Ice age “Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for fighting it” (Source Yahoo News, October 12, 2007). The Nobel Peace Prize is given for the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. However there are many intelligent people who disagree with the Global Warming. This compilation is to summarize a few of their arguments.

Once Global Cooling: Now Global Warming

 

Thomas Sowell wrote: “Back in the 1970s, the hysteria was about global cooling and the prospect of a new ice age. A National Academy of Sciences report back then led Science magazine to conclude in its March 1, 1975 issue that a long "ice age is a real possibility. According to the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek, "the earth's climate seems to be cooling down." A note of urgency was part of the global cooling hysteria then as much as it is part of today's global warming hysteria. According to the February 1973 issue of Science Digest, "Once the freeze starts, it will be too late." 

 

Critics on Al Gore Movie:

 

 From the article Inconvenient Truths Indeed by Robert C. Balling Jr (Published by Tech Central Station).

 

“1) Near the beginning of the film, Gore pays respects to his Harvard mentor and inspiration, Dr. Roger Revelle. Gore praises Revelle for his discovery that atmospheric CO2 levels were rising and could potentially contribute to higher temperatures at a global scale. There is no mention of Revelle's article published in the early 1990s concluding that the science is "too uncertain to justify drastic action." (S.F. Singer, C. Starr, and R. Revelle, "What to do about Greenhouse Warming: Look Before You Leap. Cosmos 1 (1993) 28-33.)

 

(2) Gore discusses glacial and snowpack retreats atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, implying that human induced global warming is to blame. But Gore fails to mention that the snows of Kilimanjaro have been retreating for more than 100 years, largely due to declining atmospheric moisture, not global warming. Gore does not acknowledge the two major articles on the subject published in 2004 in the International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research showing that modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro was initiated by a reduction in precipitation at the end of the nineteenth century and not by local or global warming.

 

(3) Many of Gore's conclusions are based on the "Hockey Stick" that shows near constant global temperatures for 1,000 years with a sharp increase in temperature from 1900 onward. The record Gore chooses in the film completely wipes out the Medieval Warm Period of 1,000 years ago and Little Ice Age that started 500 years ago and ended just over 100 years ago. There is evidence from throughout the world that these climate episodes existed, but on Gore's Hockey Stick, they become nothing more than insignificant fluctuations (Gore even jokes at one point about the Medieval Warm period). 

 

(4) Gore claims that sea level rise could drown the Pacific islands, Florida, major cities the world over, and the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. No mention is made of the fact that sea level has been rising at a rate of 1.8 mm per year for the past 8,000 years; the IPCC notes that "No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected."

 

Do All The Scientist Accepts This Fact:

 

Thomas Sowell in his another article ‘Global Hot Air from  The Media’ writes: There is Dr. S. Fred Singer, who set up the American weather satellite system, and who published some years ago a book titled "Hot Talk, Cold Science." More recently, he has co-authored another book on the subject, "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years."There have been periods of global warming that lasted for centuries — and periods of global cooling that also lasted for centuries. So the issue is not whether the world is warmer now than at some time in the past but how much of that warming is due to human beings and how much can we reduce future warming, even if we drastically reduce our standard of living in the attempt.

 

Other serious scientists who are not on the global warming bandwagon include a professor of meteorology at MIT, Richard S. Lindzen.His name was big enough for the National Academy of Sciences to list it among the names of other experts on its 2001 report that was supposed to end the debate by declaring the dangers of global warming proven scientifically.Professor Lindzen then objected and pointed out that neither he nor any of the other scientists listed ever saw that report before it was published. It was in fact written by government bureaucrats — as was the more recently published summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that is also touted as the final proof and the end of the discussion.

You want more experts who think otherwise? Try a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, Patrick J. Michaels, who refers to the much ballyhooed 2001 IPCC summary as having "misstatements and errors" that he calls "egregious."A professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, David R. Legates, likewise referred to the 2001 IPCC summary as being "often in direct cont

rast with the scientific report that accompanies it." It is the summaries that the media hype. The full 2007 report has not even been published yet.

 

Then Why Are So Many People Worked on The Global Warming?

 

 Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar writes in Times of India (Global Warming or Global Cooling, Feb 27 , 2005): Meteorologists are a standing joke for getting predictions wrong even a few days ahead. The same jokers are being taken seriously when they use computer models to predict the weather 100 years hence. The models have not been tested for reliability over 100 years, or even 20 years. Different models yield variations in warming of 400%, which means they are statistically meaningless.

Wassily Leontief, Nobel prize winner for modeling, said this about the limits of models. “We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions.” Exactly. Assume continued warming as in the last three decades, and you get a warming disaster. Assume more episodes of global cooling, and you get a cooling disaster.

And then he continues:

That scientific truth is rarely mentioned. Why? Because the global warming movement has now become a multi-billion dollar enterprise with thousands of jobs and millions in funding for NGOs and think-tanks, top jobs and prizes for scientists, and huge media coverage for predictions of disaster. The vested interests in the global warming theory are now as strong, rich and politically influential as the biggest multinationals. It is no co-incidence, says Crichton, that so many scientists skeptical of global warming are retired professors: they have no need to chase research grants and chairs.

 

What Should Evangelicals Do?

 

A poll released in 2006 shows 70 percent of American evangelical Christians see global warming as a "serious threat" to the future of the planet (Source: World Net Daily). Most of the evangelical leaders also support initiatives to reduce Global warming. However, it is best to leave this to the individuals to decide independently.

 

Leaders like Rick Warren, pastor and author of "The Purpose Driven Life," Rich Stearns, president of World Vision, Commissioner Todd Bassett, national commander of The Salvation Army, and David Neff, executive editor of Christianity Today all support initiatives to reduce Global Warming.

 

Leaders like Charles W. Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; the Rev. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries; the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University; Donald E. Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association; and the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition oppose any decision to be taken as an evangelical community (not that they oppose Global warming like this compilation did. Many of them support initiatives to reduce Global warming. They only oppose a stand as a community.

 

What Does the Bible Say?

 

Without doubt the Bible asks us to be stewards of the earth (Genesis 1: 28). Effects of our sin extended to the curse of the earth (Genesis 3:17, 4:12). Our glorification will redeem the creation too (Romans 8:21). But this does not mean that Global warming is a Biblical Truth. Whether you support it or oppose it is a freedom that the Bible has left to us. You evaluate the arguments and decide on it.

 

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