Former Astronaut Speaks Out on Global Warming
(article by the Associated Press, 02/15/2009)
AP article, Santa Fe, NM- Former astronaut
Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served
New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn't believe that humans are causing global warming.
“I don't think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect,” said
Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the
International Conference on Climate Change in
New York.
Schmitt contends that scientists “are being intimidated” if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.
“They've seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven't gone along with the so-called political consensus that we're in a human-caused global warming.”
Schmitt said.
Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based
Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited
Schmitt after reading about his resignation from
The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.
Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the “global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over
American lives, incomes and decision making.”
Williams said
Heartland is skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming.
“Not that the planet hasn't warmed. We know it has or we'd all still be in the Ice Age,” he said. “But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there's disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming.”
Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400AD., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise.
Schmitt also said geological evidence indicates changes in sea level have been going on for thousands of years. He said smaller changes are related to cahnges in the elevation of land masses – for example, the
Great Lakes are rising because the earth's crust is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers.
Schmitt, who grew up in
Silver City and now lives in
Albuquerque, has a science degree from the
California Institute of Technology. He also studied geology at the
University of Oslo in
Norway and took a doctorate in geology from
Harvard University in 1964.
In 1972, he was one of the last men to walk on the moon as part of the
Apollo 17 mission.
Schmitt said he's heartened that the upcoming conference is made up of scientists who haven't been manipulated by politics.
Of the global warming debate, he said: “It's one of the few times you've seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it's coloring their objectivity.”
____
Ref. Santa Fe New Mexican,
http://www.sfnewmexican.com/http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/general/view/2009_02_15_Former_astronaut_speaks_out_on_global_warming/srvc=home&position=recent
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