Dispelling many of the so-called “facts” undergirding “climate change” scientists’ argument that man-made pollutants are causing “global warming,” one climate-change skeptic points to six major reasons why environmental extremists’ devout belief in melting glaciers, rising oceans and drowning polar bears is merely science fiction.

“For nearly 30 years, some scientists and many liberal activists have been alleging that the world is on the verge of collapse because of humans’ use of fossil fuels, which they say have been causing global warming,” Heartland Institute Research Fellow and Executive Editor Justin Haskins pointed out in his piece for TheBlaze. “But despite the constant cries from the left proclaiming the ‘science is settled’ and that there’s a ‘scientific consensus,’ there are many reasons to reject these assumptions.”

Journalists have readily and incessantly touted catastrophic global warming warnings since the 1980s – warnings that have come and gone … with renewed alarms punctuating every decade since.

“A senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000,” the San Jose Mercury News alerted its readers on June 30, 1989, according to Haskins. “Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human [control.]”

Moving into the 1990’s, then-running mate to former President Bill Clinton, ex-Vice President Al Gore has rallied a loyal following for his global warming crusade – a movement he has fueled even more passionately since leaving the White House. But mainstream media has failed to capture the holes exposed in the popular Democrat’s problematic theory, as his failed predictions were brought to light in Sunday’s headline “Al Gore refuses to give direct answer when confronted over bogus 2006 claims on climate change.”

The renewed questioning was spurred as his second environmental documentary pushing climate change comes out – as Gore’s catastrophic forecasts from more than a decade ago introduced in his first documentary on the global warming never came true. The media confronted him on his faulty claims as he made himself available to the press, but he dodged giving a straight answer.

“In his life post White House, Gore has spent much of his time advocating against climate change and global warming,” TheBlaze’s Chris Enloe reported. “He released a world-famous documentary in 2006 titled An Inconvenient Truth. Many of Gore’s predictions in the documentary never came true, so 11 years later, Gore decided to release a sequel to his first film.”

But he’s at it again, similar to many other climate change alarmists – not letting the debunked theory dissuade him from raking in a lot of green from his green agenda.

“The movie, which is set to release this week, is aptly titled, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” Enloe continued. “According to a synopsis: ‘The film follows the efforts made to tackle climate change and Al Gore’s attempts to persuade governmental leaders to invest in renewable energy, culminating in the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016.’”

Regardless of the bad science, the show must go on – especially as virtually every academic institution in America promotes the multi-billion-dollar climate change agenda from the lecterns … as an undisputed scientific fact.

First: Cooling down a heated debate

Haskins began his fact check by stressing the abysmal track record of climate alarmists, who are virtually never held accountable for their predictions that grossly miss the mark because Americans are preoccupied with other more important issues.

“Instead of studying the issue for themselves, people rely on the media and the scientists the media has promoted to provide them with scientific conclusions,” the researcher insisted. “In other words, to the extent the public believes in the theory humans are responsible for global warming, it’s because they trust the scientists and media outlets they hear from most often on this issue, but should they? Based on climate-alarmist scientists’ track record, the answer is clearly ‘no.’”

Despite the fact that public schools and universities tout rising temperature predictions made by scientists as proving global warming to be true, this is far from reality.

“Over the past three decades, many climate scientists have repeatedly made a number of significant and alarming predictions about global warming, and the vast majority of the time, they’ve been wrong – really, really wrong,” Haskins recounted. “As Roy Spencer – who earned his Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin in 1981 and previously served as the senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center – wrote in 2014, greater than 95 percent of the climate models through 2013 ‘over-forecast the warming trend since 1979.’”

Spencer impressed that the assertion that man-made pollutants are raising global temperatures is mere speculation, but he said that if even half of any warming trend is accredited to man, the push for exorbitant green technology is still not warranted.

“And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50 percent of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats,” Spencer argued in February 2014. “I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like ‘most warming since the 1950s is human caused’ or ’97 percent of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming’, neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good.”

Second: Where’s the extreme weather?

Many climate change skeptics are also asking when all of this extreme weather and cataclysmic natural phenomena resulting from global warming – that has been predicted time and time again – will actually happen.

“It’s common for climate alarmists to argue that global warming has caused and will continue to cause a significant increase in extreme weather events, including hurricanes, and that sea levels will eventually rise to the point that massive cities will someday be flooded and uninhabitable, but the available data say otherwise,” Haskins noted.

