Greenpeace’s co-founder Patrick Moore has embraced the label of “warmist,” but it’s not because he believes in the theory of man-made global warming. It’s because he argues that “it would be good if the world was a few degrees warmer.”
Moore, who helped co-found Greenpeace in the 1970s, has been labeled by environmentalists as a global warming “denier” because he does not believe that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet. Rather, Moore has argued that the warming is natural and that some warming would actually be a good thing.
I’m declaring myself a “Warmist”. Someone who thinks it would be good if the world was a few degrees warmer. If you don’t, you’re a “Denier”
— Patrick Moore (@EcoSenseNow) March 26, 2014
Moore recently earned the ire of environmentalists when he testified in front of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that human carbon dioxide emissions aren’t warming the planet and that the earth is currently in the middle of a cold period, meaning warming should be welcomed.
“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” according to Moore’s prepared testimony. “Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.”
The United Nations and other international bodies have warned that the earth could warm by two degrees Celsius or more if carbon dioxide emissions are not — meaning that humans would need to curtail their use of fossil fuels. But Moore points out that humans evolved out of the tropics and are suited to slightly warmer climates.
“It is important to recognize, in the face of dire predictions about a [two degrees Celsius] rise in global average temperature, that humans are a tropical species,” Moore said. “We evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing.”
“It could be said that frost and ice are the enemies of life, except for those relatively few species that have evolved to adapt to freezing temperatures during this Pleistocene Ice Age,” he added. “It is ‘extremely likely’ that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.”
Global temperatures rose from the 1970s up until the late 1990s when they flattened out. Temperatures have not shown any warming trend for the last 17 years, baffling climate scientists who once argued that temperatures would skyrocket as carbon dioxide emissions increased.
But Moore’s warning of the dangers of a cooling climate have been getting more attention in the scientific community. In the past couple of years an increasing number of scientists have been predicting that the earth is entering a cooling phase that could last for a century.
“So the warming we saw, which lasted only from 1978 to 1998, is something that is predictable and expectable,” said Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University. “When the ocean changed temperatures, global cooling is almost a slam dunk. You can expect to find about 25 to 30 years yet ahead of us before it starts to warm up again. It might even be more than that.”
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