Global Swindle

In case you haven't caught it yet, UK Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle is a fascinating show. Here's a link to it at Little Green Footballs. It's over an hour long, but for cryin' out loud, watch it.

For the longest time, I was convinced that there was at least a shred of truth to the anthropogenic global warming scare. Now I'm reasonably sure that the whole thing is a crock of shit.

My big takeaways were:

• In Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Gore describes the relationship between CO2 and global temperatures as "complex" when discussing ice core samples taken to study CO2 levels for known periods of elevated global temperatures. One of those "complexities" is that in previous warming cycles, the elevated CO2 levels were preceded by elevated temperatures. In other words, global warming causes elevated CO2 levels, not the other way around.
• CO2 makes up something like 0.54% (or maybe it was .054%) of atmospheric gases. The percentage of that CO2 that's man-made is negligible. Think on that for a bit.
• Cosmic rays, solar wind, clouds. This simple explanation for global climate change makes the greenhouse effect theory look like a Rube Goldberg scheme.
• Maggie Thatcher's unintended consequences in trying to promote nuclear energy and break the coal miner's strike in a single blow.

Essentially, global warming is now a multi-billion dollar industry upon which the academic reputations of many scientists now depends. The genius of getting into this business as a scientist is that you can milk it your whole life because by the time you're proven wrong, you'll be dead.