He then pointed to a research fellow colleague of his at The Heartland Institute, H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. for more closure on the topic.

“[C]limate models predicted more intense hurricanes, but for nearly a decade, the United States has experienced far fewer hurricanes making landfall than the historic average, and those hurricanes that have made landfall have been no more powerful than previously experienced,” Burnett disclosed in Red State on January 4. “Additionally, while scientists have claimed anthropogenic warming should cause sea levels to rise at increasing rates – because of melting ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica and the thermal expansion of water molecules under warmer conditions – sea-level rise has slowed. Sea levels have always risen between ice ages or during interglacial periods. Indeed, sea levels have risen more than 400 feet since the end of the last interglacial period. However, the rate of sea-level rise since 1961 (approximately one-eighth of an inch per year) is far lower than the historic average (since the end of the previous ice age), and sea-level rise has not increased appreciably over the past century compared to previous centuries.”

Third: Rising temps caused by heightened carbon-dioxide levels highly unlikely

Another hole in climate alarmists’ claims has to do with the fact that humans’ so-called increased “carbon footprints” are far from being proven as being the cause of global warming.

“There are many unexplainable problems with the theory rising carbon-dioxide levels have caused global temperature to increase,” Haskins added. “One of the most common misconceptions in the climate-change debate is that skeptics reject the claim global temperatures have risen in recent decades. Virtually everyone agrees temperatures have increased, the primary issue is the reason or reasons for those increases. Climate-change alarmists say humans are to blame, and skeptics believe, to varying degrees, humans’ responsibility is relatively minimal or nonexistent.”

But the fact of the matter is that the Earth goes through both heating and cooling phases … which many scientists agree is due to cycles of the sun – not man-made pollutants.

“One of the reasons, but not the only reason, many skeptics have rejected the assertion carbon-dioxide and temperature are linked is that there have been periods during the past two centuries in which global temperature has dropped or paused,” the climate expert explained. “For instance, from the 1940s to the 1970s, Earth experienced a global cooling period, even while carbon-dioxide levels continuously rose. In the early 21st century, global temperature ‘paused’ for 18 years – again during a period in which carbon-dioxide levels increased.”

Even climate scientists such as Benjamin Santer, who was implicated in the Climategate Scandal, conceded that their inflated numbers do not hold water.

“Santer and his co-authors basically admit skeptical politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and [EPA Administrator Scott] Pruitt and numerous scientists were right: Climate models fail to replicate the warming pause in the early twenty-first century,” Burnett stated on July 7 in a piece for The Heartland Institute. “You just can’t make this stuff up folks. Reasons for climate alarm are in retreat.”

Fourth: Rife inaccuracies

The accuracy of the most widely circulated climate data is often questionable.

“For many years, climate skeptics, concerned by numerous leaked documents showing climate data had been unscientifically altered to make it appear as though warming had been more significant than it actually was, have argued many of the climate datasets advanced by prominent organizations, including NASA, are not accurate,” Haskins pointed out.

He pointed to a peer-reviewed study by researchers James P. Wallace III, Joseph S. D’Aleo and Craig Idso to make his case and point.

“We sought to validate the current estimates of GAST [global average surface temperature] using the best available relevant data,” the authors of “On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data and the Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding,” wrote. “This included the best documented and understood data sets from the U.S. and elsewhere, as well as global data from satellites that provide far more extensive global coverage – and are not contaminated by bad siting and urbanization impacts.”

And what they found speaks for itself – and against climate change alarmists.

“They concluded – by comparing trusted raw climate data with the widely used altered datasets, which have been adjusted to account for numerous problems, such as contamination from heat in urban areas – the datasets used by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Met Office in the United Kingdom ‘are not a valid representation of reality,’” Haskins added.

The haphazard “findings” of climate scientists were brought to light.

“In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data,” the researchers stressed. “Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.”

Fifth: Is warming even a bad thing in the first place?

Global warming extremists contention that a warming Earth is a catastrophic trend is exaggerated – at best.

“The underlying assumption that virtually all climate alarmists operate under is that the warming Earth is experiencing now is harmful, destructive and dangerous, but there is much evidence to suggest that moderate warming benefits most plants, animals and humans,” Haskins argued. “We know, for instance, that plants grow significantly better with higher carbon-dioxide concentrations, which is why many greenhouses pump additional CO2 into their buildings.”

He let the numbers speak for themselves.

