Bjorn Lomborg Talks Common Sense on Global Warming; Scientists Agree

Cool it is the name of Bjorn Lomborg's new book. But Lomborg is just one of many recent books and publications on Anthropogenic Global Warming. Many agree that the earth is warming but that such variations in temperature are cyclical and that much of the Kyoto & Al Gore reactions are empty exercises, or in Gore's case, Lomborg considers him "hysterical." [Whether AG is hysterically funny or clinically deranged is uncertain.] In any case, much evidence, such as icecaps melting on Mars, indicates that we are dealing with a solar phenomenon. Here is the gist of a new Hudson book:

A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance. "This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850," said Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery.

Other researchers found evidence that 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate.

Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention. "Not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics," said Avery, "but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see."

The names were compiled by Avery and climate physicist S. Fred Singer, the co-authors of the new book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, mainly from the peer-reviewed studies cited in their book. The researchers' specialties include tree rings, sea levels, stalagmites, lichens, pollen, plankton, insects, public health, Chinese history and astrophysics.

"We have had a Greenhouse Theory with no evidence to support it-except a moderate warming turned into a scare by computer models whose results have never been verified with real-world events," said co-author Singer. "On the other hand, we have compelling evidence of a real-world climate cycle averaging 1470 years (plus or minus 500) running through the last million years of history. The climate cycle has above all been moderate, and the trees, bears, birds, and humans have quietly adapted."

"Two thousand years of published human histories say that the warm periods were good for people," says Avery. "It was the harsh, unstable Dark Ages and Little Ice Age that brought bigger storms, untimely frost, widespread famine and plagues of disease." "There may have been a consensus of guesses among climate model-builders," says Singer. "However, the models only reflect the warming, not its cause." He noted that about 70 percent of the earth's post-1850 warming came before 1940, and thus was probably not caused by human-emitted greenhouse gases. The net post-1940 warming totals only a tiny 0.2 degrees C.

The historic evidence of the natural cycle includes the 5000-year record of Nile floods, 1st-century Roman wine production in Britain, and thousands of museum paintings that portrayed sunnier skies during the Medieval Warming and more cloudiness during the Little Ice Age. The physical evidence comes from oxygen isotopes, beryllium ions, tiny sea and pollen fossils, and ancient tree rings. The evidence recovered from ice cores, sea and lake sediments, cave stalagmites and glaciers has been analyzed by electron microscopes, satellites, and computers. Temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period on California's Whitewing Mountain must have been 3.2 degrees warmer than today, says Constance Millar of the U.S. Forest Service, based on her study of seven species of relict trees that grew above today's tree line.

Singer emphasized, "Humans have known since the invention of the telescope that the earth's climate variations were linked to the sunspot cycle, but we had not understood how. Recent experiments have demonstrated that more or fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth create more or fewer of the low, cooling clouds that deflect solar heat back into space-amplifying small variations in the intensity of the sun.

Avery and Singer noted that there are hundreds of additional peer-reviewed studies that have found cycle evidence, and that they will publish additional researchers' names and studies. They also noted that their book was funded by Wallace O. Sellers, a Hudson board member, without any corporate contributions.

Dr. Sanity notes in her eminently sane and sound analysis of intense hyperventilating over AGW that it may be a result of a psychological phenomenon known as "displacement." Displacement occurs when deep emotions about a subject cannot be assimilated and are switched onto another subject, in this case fear of Islamofascism resulting from 911 cannot be assimilated because the left hates Bush & his GWOT & Islamic terror goes against every anodyne and bromide the left has been peddling about kumbayeh cosmopolitanism of the Kwame Appiah variety. Here's the good doctor:

What we are witnessing is a regressive psycholgoical defensive maneuver that has become perhaps, the most common response to the worldwide threat of Islamofascism, with all its attendant barbarism and frightening committment to death and destruction. A very specific kind of psychological denial has become the "opt out of reality" ticket for the West and it is referred to as displacement (also see here, here and here).

I have discussed this phenomenon multiple times because displacement is the same psychological strategy that is at the root of Bush Derangement Syndrome and the widespread leftist belief that Christianity is iminently going to impose a theocratic state in the US, even as Shar'ia is welcomed with open arms, tolerant hearts, and closed eyes.

And it is also happens to be the dynamic behind the current rise of anti-semitism and anti-American sentiment right here in the USA--even among relatively normal individuals otherwise.

You can think of psychological displacement as a process analogous to how attenuated viruses work when a person is immunized with them to prevent the catastrophic consequences of an otherwise life-threatening virus.

Psychotherapy itself revolves around, and works because of the temporary displacement of the patient's psychopathology onto the therapist--which is called transference. Let's say, that the patient has a conflict with his father. For all intents and purposes, the therapist becomes the psychological brother and the therapeutic relationship plays out the drama in a less threatening, and more manageable setting.

The entire purpose of displacement is to gain control over the conflict. By focusing on something you have some control over, the psyche is much less threatened. You can fire your therapist; you can express your hatred unreservedly and there will not be the consequences if that hatred were directed toward the real object of conflict. You can even pretend, that if it weren't for the therapist, everything in your life would be perfect.

Displacement can be thought of as an slightly more mature type of projection. In projection, the individual remains oblivious to the fact that he owns and is responsible for the emotions that he imagines are in the person or group into which he is projecting. In other words, ownership of the idea and/or affect is banished from the self.

In displacement, the idea or emotion is deflected from one object to another, less threatening one, but the ownership of the negative emotion or idea (e.g. animosity, anger) is retained--and is often raised to a virtue. A common example is the person who is angry at a loved one, but settles for kicking the dog. The anger is evident in the action and is still owned by the person experiencing it.

Sorry for the slight digression, but the cardinal point is that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a convenient holding pen of denial, displacement and infantile dog kicking when the emotions caused by Islamofascism and the girding of western loins the West may be required to do to oppose this threat to its very way of life. Instead of manning up and facing the difficult task requiring backbone and courage of confronting violent reactionary religious fanatics, the left and Democrats do their usual combination of appeasement, digression, displacement [the oceans are going to boil any century now!] and convince themselves that AGW is more important than GWOT---nay, that GWOT is unnecessary.

Lomborg breathes common sense into a scientific debate which is suffused with what Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science." If another hurricane season goes by without a major landfall in the USA, perhaps the hysterical screeching & posturing by airheads like Leonardo Di Caprio and political scam artists like Al Gore will slowly fade, or lower their decibel levels.

And let a real scientific debate proceed without hype and hysterics.