Beware Global Cooling . . . or Warming!

I was a little annoyed yesterday, having lugged my raincoat into work, in anticipation of the thunderstorms that the Weather Channel told me to expect. As I looked out my window, I saw blue skies with a few cotton candy-looking clouds. Not a thunderbolt in sight. This is my first point. How many of us are really surprised anymore when the meteorologists are off on their weather predictions? Sometimes I think it might be nice to have a job where you can be wrong so often and yet not be out of a job.
Then I think about the predictions for last year's hurricane season. Going into the season, Professor William Gray of Colorado State University, who was acknowledged for his expertise in such predictions, called for 17 named tropical storms, 9 hurricanes, 5 of which would be major. Instead, we saw only 9 named tropical storms and a total of 5 hurricanes, none of which were major (category 4 or 5). That is my second point.
In 1975, Peter Gwynne wrote an article for Newsweek magazine where he talked of the famines that were then being predicted by scientists due to global climate change. And the culprit? Global cooling. Seems that temperatures had dropped by .6 degrees from the early 1940s to the 1970s. Within as little as 10 years, the entire earth could have been in the middle of a global inability to feed itself due to the impact that this drastic change in temperature would have on farming practices. What was one of their proposed solutions? Melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot! But this time they've got it right. And, besides, Al Gore tells us it is so. His bachelor's degree in government makes him an expert on the subject. This is my third point.
What am I trying to say with all of this? That all of these people lecturing us on global warming and the hazards we face if we don't revert to pre-industrial revolution living standards within the next five years might - just might- be wrong. They can't accurately predict the weather one week in advance, or the expected storms one year in advance. But we all believe, without question, that they can predict the entire climate of this planet more than 10 years from now? Based on half of a degree change over the course of a decade? And we should accept it all, of course, because it is published in peer-reviewed journals and presented in Academy-Award winning documentaries? Let's not forget the recent debacle with the Korean scientist who claimed to have successfully cloned, but who later had to retract his study. That was published in one of the most highly regarded, peer-reviewed scientific journals on the planet.
So forgive me if I don't sign on to the hype. Do I want to see the planet polluted? No. I try to do my part. I buy cars that will get me the best gas mileage that I can afford. I calculate the mileage that I get out of my car regularly, and try to keep it well maintained so that I can get the fuel efficiency even higher. So you'll forgive me if I change the channel when Madonna lectures me from a stage in London about what I'm not doing, as she drives her multiple cars and SUVs. I switch off lights in my house when they aren't in use, and keep my house just a little bit warmer than I would absolutely like, in order to save energy. So I hope you don't mind that I ignore Al Gore, who consumes more energy in his house in one month than most people do in over a year. I flush my toilet and send my waste to the city sewers, where man-made technology does what it can to limit the impact on the environment of that waste. So I'll thank you very much to not lecture me on how I should listen to the rantings of Dave Matthews, who dumps the waste from his tour bus whenever he gets over a river in Chicago. In my own selfish, fiscally minded way, I do more to combat global warming and limit my carbon footprint on this planet than any jet-setting, carbon offset-buying, tree-hugging, platitude-spewing, environmentalist Hollywood actor/musician/pseudo-scientist or has-been politician out there. And I don't subject them to any junk science powerpoint presentations. Why don't they afford me the same consideration?