“It’s also been confirmed by multiple studies that greening has increased in recent decades – and likely because of higher carbon-dioxide concentrations,” Haskins added. “According to a study by Martin Brandt et al., published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution in May, 36 percent of the continent of Africa became greener over the 20-year period from 1992 to 2011, while only 11 percent became ‘less green.’ Interestingly, the researchers found the increased greening was likely ‘driven’ by higher carbon-dioxide levels and precipitation, and the decreased greening was largely a result of humans cutting down vegetation.”

It is never mentioned that global cooling could be even more dangerous to the Earth than global warming.

“A greener planet means there is more food for humans and animals to consume, but a cooler global climate has historically been associated with significant food shortages and, in extreme cases, starvation,” Haskins emphasized. “An article in the influential journal The Lancet, published in 2015, examined health data from 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths. The authors concluded cold weather, directly or indirectly, kills 1,700 percent more people than hot weather.”

Sixth: Cheap energy alternatives will likely be developed during the next century

It is argued that even if global warming becomes a real problem, when it does, technology will likely be able to deal with it.

“The most serious problems are still a century or more away – even under some of the most dire, scientifically unsupported models,” Haskins pointed out. “That means the world has at least a half-century to come up with alternate energy sources and determine once and for all whether fossil-fuels are truly causing the problem.”

He went through a fairly recent chronology to demonstrate man’s innovative ways of improving things on Earth.

“A century ago, civilized nations were still fighting each other on horseback and traveling using steam engines … 50 years ago, cellphones were the stuff of science fiction,” Haskins recounted. “Thirty years ago, the average American household didn’t have a computer. Today, people fly across the world in a few hours on planes equipped with WIFI, allowing them to access a nearly endless supply of news, information and entertainment using pocket-sized super computers. Does anyone really think energy won’t change over the next century as well?”

The executive editor maintains that climate change skeptics are only guilty of looking for the facts – not basing their stance on emotional appeal rooted in speculations.

“Being a climate-change skeptic doesn’t mean you deny Earth’s climate has warmed or scientific findings,” Haskins concluded. “It simply means that you let facts, not speculation and fear-mongering, guide how you view the debate. If that sounds reasonable, then you’re probably a climate-change skeptic, too.”

Still not giving up

As for Gore and other climate change alarmists cashing in on their predicted cataclysmic environmental events – that never come to fruition – they show no signs of giving up on pushing their green agenda – even when holes in their arguments are exposed for all to see.

PJ Media Correspondent Nicholas Ballasy asked Gore last week about his 2006 claim that “the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years” if countries around the world didn’t take “drastic measures” to counteract what he saw as man-made global warming.

“Looking back on that prediction, why did you make the prediction at the time and are you making a new one right now given the current circumstances?” Ballasy challenged Gore last week.

The politician-turned environmentalist backtracked a bit and changed the subject.

“Well, first of all, we’ve seen a lot of progress since the first movie came out,” Gore replied. “We have the Paris agreement now. The cost of renewable energy has come down so quickly that people are switching over. Unfortunately, some elements of the Earth system have crossed a point of no return.”

His full explanation was clarified.

“To expand on his comments, Gore explained that a ‘big chunk’ of the west Antarctic ice-sheet ‘makes a considerable amount of sea-level rise inevitable in the future,’” TheBlaze’s Enloe extrapolated. “Gore, however, did not offer facts to back that claim. As it happens, Antarctic sea ice has been in the news recently. Earlier in July, a chunk of ice reportedly the size of Delaware broke off from Antarctica. Climate change alarmists seized on the opportunity to blame man-made climate change, but facts say otherwise, as most scientists have deemed the occurrence to be part of the natural iceberg forming process.”

Gore then turned around and blasted President Donald Trump for pulling out of the Paris Agreement.

“We still have the ability to stop short of other points of no return, and we now have the solutions available to really solve this crisis,” Gore insisted, according to TheBlaze. “We need the political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

However, the ex-VP would not address environmental catastrophe he said Trump was leading the world into, and ended up dodging the question about his predicted impending disaster by talking about the Paris accord.

“I’m very optimistic because the entire world has now reached the agreement in Paris to go down to net-zero global warming pollution as early in the second half of this century as possible,” Gore shared. “Many countries are making dramatic changes now and, regardless of President Trump’s statement about the Paris agreement, our governors and mayors and business leaders are stepping up to fill the gap. I think we’re going to meet our obligations under the Paris agreement regardless of what he does.”

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Copyright American Family News. Reprinted with permission.

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