The Truth of "Global Warming"

For day three of Conservative Awareness Week, we had the privilege of a visit from John Coleman, a man best known as the American meteorologist who founded the Weather Channel. Students strolled in and took their seats in the small lecture room in Rapson Hall Wednesday night, many also helping themselves to the free Raising Canes at the back of the room. Standing beside his slide show in his black suit and blue striped tie, Coleman introduced the discussion with a picture of the Earth. Apparently it was only 38 years ago, that this first full picture of the Earth was captured, with the sunlight hitting it just right. Young John Coleman was there at the television set, watching the photo gradually load onto the T.V. screen. It was an interesting thought to ponder for those of us in the room, especially since our memories only really ranged about 18-25 years or so. It's easy for us to forget that all that we know about the Earth is actually quite new, which is why he finds it best to retain a degree of cautious skepticism.

His message was clear and delivered with helpful visual and humorous supplementation. As he stood beside his presentation, gesturing at its main points, his career as a weatherman and newscaster were evident in his posture and speaking style. His arguments were informative and well-supported, and his monologue entertaining enough to get a group of college students to willingly spend their evenings listening to what he had to say on global warming. This holds especially true for the U of M Twin Cities campus, which is notorious for its "Green" initiatives. Ironically, no organization on campus appears to waste as much paper blanketing the campus in propaganda, as the environmentalists.

And, despite this reputation, John Coleman braved the possible backlash of questioning the globe-boiling doomsday allegedly lurking in our near future in order to reintroduce scientific facts to the discussion on climate change. He addressed the many myths about climate change, including flora and fauna dying off, ice caps melting away, terrible droughts wreaking havoc, coasts flooding, and all of the other "signs" of global warming that these politicians and leaders bent on finding means of control in order to someday construct their world government have so hollowly claimed.

Coleman, through speech and slide show, worked to shine light on the common misconceptions surrounding what we know about the environment. Cycles of change in flora and fauna are naturally occurring, along with the rise and fall of temperatures. The message we're hearing is that carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas will cause temperatures to skyrocket, ice caps to melt, oceans to flood over shorelines, droughts to sweep the earth, and various other catastrophes. During his speech, Coleman tried to introduce scientific facts and solid evidence, in order to give us another perspective on what is going on.

The first myth he addressed in detail was the alleged north pole and ice cap catastrophe. Ice on the north pole has consistently come and gone, melted and frozen, throughout the past thousands of years as far as we can tell. At one point, remember, we cold even sail ships through the Northwest Passage. Coleman added that, "The first submarine in 1960’s went to the north pole and came up through the ice. It has always been in an ebb and flow. The newspapers and websites and TV channels were full of this news, but today (the ice level) is right back to where we started and back to the norm of the last 40 years."

He addressed the picture of "drowning polar bears," made famous by global warming's poster child Al Gore, which depicted polar bears stranded on a small, floating chunk of ice, soon to tragically drown due to their homes having melted away. The shocking truth behind this photo is that this is such a misrepresentation of what was occurring, that it's actually somewhat laughable. The scientist who took this picture was later shocked to see her stolen shot being used in Gore's exaggerated and scientifically unsound politicized presentation. Really, as she and her team had crossed through there in their boat, the polar bears had swam up to that chunk and climbed on it out of curiosity, trying to get a better view of their peculiar and unfamiliar human visitors. A little while later, they dove back into the water and swam back to their usual icy shore. There was no drowning involved at all. Polar bear deaths were actually due largely to hunting. Local communities had used their fur to keep warm and their meat as food. Since their hunting has been limited, however, the polar bear numbers have apparently risen back up to 29,000 again. Yes, we were killing polar bears through our activities, but directly, not by warping the globe itself. Coleman declared, "The polar bears are thriving."

On the myth of flooding coasts, Coleman, who has himself lived on the coast exclaimed, "Ive lived there 15 and the waters right where it was when I got there. I have friends who have lived there for 40 years and its right where it was when they got there.” Of course, when this argument was brought up to Gore, he so wittingly responded that the ocean rises differently in different places. And, granted, there will be some fluctuations due to varying factors, but these sorts of differences involving a lack of rising altogether? Not likely.

