The Climate Change Controversy: A Perspective

Our friend Dennis Gartman, publisher of The Gartman Letter, a daily commentary on the global capital markets, has brought to our attention the June 24th issue of Time magazine. The article begins:

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.

Sounds like the beginning of an ad for Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in which the former Vice President predicts the end of the world as we know it unless global warming is stopped.

But wait … the article is actually warning us of:

However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

The proof is everywhere for scientist to see:

Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.

This warning was sounded in Time’s June 24th 1974 edition.

Since that time, government regulations and industrial efforts have been aimed at cleaning up the environment, reducing harmful emissions and industrial by-products.

Surely our power plants and automobiles are a lot cleaner and more fuel efficient than their counterparts in 1974.

So has there been a clear reversal of the global cooling that was supposed to be the harbinger of the coming ice age? Or are we been had ... again?

And if we are being misled, as seems logical to me from the hysterical predictions coming out of the global warming advocates, what is the motive behind the push to “do something” about the so-called anthropomorphic (or man-made) global warming? What are the recommended “cures” and who benefits from their implementation? Surely that is a fair question.