In the April 20 edition of the Australian newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph, Cardinal George Pell expressed his concern regarding the “global warming hypothesis” in an article titled, “Global warming is over.” Cardinal Pell began his article by giving recent examples of countries that have experienced more bitter temperatures and heavier snow than usual.
“Canada has just experienced the coldest winter and the heaviest snowfalls since 1970-71, which was called a once-in-1000-years event. Another 18cm of snow would set an all-time record.”
“In China, the Chinese New Year coincided with a fierce cold snap and snowstorms, which prevented many city workers returning to their villages for the celebrations. Police had to deal with the ensuing riots. London has just experienced snow at Easter.”
The cardinal stated that while “the world is much bigger than both China and Canada combined, which might be the exceptions to the new rule of man-made global warming, but they are inconvenient facts for the climate-change bandwagon.”
“And it is an intolerant bandwagon with loud, exaggerated claims that the issue is settled and that an unchallenged consensus among scientists confirms the hypothesis of dangerous, humanly caused global warming. In fact, the issue is far from settled.”
Though skeptical politicians would need “unusual courage” to resist these claims in the public sphere, Cardinal Pell argued that “the rest of us are not so constrained and we should consider all information.”
He continued by listing three significant points:
“Last December, more than 100 international scientists, some of them members of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned the UN that attempting to control climate was ``ultimately futile''. So did 500 experts in Manhattan in March.”
“Fighting climate change was distracting governments from helping the most vulnerable citizens adapt to the threat of inevitable natural climate changes, whatever they might prove to be. Futile attempts to prevent global climate change would be a tragic misallocation of resources, they claimed.”
His second point noted that “none of the natural changes observed with glaciers, sea levels and species migration is outside the bounds of known variability, including the warming of 0.1C to 0.2C per decade, in the late 20th century. But the 1930s decade was warmer than the 1990s. Most importantly, the global temperature has not increased since 2001. Global warming has ceased (New Statesman, 19/12/2007).”
“This finding invalidates the global-warming hypotheses because the amount of carbon dioxide continues to increase and the temperature should be increasing, too. It isn't."
His concluding point was that “today's computers cannot predict climate over long periods, as there are too many unknowns and variables.”
“We should never forget that while computers are miracles of human ingenuity, they are also limited, cannot think for themselves and are totally obedient to their last human master.”
“More than this is needed to predict the future.”
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