'Intellectual Pigmies'

One of the smartest guys alive, George Gilder, author of "Wealth and Poverty" and now something of a microchip genius, weighs in on Al Gore and his horror flick, "An Inconvenient Truth":

The disabling flaw of the Al Gore movie is that nearly all the details (Kilamanjaro, the Chad lake, the spread of diseases and on and on) dissolve as soon as you investigate them. (It’s been colder than usual on Kil; the lake is a few feet deep and disappears cyclically; the diseases are unrelated to GW.)

The key to his scientific argument is the famous Academy Award extrapolation of CO2 increases to the skies, as dramatized by his elevator lift scene.

But far from an exponential, CO2 does not even have anywhere near a linear impact on temperatures. If he compared the increase in CO2 not to existing CO2 but to the gyrations of other greenhouse gasses, particularly water vapor, which is 130 times more voluminous, he would have had to crawl along the bottom of the chart with a magnifying glass.

The idea that CO2, which is absorbed by plants and sustains them (to the extent of a 28% increase in foliage in recent years), is a pollutant of any kind will be regarded by future scientists as the looniest notion of our increasingly innumerate media culture. Nick Tredennick did a great short essay on this. (See http://blog.gildertech.com/index.php?/archives/13-Aliens-Global-Warming.html)

As Richard Feynman pointed out about adjectival "sciences," environmental science probably isn't. It's science for rich upper class dummies like Bobby Kennedy and Sharon Rockefeller who think they should be able to push around current wealth creators because their own wealth is "well seasoned" by time and refined by Ivy "liberal arts." They themselves are intellectual pigmies compared to their forbears in business whom they depend on for their trust fund support and disdain in politically correct fatuities.

Link here (2nd item)