Pointe of View - Global Cooling

By Gerard Meister

I started worrying about global weather patterns a long time ago. It was back in the late-forties when I was an undergrad at good old CCNY that the fear hit me. My professors warned that if we didn’t do something about the pattern of global cooling (yes, you read it right, Global Cooling!) the drop in world temperatures (fast approaching one degree Celsius) would change living patterns so severely that the life forms on our planet would be altered at best and die off at worst. In fact Professor Paul Ehrlich, my favorite catastrophic environmentalist, doubted “London would even exist in the year 2000!” between the “Population Bomb ” (his pet theory) and the decline in food production resulting from the drop in temperatures we were experiencing.

Moreover, the steady drumbeat of environmental catastrophic postulations continued well into the seventies. Not just arcane scientific journals, but such mainstream publications as The New York Times and Time Magazine added its voices to our chilling future. And for good reason: the four decades from the 1940’s through the mid- seventies were years of the highest industrial output in history (with the concomitant rise in CO2 emissions). Not only WWII, but also the Cold War and the resurgence of Germany and Japan as economic powerhouses, yet the thermometer kept falling!

But now, temperatures are on the rise once again, which brings to mind a book that everyone who doesn’t want their food for thought pre-digested for them by The New York Times and CNN, et al, should read: “Unstoppable: Global Warming Every 1500 Years,” by Dennis Avery and S. Fred Singer. And more to the point there is a video currently on the Internet that is a MUST for every human being on the planet who is concerned about the environment and Global Warming: (Google) “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and scroll down until you get to a “You Tube” documentary about Global Warming. Trust me on this one, people, if you don’t own a computer, beg, borrow or ask a friend to run it for you (about 40 minutes). It’s that important!

You see, dear reader, the Global Warming cult wants you to believe that if you are against Global Warming you are, ipso facto, against protecting the environment. NOT TRUE! Who in their right mind would want more pollution in the air, or more toxic waste leeching into our water supply? No one, certainly not anyone I’ve ever read or heard speak. But we can control air pollution and toxic dumpsites with present day (and ever improving) technology. And do not have to give up our way of life by trying to live with an energy supply wrung out of wind farms and solar panels. It just won’t work, which is why Mr. Gore built his house with conventional power sources.

He did trade off some environmental restraints for pollution credit, which is fine because it does take into account the impact of pollution (air &water) on our health. Just understand that neither his actions, nor anything that any number of human beings can do will be able to affect global weather patterns.

Yet, something good is coming out of all the publicity garnered by Mr. Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is that the entire scientific community was galvanized into action by the audacity of a documentary claiming to know all the answers to a complex multi-faceted scientific problem, yet seemingly based more on political correctness foppery than on the sound principles of the physics of the atmosphere. So that for the first time (and I’ve been watching this for over half a century) answers are beginning to emerge. Important work is being done on the causes of global temperatures rising and falling at different times in our history and that there is now clear and compelling evidence that natural phenomena is the chief causative factor, i.e., sunspots and the effect of cloud cover on Gamma rays and not anything that you or I or anyone else on the face of the earth is doing!

So not to worry, my friends, the earth’s temperature seems to be in God’s hand, not ours.