Global Warming Hype

The global warming community has orchestrated the most successful marketing blitz that I have seen in years. Not since Chicken Little have so many feared that the sky is falling. But are we dangerously close to causing our own destruction or is this simply global warming hype?

I am not a climatologist, a geologist, or any other “ologist”, so my knowledge of the subject is limited. What interests me are not the scientific facts, but the scientists themselves who reject the very idea of global warming and who even go so far as to mock the concept. Some of these naysayers have been ostracized by their peers; some have even been blackballed by the scientific community. Professor Ian Pilmer of Adelaide University is among these skeptics. In fact, he has been labeled the global warming ‘denialist poster boy’. In Thursday’s edition of The Telegraph, Pilmer argues that global warming is not caused by CO2 and that the major producer of CO2 is volcanoes, not Man. He also adds that “we have had huge climate change in the past and to think the very slight variations we measure today are the result of our life - we really have to put ice blocks in our drinks.’"

So why then are so many scientists falling in step with the global warming party line? Research funding.

“’In previous times people got wonderful research grants in a war against cancer and they achieved a lot of money for that. Now we have a war on climate change and we have a huge number of people out there who have their career staked on it and are beneficiaries of this process.’"

Is Pilmer’s defiance warranted or is he willfully ignoring the scientific evidence?

Your guess is as good as mine, but one thing is certain: Pilmer deserves credit for standing firm against a tsunami-sized PR wave that would drown most skeptics into silence.