“There won’t be a cap and trade bill; there won’t be a national carbon tax; there won’t be national legislation of any significance,” he told hundreds of resource professionals at the conference.
And just for emphasis, he added – “Not in the U. S. and not anywhere in other countries that have not yet adopted greenhouse gas legislation.”
The reason: ClimateGate, which has laid bare the manipulation of the data by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “the body that has orchestrated the global warming doomsaying for more than two decades now.”
In case you’re wondering, Solomon is not a cheerleader for the mining industry; he’s a journalist with a long history of environmental activism.
His speech identified the following flaws in the science underlying global warming theories:
- Destruction of temperature data, as the e-mails admit, now makes it impossible to confirm that the planet has been warming over the past 150 years;
- The Himalayan glaciers won’t melt by 2035, as the IPCC had previously claimed since 1999;
- The scientists at the University of East Anglia complained that the data was not fitting the preordained conclusions that the earth should be warming, as models had predicted.
While the debate is far from over, this much is clear. There will undoubtedly be a much more robust debate, discussion and investigation of the claims by what Solomon refers to as “the doomsayers.” In fact, six separate investigations are now underway.
You can see that doubts about the science are again creeping into the political arena. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper – who is also running for Governor of Colorado as the Democratic Party’s candidate – even admitted to misgivings about man’s influence on climate when he addressed conference attendees by phone later that same day. Apparently a snowstorm in Washington, DC had delayed the Mayor’s return to Denver.
This much is also clear – those who dare question the science of global warming will no longer have to roam in the wilderness. As Solomon outlines in his book, they have plenty of good company – Freeman Dyson, eminent physicist at Princeton, who has repeatedly challenged computer modeling predictive capabilities; Claude Allegre, one of France’s best known scientists, and Edward Wegman, one of the top statisticians in the U. S., whose careful analysis blew the cover on the “hockey stick” theory. The hockey stick THEORY alleged that earth’s temperatures rose dramatically during the past 100 years, due to man’s activities in emitting carbon.
And these analyses do not even begin to cover the costs associated with cap and trade. Given ClimateGate, given the dramatic costs associated with climate legislation, are we reaching a tipping point here?
Stuart Sanderson, President, Colorado Mining Association
