientists destroyed data, fudged their numbers and attempting to block dissent, more and more scientists are beginning to dispute the data.

Believe in man-made global warming if you will, but let’s not lie about the scope of the arguments surrounding the theory.