New study debunks global warming claims

Members of the U.S. Senate will do well to take the time to read "Influence of the Southern Oscillation on Tropospheric Temperature." Sounds like a real page-turner, no? It certainly should be for senators and anybody else who cares about whether Congress approves the Obama-Waxman-Markey anti-global warming energy bill ("cap-and-trade") that recently passed the House and is now before the Senate. The principal evidence underlying cap-and-trade is contained in the UN's annual Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which asserts that the Earth's atmosphere is warming due to man-made activities, chiefly the burning of carbon-based fuels like oil and coal; the consequences, not surprisingly are described as catastrophic. Cap-and-trade imposes a host of draconian measures masquerading as a "market-based approach" designed to phase out carbon fuels, which would be replaced by the alternatives encouraged by tax breaks and government subsidies. If the measure becomes law, it will double or triple monthly utility bills, make the price of gasoline skyrocket, and cost millions of jobs.

Quite simply, the "Influence" study demolishes the claims of the IPCC. Conducted by two scientists from Australia and one from New Zealand, the peer-reviewed paper assessed the influence of the Southern Oscillation Index, (which manifests north of the Equator as El Nino), on global temperature variation. At least 81 percent of the variance in global temperatures is explained by the Southern Oscillation Index, according to the study. The study findings were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. In view of these findings, the Senate should, at the very least, put cap-and-trade on hold, pending congressional hearings in September at which the Influence study authors and IPCC proponents can argue their cases. Then senators should be better able to make defensible decisions on whether it makes sense to impose radical new controls on the production and consumption of the energy that is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy.

This is the sensible approach because, as Buzz Aldrin, the former NASA astronaut who famously walked on the Moon, recently told the London Telegraph: "I think the climate has been changing for billions of years. If it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today." Put another way, it's time to make global warming decisions on the basis of credible evidence and logical analysis, rather than alarmism fueled by the media.