It would be a much better idea if Mr Feeney (PMI 20/10) would lift his game and play the ball (the issue) and not the man. His impoliteness to another correspondent with a different view, and his suggestion that the editor is showing ‘bias’, are hallmarks of a person who has something to hide or something to lose. May I submit that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change) and their global warming (GW) affiliates have sullied themselves with similar types of behaviour since their inception.
Global warming became a ‘hot topic’ in the 1980s and received significant impetus with the establishment of the UN-sponsored IPCC in 1988.
It’s no coincidence that environmental activists, who were so vocal during the Cold War years, suddenly became silent when the Iron Curtain fell. For decades they had been issuing dire warnings about the dangers of nuclear weapons which the two super-powers had, all pointing at each other’s major cities.
The threat (of global destruction) was so real. But people’s interest in all that waned when the Cold War ended. Accordingly, the environmental activists looked for something new to dog their claws into and many embraced the global warming movement and infiltrated the IPCC. The media went into overdrive and the rest is history (instead of being told we could all be decimated in a nuclear holocaust, we were now being told we were doomed to be roasted, and it’s all our fault). As politicians and celebrities came on board, the global warming movement became trendy.
Anyone can check out the behaviour within the IPCC in a book entitled ‘Heaven + Earth’ (pages 17-23 by Professor Ian Plimer. Many global warming supporters obviously try to discredit Plimer because he has been working for mining companies. However, his research about the IPCC is well documented and has not been refuted. Even the Wall Street Journal (June 12, 1996) published an article about the IPCC entitled ‘Major Deception on Global Warming’.
Meanwhile it is rather ironic that, on the same day that the PM’s Carbon Tax legislation was passed in the Lower House, a report in the letters column of the Australian newspaper (Oct. 12, 2011) quotes headlines from two European newspapers. The Sunday Times (9/10) proclaims ‘Europe may be facing return Little Ice Age’, while the UK Daily Express (10/10) has a headline stating ‘Britain Faces a Mini Ice Age’. All this while human induced Co2 levels are rising.
Furthermore, the so-called ‘consensus scientists’ of the global warming movement still need to account for a cooling cycle — of about 30 years — which fortunately ended in the late 1970s, but not before scientists issued serious warnings in Time magazine, Newsweek and the National Geographic between 1974-1976 of a soon-coming Ice Age. Inasmuch as these three decades included the post-war years of intensive industrial activity when human induced Co2 levels were extremely high (therefore there should have been global warming during these years, not cooling). That in itself should have been enough to ring alarm bells and prompt them to look elsewhere for the cause of global warming. This is what true science does. It seeks for alternative explanations. There is no such thing as ‘settled science’. One day the chickens will come home to roost, but it may be too late for Australia.
Bob Donaldson
