Greenpeace co-founder: No scientific evidence of man-made global warming
There is no scientific evidence that human activity is causing the planet to warm, according to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who testified in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday.
Moore argued that the current argument that the burning of fossil fuels is driving global warming over the past century lacks scientific evidence. He added that the Earth is in an unusually cold period and some warming would be a good thing.
“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,” according to Moore’s prepared testimony. “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,” Moore said. “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.”
“It could be said that frost and ice are the enemies of life, except for those relatively few species that have evolved to adapt to freezing temperatures during this Pleistocene Ice Age,” he added. “It is ‘extremely likely’ that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.” Indeed, cold weather is more likely to cause death than warm weather. RealClearScience reported that from “1999 to 2010, a total of 4,563 individuals died from heat, but 7,778 individuals died from the cold.” Only in 2006 did heat-related deaths outnumber cold deaths.
In Britain, 24,000 people are projected to die this winter because they cannot afford to pay their energy bills. Roughly 4.5 million British families are facing “fuel poverty.”
“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,” Moore said.
“When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time,” he added. “Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.”
Moore, a Canadian, helped found the environmental activist group Greenpeace in the 1970s. He left the group after they began to take on more radical positions. He has since been a critic of radical environmentalism and heads up the group Ecosense Environmental in Vancouver, Canada.
Moore’s comments come after President Obama declared global warming a “fact” in the State of the Union. His administration has attempted to argue that the recent U.S. cold snap was influenced by a warmer planet.
Climate scientists, however, have been struggling to explain why global surface temperatures have not risen in the last 17 years and why atmospheric temperatures have been flat for the last decade.
“From 1910 to 1940 there was an increase in global average temperature of [0.5 degrees Celsius] over that 30-year period,” Moore said. “Then there was a 30-year ‘pause’ until 1970. This was followed by an increase of [0.57 degrees Celsius] 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,” the former environmental activist added. “The increase in temperature between 1910-1940 was virtually identical to the increase between 1970-2000.”
“Yet the IPCC does not attribute the increase from 1910-1940 to ‘human influence.’” Moore continued. “They are clear in their belief that human emissions impact only the increase ‘since the mid-20th century.’ Why does the IPCC believe that a virtually identical increase in temperature after 1950 is caused mainly by ‘human influence,’ when it has no explanation for the nearly identical increase from 1910-1940?”
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