Connecticut’s Very Own ‘Climate Denier’

April 15, 2010

Three years ago, Michael Griffin, then NASA’s boss, offered a unique take on climate change.

While he had “no doubt” that “a trend of global warming exists,” he questioned whether it was “a problem we must wrestle with.”

The aerospace geek -- you need two hands to count Griffin’s degrees in engineering and physics -- explained his ambivalence: “I would ask which human beings, where and when, are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Mercy. That’s climate heresy. And it’s exactly the kind of unconventional, big-picture thinking found in James R. Barrante’s Global Warming for Dim Wits: A Scientist’s Perspective of Climate Change.

For years, Barrante, professor emeritus of physical chemistry at Southern Connecticut State University, has clashed with warmists in the (Waterbury) Republican-American’s editorial page. Now he’s summarized his research in a 126-page booklet that thoroughly obliterates his foes’ fevered claims.

Barrante gets to his point just a few pages into the preface: “The fact that global temperature has risen 1.4°F or so in the last 150 years, or the fact that global temperature has not increased since 1998 proves only two things scientifically: that global temperature has risen 1.4°F or so in the last 150 years and that global temperature has not increased since 1998. It is not evidence that the temperature of the globe will continue to rise, fall, or go side-ways. And it is certainly not proof that the climate is changing.”

The planet, Barrante reminds us, is old. Really, really, really old. And when placed in the context of 400,000 years, the last century and a half of closely observed temperatures becomes … uninteresting.

Ice-core samples drilled by Russian scientists in Antarctica can be read like tree rings. Barrante draws an inescapable conclusion from the frozen cylinders: “[G]lobal temperature changes in a very controlled, periodic way.” Every 100,000 years or so, the planet’s warmth peaks, then drops quite rapidly, only to creep upward again. Once the next apogee is reached, the cycle starts anew. Within each 100,000-year cycle, short, dramatic shifts are commonplace.

“So,” Barrante avers, “it is apparent that there is nothing unusual about the increase of 1.4°F from the mid-1800s to the present. It is simply what the globe does over and over again.”

In Barrante’s anthropomorphic analogy, Earth “apparently ‘likes’ to be at ice-age temperatures.” The professor admits he doesn’t know why -- and no one else does, either.

It gets worse, warmist weenies! The professor’s data-digging has led him to conclude that climate change drives carbon dioxide levels -- not the other way around. “[Carbon dioxide] follows the global temperature,” he asserts, “not leads it.” What causes the planet to heat up is unknown. The professor suspects “something external, something extraterrestrial, like that big, yellow thing in the sky” is the culprit.

If their bête noire does regulate temperature, Barrante has a question for eco-alarmists: “Twenty thousand years ago, when the average temperature of the globe was 15°F colder than it is today, and the earth was solidly locked in an ice age, what prompted the [carbon dioxide] in the atmosphere to suddenly rise very quickly and take the globe out of the ice age?” Certainly not prehistoric man’s widespread use of SUVs and plasma-screen TVs.

As for the future: “Based on previous behavior of the climate, it is safe to say that … global warming will never be a concern, unless something catastrophic happens to our sun.”

But really, why bother listening to Barrante? He’s just a guy with a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard. Joe Lieberman, Rob Simmons, Donald Williams, and John McKinney are public servants. Who’s a more reliable source: A chemist with 43 years experience in his field who studies thousands of centuries of climate history, or a science-degree-free politician who studies how to win his next election?

One day -- and “deniers” hope it arrives during their lifetimes -- the “crisis” of “global climate change” will be remembered as one of the apocalyptic fairy tales humanity tells itself every few decades.

When the warmists meet their waterloo, few will remember the name James R. Barrante. Those who do will look back fondly on the work of a man who refused to bow to the power-crazed pols and grant-seeking “scientists” who once peddled the laughable notion that man has the power to control the planet’s temperature.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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