by Ken Van Doren

Lesson One:

The week of February 15, a press release sounded the clarion call that our oceans were being acidified by carbon dioxide emissions. I did not hear the first part of the “news release” so am not sure but it sounds an awful lot like the work of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Check out this statement from NRDC web site:

“Ocean acidification is the quiet tsunami of environmental degradation. Within a few decades, ocean acidification may devastate some marine ecosystems and threaten the productivity of our fisheries. When we burn oil, coal or gas, scientists have recently shown, we are transforming the fundamental chemistry of the oceans, rapidly making the water more acidic.”

What is wrong with this statement? Well, only that it is not true. First, carbon dioxide and water makes a very weak acid. It takes a lot of CO2 to make a very small difference in pH reading, a scale used to determine acid/base strength. Think your typical carbonated beverage, which is at saturation when opened. It has far higher CO2 concentrations than are likely in nature because these beverages are typically manufactured under pressure.

Second, CO2 is to plants what oxygen is to animals—a necessity of life. Higher CO2 concentrations will under most circumstances mean more plant growth, and less CO2 in solution.

Third, CO2 precipitates out when combined with calcium and other ions in the water. In fact, the corals that NRDC is fearful will disappear actively use chemical and biological processes to precipitate the CO2 in order to form their skeletons, which we know as coral reefs.

Fourth, given the millions of millions of tons of limestone in the world, and that this limestone was produced by similar processes by organisms that are similar to those that exist today, it is extremely likely that in prehistoric times the CO2 concentration was far higher than it is today.

All that I have written above can be confirmed by real scientists at the Science and Public Policy Institute website. SPPI produced a paper debunking the NRDC film, “Acid Test: The Global Challenge on Ocean Acidification.” See it here:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/acid_test.html

Lesson Two:

This is technically an op-ed piece, but given his “stature,” it could loosely be called news. Recently the New York Times printed a lengthy piece by Al Gore titled, We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change.” He begins the article this way:

“It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

And:

“But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

“I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Has Al not looked at the evidence against Phil Jones, Michael Mann, et al? Has he not seen the work of E. Michael Smith and meteorologist Joe D’Aleo demonstrating fraud in the data collection practices of NOAA and NASA? Has he not hear of Phil Jones of Climate Research Unit, at East Anglia University admitting that he was NOT a good record keeper, and suggesting that he could not give data to his critics so they could examine his work, because he LOST the data? And ditto with perhaps the leading New Zealand climatologist (The Kiwigate scandal). Is this the best they can do, “the dog ate my homework?”

And is he not aware of a number of folks critiquing the “hockey stick” graph of Mann for “eliminating” two historically known climate phenomenon, namely the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age, when temperatures globally were significantly warmer and cooler than today?

So why is Al Gore so ignorant of the MANY bits of information confirming widespread fraud in the science? Why is he ignoring the fact that former ally Phil Jones, one of the world’s most pre-eminent pro Anthropomorphic Global Warming advocates, now admits that the real data do not indicate any real warming of significance since 1995?

And why is he AND the New York Times not telling us that Al Gore intended to get rich on the fraud of Cap and Trade carbon credits?

Perhaps the headline SHOULD read, “We can not Wish away Climategate,” but apparently, neither Al Gore nor the NY Times know any shame. Just as you can not be a little bit pregnant, I will not accept of “scientists” the claim that “we only lied to you SOME of the time.” And even if that were so, if they lied in their data but once, it taints the credibility of all of their work. You would think that the scientific community would be all over this, because if we let the climategate scandal slide, the credibility of most of science will be forever tainted. Just as the NY Times themselves have upon occasion, had to shed themselves of “reporters” who made up stories of wholecloth, so too the scientific community should be eager to shed themselves of dishonest scientists, like Phil Jones, Michael Mann, James Hansen.

And another powerfully significant question: WHY is mainstream media collaborating in this, ignoring and downplaying criminal fraud? And WHY are they uncritically allowing Gore the opportunity to engage this “the best defense is a good offense” tactic?

So if the science does not support the claims of NRDC and Al Gore, what can be their purpose? Could it be political? Sorry Al, but CLIMATEGATE is Real!! WHO are the deniers now?