Nearly three years ago, Al Gore pronounced in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, “The debate in the scientific community is over” concerning global warming. That assertion echoes throughout the channels of the popular media, rising in volume and pitch with every reverberation. Its proponents enjoy increasing public acclaim (and funding), and receive the highest honors across disciplines. Does this cacophony from the advocates of man-made warming mark the close of any real debate?

The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary released last year by British television producer Mark Durkin (to scarcely a whisper from critics of any scientific persuasion), has the temerity to suggest otherwise. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Virginia, and author of perhaps its only review in an American newspaper, described this film as “a devastating documentary…based on sound science and interviews with real climate scientists, including me.”

The film features interviews with prominent scientists and media figures who have voiced skepticism of the prevailing account of climate change. These include, among others, Lord Nigel Lawson, former Secretary of the Exchequer in Britain, and among the first government officials to allocate public funds for research into emissions-linked climate change in the 1980’s; Dr. John Christy, listed as a “lead author” of the 2001 IPCC report, and still claimed by the organization as a “contributor”; Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace; and Dr. Ian Clark, a paleo-climatologist, and expert in the ice core-sampling that forms the heart of Gore’s argument in An Inconvenient Truth.

Durkin uses these interviews as a springboard to propose several audacious hypotheses. Among the most gut-wrenching, the interviewed scientists claim that increasing carbon dioxide does not, in fact, increase the Earth’s temperature; rather, they insist, the causal link between carbon dioxide levels and temperature runs the opposite direction—”Temperature,” claims Dr. Ian Clark, pointing impressively to a graph showing two jagged lines chasing one another across the millennia, “is leading CO2 levels by 800 years.” The documentary proposes that changes in solar activity, rather than carbon dioxide, predominantly influences global temperature, and that the current orthodoxy of anti-industrial environmentalism arose out of an unlikely allegiance between pro-nuclear British conservatives, lead by Margaret Thatcher, and neo-Marxists ideologically displaced by the fall of the Soviet Union.

Whether the argument presented in The Great Global Warming Swindle is true or not, the documentary provides an important perspective on what is potentially the most monumental issue facing the world today. Anyone evaluating the dramatic claims of the new environmental movement—denounced by its very father, Patrick Moore, as “anti-human” in the closing moments of the film—will do well to consider its claims.

The recent torrent of natural disasters—devastating hurricanes, a holocaust of Southeastern wildfires, intense droughts—have many questioning whether some crazed archangel might not be upending the bowls of judgment upon our heads.

For Charles Blow of the New York Times, along with others like Al Gore and the IPCC, this confluence of weather-related catastrophes “more than likely” is one of the accelerating effects of anthropogenic global warming. Blow concludes his recent piece with a cry for action: “we need to declare a coordinated war on global warming,” which amounts to a top-down, systematic campaign to reduce carbon emissions, such as that outlined by the Kyoto Protocol.

But the government-run Energy Information Administration has estimated that the costs of reducing U.S. emissions 3% by 2012 would total $411 billion. By contrast, Blow’s laundry list of climate-related economic woes only tallies to $125.9 billion. Barry Heam and the editors of JunkScience.com estimate that Kyoto has already cost the global economy over $493 billion since 2005, while only potentially reducing global temperature .005 degrees Celsius—emphasizing “potentially,” because no one can measure global temperature accurately enough to register the change.

Considering the cost of sweeping reforms like Kyoto raises an important question. Why is it that when two devastating storms struck low-lying regions, the stronger of the two (Katrina) killed fewer than 2,000, compared to the more than 50,000 lives claimed by the weaker Nargis? The difference: meteorology, hospitals, paved roads, helicopters, and the industrial infrastructure needed to ship emergency supplies for millions of refugees hundreds of miles at a day’s notice. With all their inefficiency and backwardness, FEMA was a paragon of efficiency compared with the helplessness of the Burmese junta faced with the millions now starving in disease-ridden camps.

A “coordinated war on global warming” should take into account global economic growth, which might one day provide the Burmese with the resources to weather a Nargis with only a few thousand dead, rather than tens of thousands.

