Here is a comment I sent to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

I know you are not interested in anything that disagrees with the global warming hypothesis of the eminent theologian Al Gore, but here is an interesting report from a Member of the European Parliament, Roger Helmer, that indicates politician’s lack of interest in actual data. This is from:

http://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/unwrapping-the-eu-climate-package/

Unwrapping the EU Climate Package
February 28, 2008, 8:00 pm
Filed under: Climate Change

I attended a European Policy Centre Breakfast Meeting on Feb 28th with Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas. It was well attended with about 300 there: I sat at the top table with the Commissioner. He spent some time “unwrapping the EU Climate Package”.

When I had a chance to put a question, I spoke as follows:

“Is the Commission aware that 1998 was the hottest year in recent history, and that climate change now seems to have stalled? Is it aware that new data in recent days from four highly respected meteorological institutes shows that in recent months average global temperatures have dropped dramatically, far outside the range of recent years? Is the Commission aware of the exceptional snow-fall in China, in the Middle East, in parts of the USA?” (I could see that the American Ambassador, Boyden Grey, also at the top table, was following my question with interest). “Does the Commission know that sea ice cover in the Antarctic is currently the highest since records began? You may say that these are anomalies against the trend, but we seem to have an awful lot of anomalies and not very much trend.

“Isn’t it true that we are relying on predictions from computer models which are increasingly at odds with reality, and that based on those predictions we are putting in place policies which will do huge damage to European economies, and impoverish our grandchildren?”.

The guy from the WWF booed. Commissioner Dimas muttered a long reply which contained a lot about the IPCC and the Stern report, nothing at all about the actual climate data.

Helmer forgot to mention that there is now ice all of the way from Greenland to Newfoundland. Maybe he didn’t know because news organizations seem reluctant to spread that news. That is curious since they were so eager to report the absence of sea ice last summer. The poor polar bears are now in danger of starving because they are iced in, as opposed to drowning because there are no ice floes.

You know there are two schools of thought regarding global warming. One is that temperature is now driven by CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (never mind that past temperature variations were clearly not due to atmospheric CO2 variations). The other is that the sun drives the temperature on earth with the important variable being solar magnetic activity rather than solar intensity. The magnetic activity is indicatd by sunspots. When there is not much magnetic activity, there are not many sunspots. This lack of activity allows more cosmic rays (which are actually particles rather than rays) to reach the earth’s atmosphere where they cause cloud formation that reflects the sun’s energy before it reaches the ground. Sunspot activity correlates well with the temperaure history of earth since the last ice age. Recently sunspot activity has been low. Recently the earth’s temeprature has gone down a lot. Advantage to those who believe that the sun is the earth temperature driver as opposed to the Al Gore acolytes who believe that CO2 is the driver. Do politicians care about what is actually happening? As indicated above, they do not. They see global warming (which they now call climate change, since warming is not actually happening) as an opportunity to establish a socialistic world government and to end individual freedom in the West, and they intent to take the opportunity while they have the support of an uninformed public.