McCain Wrong on Global Warming

This just illustrates the fact that this year's [2008] presidential election isn't between right and wrong, it's between bad and worse. I'm so discouraged.

A British editor and politician prominent in the discussion of climate change has written an open letter to John McCain criticizing statements the Republican candidate has made about global warming.

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who was an adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, sought to keep Al Gore’s global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” out of public schools in Britain, and in March 2007 challenged Gore to a debate on climate change.

Now in his letter to McCain, published on the Web site American Thinker, Monckton calls manmade global warming fears “scientifically discredited” and advises, “Not for a single moment longer must you allow yourself to be distracted by the murderous foolishness of the climate alarmists.”

Monckton quotes a McCain statement that “we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures.”

Monckton, saying he bases his assertions on “peer-reviewed scientific literature,” counters, “For most of the past 600 million years, the temperature that most often prevailed globally is thought to have been 12.5 degrees higher than today’s temperature . . .

“From 1700 to 1998, temperature rose at a near-uniform rate of about 1 degree per century. In 1998, ‘global warming’ stopped, and it has not resumed since. Indeed, in the past seven years, temperature has been falling at a rate equivalent to as much as 0.7 degrees per decade.”

Responding to McCain’s statement that greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide, “are heavily implicated as a cause of climate change,” Monckton writes, “Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is naturally present, and carbon dioxide occupies just one ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did 250 years ago.”

Monckton, who was an editor and writer with Britain’s Evening Standard newspaper, quotes McCain, “We need to deal with the central facts of . . . rising waters.”

He counters, “Sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago . . . The rate of increase has averaged four feet per century. Yet in the 20th century, when we are told that ‘global warming’ began to have a major impact on global temperature and hence on sea level, sea level rose by just eight inches.”

Then in a swipe at Al Gore, whom he does not mention by name, Monckton observes, “There is not and has never been any scientific basis for the exaggerated projections by a certain politician that sea level might imminently rise by as much as 20 feet.

“That politician, in the year in which he circulated a movie containing that projection, bought a $4 million condominium just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.”

Monckton also seeks to refute statements McCain has made on receding glaciers, melting polar ice sheets, extreme weather events, threats to polar bears, and more.

And in reference to the candidate’s stated support for efforts to control climate change by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases, Monckton tells McCain: "With every respect, there is no rational basis for your declared intention that your great nation should inflict upon her own working people and upon the starving masses of the Third World the extravagantly pointless, climatically irrelevant, strategically fatal economic wounds that the arrogant advocates of atmospheric alarmism admit they aim to achieve.”