A Greenpeace founder says panic is not justified

It’s worth reading what Patrick Moore has to say about man-made global warming. He has a doctorate in ecology. He’s also one of the founders of Greenpeace.

And he has the courage not to run with the herd. Moore told senators this about climate change:

“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.”

Not that a little warming would hurt, Moore went on to say:

“ ‘Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.

“ ‘It is important to recognize, in the face of dire predictions about a [two degrees Celsius] rise in global average temperature, that humans are a tropical species,’ he continued. ‘We evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing.

“ ‘The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming,’ he said.”

You can read his full testimony here. You can watch it here, at least if unlike President Obama you’re open to new ideas or evidence.

Moore testified to some facts that are inconvenient to the conclusions of politicians and the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

“The IPCC states that humans are the dominant cause of warming “since the mid-20th century”, which is 1950. From 1910 to 1940 there was an increase in global average temperature of 0.5 degrees C over that 30-year period. Then there was a 30-year ‘pause’ until 1970. This was followed by an increase of 0.57 degrees C during the 30-year period from 1970 to 2000. Since then there has been no increase, perhaps a slight decrease, in average global temperature. This in itself tends to negate the validity of the computer models, as CO2 emissions have continued to accelerate during this time.”

If you need more information on that “pause” in warming that has gone on for more than a decade now, read up on it in liberal-leaning sources such as the BBC or Nature or the New York Times or The Economist.

The climate activists insist that warming will resume sometime, though they cannot say when, and they cannot say why the rise has halted. It might be volcanoes or the Pacific Ocean or winds or pine trees’ emissions, they say. They insist that despite this uncertainty we must still fear calamity and accept punitive restrictions on energy use.

Moore, the Greenpeace founder who left because he believed the group became more interested in politics than science and had taken "a sharp turn to the political left," made more sense:

“We do not know whether the present pause in temperature will remain for some time, or whether it will go up or down at some time in the near future. What we do know with ‘extreme certainty’ is that the climate is always changing, between pauses, and that we are not capable, with our limited knowledge, of predicting which way it will go next.”