Skeptic features a cogent debate about climate change with these two great essays that seem rather reasonable in their presentation: “The Climate of Belief” (which argues that we just don’t have the science to confirm that humans have caused global warming) versus “How We Know Global Warming is Real” (which argues exactly what it says).

Just when we thought Ted Turner was finally making sense, he appeared on the Charlie Rose Show, opened his mouth, and removed all doubt of where his head is. Here’s a link to the NewsBusters report, which features these gems from the interview …

On the “catasthropic” effects of global warming: “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”

On China’s military buildup: “China just wants to sell us shoes. They’re not building landing craft to attack the United States.”

On Iraqi insurgents: “I think that they’re patriots and that they don’t like us because we’ve invaded their country and occupied it.”

Joe Klein in Time: “[I]f this race continues to slide downhill, the answer to the Democratic Party’s dilemma may turn out to be Al Gore.” Read Klein’s superdelegate scenario for drafting Mr. Green here.

Gore, by the way, will be featured on 60 Minutes this Sunday (coincidence?), where, according to the CBS News website, he tells Lesley Stahl that “those who still doubt that global warming is caused by man—among them, Vice President Dick Cheney—are acting like the fringe groups who think the 1969 moon landing never really happened, or who once believed the world is flat.”

Sweden is about as close as socialists will get to Utopia.  The country is often held up as the paragon of what all civilized nations should be, particularly when it comes to climate change and why governments should force their citizens to recycle.  In Sweden, you have to recycle just about everything, and this can take a lot of time.

So what do you do with your waste? Most homes have a number of trash bins for different kinds of trash: batteries in one; biodegradables in one; wood in one; colored glass in one, other glass in another; aluminum in one, other metals in another; newspapers in one, hard paper in another, and paper that doesn’t fit these two categories in a third; and plastic of all sorts in another collection of bins. The materials generally have to be cleaned before thrown away - milk cartons with milk in them cannot be recycled just as metal cans cannot have too much of the paper labels left.

Per Bylund, the Swede (and American Ph.D. student) who wrote the article, says that the success story of recycling in Sweden is really just a myth, and he tells us why.   This post isn’t slinging mud at well-intended governments.  It’s slinging mud at well-intended governments that obfuscate information about their coercive policies meant for the greater good.

byFaith magazine writes about philosopher and theologian Paul Helm, who “looks at global warming through the lens of Pascal.”

Pascal’s argument was that if the evidence for God’s existence is no stronger than the evidence against, you should wager on the side of faith-that was what seemed reasonable to him,” said Helm. “As a philosopher, I am redeploying Pascal’s wager argument to think about global warming. We should adopt forms of action that are sensible, whether it is determined that mankind is responsible for global warming or not.”

If you go to byFaith, you can see some contrary comments against this kind of thinking, and some for it.  What do you think about “Helm’s wager”?

In A Short History of Fear, Alexander Cockburn writes about being witchhunted by the left for writing about the problems of the global warming craze:

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.

Cockburn explains who, in fact, is benefitting from the global warming craze (the “corporations,” actually) and who it’s hurting (developing nations, actually).  He seems a bit manic in his interview, but I do appreciate him pointing out the ideological foundatons for the “climate catastrophism” of the left.  Just like the adoption of communism by the American left in the 20s and 30s, or the hegemony of evolutionary theory by the Materialism Bloc.

(Please don’t let this be a thread about evolution.  Let it be about climate change.)

UPDATE: The link has been restored.

In more than a dozen states, special governor-commissioned advisory groups have completed sweeping climate-change action plans that embody precisely the kind of top-down approach President Bush rejects. Measures include tightened vehicle emissions standards, investment in alternative fuels, and strict limits on development in forested areas. It’s enough to make California look like Germany, where efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions have wrought significant economic damage, despite falling well short of targets.  WORLD’s Mark Bergin reports.

Nobel speeches should be memorable events, and Al Gore just delivered his in Oslo.

It is time to make peace with the planet,” Gore said in the prepared remarks. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war.”

Probably the most famous Nobel speech belongs to William Faulkner, who accepted his (for literature, of course) on this date in 1950.  Gore’s and Faulkner’s speeches can be compared rather easily.

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