Political figures from former Vice President Al Gore to Rep. Henry Waxman claim global warming is responsible for Hurricane Sandy and the havoc she wrought on the eastern seaboard of the U.S.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says his late endorsement of President Obama is largely because he believes Obama will do more to combat global warming and help avert storms like the one that just pounded his city.
But while blaming man’s impact on his environment may be the politically trendy explanation for the destructive storms from earlier this week, but climate expert Leighton Steward says the facts simply don’t back up that argument. Steward is a geologist, climate adviser to former NASA astronauts and scientists critical of the agency for embracing the conventional wisdom on climate change and author of a book that breaks down the issues of global warming for the non-scientist.
“I think they’re grasping at anything that might be conceived as empirical evidence since they really have essentially none to back up their catastrophic forecasts,” said Steward, who contends climate change activists are simply trying to instill fear in people. “You can scare a lot of people and scare a lot of money out of their pocket one way or another, and that’s what they’re doing. But the real evidence that you look at and what’s happening with climate today and what has happened to climate over the years shows that carbon dioxide is not having that much of an effect on the climate.”
The alleged consensus of the scientific community is that human activity leads to greater emissions of carbon dioxide which leads to higher temperatures and more extreme climates. Steward says there’s a major problem with that theory.
“The earth has not warmed in 16 years,” he said, noting that data comes from British scientists who are revered in the climate change movement. “All the while, (carbon dioxide) levels been rising, rapidly.”
So if climate change is not responsible for the devastating storm, what does Steward see as the culprit? He says Sandy was barely a Category 1 hurricane, but when she happened to collide with cold weather systems over the east coast, we got this disaster.
Steward says evidence throughout history shows a general warming trend started in 1715, well before the industrial revolution.
Steward also offers advice to the political and media personalities looking to turn this tragedy into a legislative victory.
“Instead of our current administration wasting money trying to prevent Mother Nature from doing these natural occurring effects, they need to be thinking what they need to do when these impacts do hit us,” said Steward, noting that tax dollars should be spent on burying power lines and raising seawalls.