The droughts. He acknowledged that we have had some rather severe ones two years ago (in Texas and California for example), but in the last week, there's been no drought. The El Niño season wiped it out. He explained that he lived through the dust bowl as a kid and that droughts come and go.

"There is no climate crisis," Coleman said. "No climate crisis at all."

So how did Al get it so wrong? According to Coleman, "This whole political frenzy, this whole political hubbub, …this whole thing would not have happened" if it weren't for Al Gore. So where did this man get his idea? After showing us a video he made about Al Gore that I'm sure anyone can find amongst his other videos on his website, Coleman's Corner, John Coleman informed us about Revelle,an oceanographer, and his fellow researchers who started the research with a small report. He involved student Albert Gore in his research later and Gore ended up running with it. The surprising twist here is that, in 1988, Revelle wrote to congressmen and women about his second thoughts. He then wrote a report urging more research before any remedial action. Gore called him senile and characteristically refused to debate on it. Revelle later delivered a speech apologizing for the research he had done which sent us so far astray. And ironically, Al Gore still would go on to receive the Revelle Award for his global warming propaganda. The video provided far more detail, but in summary, explained how Albert Gore, who had gotten a D in Revelle's class, went on to somehow win the Nobel Peace Prize for something based entirely on forged, greatly refuted, and/or later disproved "scientific" evidence. Coleman explained that hearing about these two men winning the Nobel Peace Prize for such a falsity, was what really pushed him over the edge. "I really study my issues carefully and clearly," he explained. "I studied the papers that showed up online...I talked to my colleagues and friends." When he decided to speak out against it, and produce a report on the fallacy here, he explained that he was at the time working in a journalism job in San Diego, and half expected to fired for this come Monday. Instead, he received a ton of support for what he wrote. More than 700 international scientists had then expressed dissent on man-made global warming. Coleman was invited to an international convention on climate change in New York, and he showed us the speech that he made there.

We were told they have 4000 scientists in consensus at UN. First of all, there are only 2900 members of the IPCC, and most are politicians and bureaucrats, not scientists. Only 60 scientists contributed to or reviewed the key chapter 9, and even of those, they weren’t totally convinced it was true.

From here, he moved into what he knows about the Earth:
The interglacial period is nature’s global warming. The other ones couldn’t have been man-made because there weren’t any human beings around. We didn't start building fossil fuels until recently (see picture of the graph he presented). The IPCC printed it out very differently. This became known as the hockey stick chart, produced by Professor Michael Man. We found out that the IPCC manipulated the formula for this chart so much that no matter what you put into it, it would come up as a hockey stick. All the warming there is is actually 6/10 of a degree. That’s it. Nature’s global warming is about one degree every hundred years, so there is nothing unusual about this.

So why is 4.5 billion dollars a year being spent on global warming?
The objective, Coleman explained, was to be able to tax industrialized nations in order to fund a single world government, and to help the U.N. and underdeveloped nations.

He concluded with points on energy sources and fuel. "Is it possible to have a modern, fossil fuel-powered civilization without destroying the climate and our clean air and water? Thanks to real scientists, we could. The technology we have in the 19th century allows us the opportunity to work towards this goal. What are you going to do, though? Wind power? Our wind farms have proved economically unviable because it only works between 17 and 24 mph.

"How about solar? That's beautiful if the sun is out. (He looks out the window) The sun isn’t out right now. Solar wouldn’t have worked tonight or over the winter. Even in San Diego it doesn’t nearly cut it.

"We have learned to use our fossil fuels cleanly thanks to real scientists. We can even power Las Vegas without damaging the environment. We can do it. We have done it. And I am proud of our scientists who have done it.

"I don’t want you to lose any more sleep about your carbon footprint. It is not real."

His last slide was a picture of underwear (included below), which he humorously explained was the only evidence he has seen for global warming.

From here he moved into an interesting question and answer session that I shall detail below, once I have a spare moment between final projects, papers and exams.
For more information, feel free to visit Coleman's Corner, off of the Kusi.com website. There should also be plenty of youtube videos you can access, in order to reach the other side of the story, and to understand not only what the government would like us to think is occurring around us, but what is actually occurring.