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[Rob <becida AT comcast.net>]

At  10/17/2006 07:04 PM,Marie McHarry wrote:
> Lately I've read a couple of articles that suggest strongly that the
> American West will be hit hard by global warming, so concerns about
> local carrying capacity may become moot. Or not. It remains to be seen
> what happens when major weather patterns change.

I think this stuff is interesting, I've been 
reading it for some time and watching the changes in reporting.
Anyway this one was a bit different.

http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20061015/OPINION/110150097



The truth about global warming and the coming ice age



by Dan Mooney
Special to the Appeal
October 15, 2006

It is a fact that the globe upon which we live is warming.

". . . An ice age will result from a slow warming 
and rising of the ocean that is now taking place."

I read this prediction 48 years ago. When a 
sophomore in college and enrolled in an 
Expository Writing class, I wrote a research 
paper, part of which was based upon an article by 
a freelance writer, Betty Friedan. This was five 
years before she wrote The Feminine Mystique 
(1963). Her inquiry, "The Coming Ice Age," was 
published in Harper's Magazine in September of 
that year. The article stirred my imagination. 
Since I expected to live another 100 years, I 
kept the magazine as a reminder to look into it 
50 years later. We're almost there.

Computer modeling was unheard of then so the 
prediction was based upon solid scientific 
research by a team of scientists headed by 
Maurice Ewing, director of the Lamont Geological 
Observatory and a theoretical geophysicist at 
Columbia University. Their results predicted that 
natural global warming would start within 100 
years from then (1958) with rising ocean waters 
flooding most of our port cities. What a prophecy!

I emphasize this as a natural process not caused 
by human intervention. Yet social, political and 
even physical scientists today still do not tell 
the truth about the natural cause of these 
events. Global warming has been brewing for over 
10,000 years. Yet the far left propaganda mill is 
very busy proclaiming that the cause is man made 
without even a hint that we are at the beginning 
of global warming that naturally precedes an ice age.

Based upon my inquiry some 48 years ago, I was 
not surprised to hear that the ice sheets on the 
North and South Poles have now started melting. A 
natural event or man made? Just the other day, 
the results of a four year study using high-tech 
tools was released by Peter A. Rona, a Rutgers 
University professor who led a team of scientists 
from the U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole 
Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and 
Stony Brook University in New York. Their 
findings include preliminary evidence that 
methane gas, which is dispersed under the ocean 
floor over millions of square miles, is escaping 
and contributing to global warming, a natural process.

Still, Al Gore and the visual and print media are 
replete with sensational stories about the 
melting glaciers, using this natural event as a 
cause célèbre for their insistence that, with 
little evidence, the "warming effect" is not 
caused by nature but by man's flatulence alone, 
i.e., the buildup of greenhouse gases, primarily 
carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. This, 
in spite of Dr. Ewing's accurate predictions 48 years ago.

In their book, "The Golem: What You Should Know 
About Science," Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch 
point out that when scientific experiments are 
inconclusive, scientists often resort to 
alternative methods of arriving at conclusions. 
Thus, scientific truth is also subject to 
cultural limitations because scientists live and 
work within the ethos of their culture and time 
period. Hence this is the time to be wary of 
scientific and political conclusions that man is 
the cause of global warming or that high level 
nuclear waste can be safely stored forever or that they will leak in 10 years.

As with global warming and Yucca Mountain, when 
important social decisions are based upon 
science, the average citizen is forced to trust 
that these decisions are made by those who use 
science competently. But, when stakes are high, 
science, like statistics, is often used to 
support almost any conclusion including the 
creation of bad science to influence political decisions.

Unless we study the matter in detail and review 
all alternatives, we should not draw independent 
conclusions. Science is just too complex. Yet we, 
like the political scientists, still pick and 
choose which science to believe based upon our own non-scientific biases.



• Dan Mooney is a Carson City resident and 
frequent contributor to the Nevada Appeal's Opinion page.