It's OK to Fib About Global Warming

The thing about movements is that the truth tends to get lost in the campaign to tell the world about the Greater Truth. And that is certainly true about the Global Warming Movement.

For those of us who haven’t been heard, Patrick J. Michaels has been keeping an ear to the ground and also on Al Gore.

So here's what Al told Grist Magazine about global warming: "I believe it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience."

Then there is NASA’s James Hansen.

He also started the whole global warming hysteria, with some remarkably inflammatory congressional testimony in 1988, and he is Al Gore's climate guru. Here's what he wrote in 2003 from his Broadway office, in the online journal Natural Science: "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decisionmakers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue."

The problem with all this scare stuff is that there’s a good chance we’ll be basing public policy on a lie. There’s a lot of scare stuff going on. There’s the danger of nuclear power, the danger of drilling for oil, the danger of building highways, and the danger of eating food with pesticide residues. How dangerous are these threats, really?

We’ll never know, because the science got buried by the politics.

And we really can’t say anything about man-made global warming until we really understand the fluctuation in energy output from the sun.

It does fluctuate, you know. Scientists think that solar energy output is high when sunspot activity is high (like right now) and low when sunspot activity is down (like during the Maunder minimum half a millennium ago during the, er, Little Ice Age).