Is The Earth Really Warming? (Part 2)

From Grassfire: Here is Part Two of the interview by Steve Elliot (President of Grassfire.org) with Congressional Staffer Marc Morano following his recent trip to Greenland as part of a Congressional fact-finding tour. In this interview, Marc and Steve get to the fundamendals of the issue: Is the earth warming? Is CO2 the primary cause? What can we do about it? With Congress getting ready to consider a huge Carbon Tax bill that could cost the average American family over $4500, this is important information:

For those of you with low bandwidth, here is a rough transcript...

Steve asks Marc, "Let's step back and look a little bit at the bigger picture. Are you saying there is no trend in warming over the past 40 years?" Marc says, "I'm saying, if you look at it from the end of the 'Little Ice Age' which roughly ended 1850-1880, we've been on a warming trend. Human CO2 could not possibly have impacted that until after 1940. We've been steadily warming. In fact, five of the ten hottest summers were in the 1930s in the US. Just to give you an example of what was going on during the 1930s. And it was the same with Greenland. It was warm as well. Temperatures... after human CO2 really increased after 1940... guess what? Global temperatures fell from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, into the 70s, to the point where Newsweek, TIME, and the National Academy of Sciences came out with reports warnings of a coming Ice Age. And then of course, they've been warming over the last 30 years."

Marc continues, "Now the question is, what's been causing that warming? A physiscist from Denmark, and a whole slew of astrophysicists have just come out recently and announced that the sun is the hottest point it has been in 1000 years. So scratch your head, stop and think a minute about what was happening back then... oh yeah, that was the Medieval Warm Period when the Vikings were farming a much warmer Greenland! Ahh, I see, it all starts to make sense now, but, a couple caveats though..."

"No one is arguing that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. No one is arguing that CO2 does not impact our climate. In fact the 60 scientists who advised Canadian Prime Minister Harper last year said, 'if we had known in the 1990s what we know now, we would have concluded that Kyoto was never necessary'. They said, 'Yes, CO2 is a warming agent, but that you can't distinguish the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere from natural climate variability'. And that's essentially what's happening in Greenland with the latest peer review studies. But people say, 'Yes, but what about the future? If we keep putting all this CO2 into the atmosphere we are going to have an 8F degree rise in temperature and all the ice sheets are going to melt. We're going to have more severe storms'," Marc said.

He went on, "First of all, warmer world means less severe storms and a lower death rate. In fact, cold snaps kill more people than heat waves. You can look that up in the history of the ice ages. The Little Ice Age was much more damaging. It used to be called the 'Medieval Climate Optimum', now called the 'Medieval Warm Period'. Steve asked, "You mean they actually changed it?" Marc said, "I don't have the details on that, but the name was actually changed from decades ago. It used to be called the 'Medieval Climate Optimum' meaning that the climate was optimal, but they didn't like that because it didn't go with their agenda, so now it became the 'Medieval Warm Period'."

"The gist of the whole debate is what is the the impact of future CO2 increases. And the report we're working on in the Senate has Ivy League geologists, it has other climate experts explaining what happened, and this why the climate models are so wrong... why the scientists believe they're so wrong. Each unit of CO2 you put into the atmosphere has less and less of a warming impact. Once the atmosphere reaches a saturation point, additional input of CO2 will not really have any major impact. It's like putting insulation in your attic. They give a recommended amount and after that you can stack the insulation up to the roof and it's going to have no impact. You only put so much in. And that's the gist of CO2... in the stabilizing atmosphere."

"In addition to that, it's not the only factor: water vapor, cloud cover, cosmic rays, solar impacts, ocean circulation, different... land use changes, heat urban island effect. Did you know that if there are more trees in the northern hemisphere, they can contribute hugely to possible warming in the northern hemisphere because they are dark colored and absorb more sunlight? There's so many factors... cow emissions. The U.N. last November came out with a report claiming that cow emissions were more damaging to the atmosphere than all the CO2 from cars and trucks. I mean, just think of that, methane from cow "burps" (and, you know, from the other end) are more damaging and more of a heating agent than all the CO2 from cars and trucks."

"When you add all this up and then you ask the question, assuming we WERE facing a man-made climate catastrophy, what could man do about it? The bottom line is there's very little we can do about it. Even we shut down our entire economy and stopped all man-made CO2, the climate scientists who believe the alarmist stuff will tell you that it's essentially too late. We've already reached past a tipping point. There's so much CO2 in the atmosphere, the warming will continue for 1000s of years."

"But then you look at proposals like the Kyoto protocol and you look at the CAPA Trade bills in Washington DC. The architects of Kyoto admit it, and the architects of the CAPA Trade bills here in DC, admit that even if their bills are fully enacted, they will have no impact on the climate. They're all symbolic bills to get us... quote 'to do something about global warming'."

Steve Elliott said that he's heard there are some proposals in Congress that could cost the American family up to $4500 over a 5-10 year period if they're enacted. What legislative bills are being moved right now, and will there be an economic cost to the American family?

According to Marc, there about a dozen or more bills in both houses of Congress, all different variations. "We're expecting something to come to the floor this fall. It's got to go through Committee first but, the gist of almost everything proposed is... You have Senator Binghaman's(?) CAPA Trade Bill which the Washington Post which described as having no impact on the climate, but will raise home energy and gas prices an average of 5%. And this is the Washington Post, not a friend to any skeptics of the climate, admitting that this bill will not affect the climate. So it's all climate symbolism for real economic pain. Well what is the pain? Senators Boxer-Sanders(?) have a bill. The MIT and CBO have done a study and a cost estimate that it would have an economic cost of approximately $4500 per family. The Lieberman-McCain Climate CAPA Trade bill would cost $3500 per family. Keep in mind, even if these bills are fully enacted, you will not even be able to detect the impact they will have on the climate, assuming that these bills are fully complied with (which we're finding out with the Kyoto treaty, these bills are almost NEVER fully complied with)."

Marc closes with this. "Just to leave the listeners with one thought, when you're debating someone who's into global warming, ask them one question, I mean... get them to understand, that nothing on the earth is outside of normal variability... Computer models are being pedaled by 'software engineers' who know nothing about climate. They are not licensed and qualified to sell these programs to society, meaning... this is just wild speculation about what could, might, may happen in the future. And you could sit down and scare yourself silly if you wanted to... based on that (the computer models)... if that was the criteria."

UPDATE: Michael Fumento at 'The American Spectator' confirms some of the statements made by Marc Morano in his interview above. To check it out, go HERE.