Says Mankind Isn't Responsible For Rising Seas
Former Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison
Schmitt has taken a position on global warming contrary to that of
many of his peers... but he's hardly alone.
Schmitt, a resident of Albuquerque, NM, told the Santa Fe New
Mexican he's been invited to speak next month at the International
Conference on Climate Change in New York. The former astronaut and
geologist is one of 70 speakers who will present an opposing
position to the belief that humanity has caused the Earth to warm
at an excessive rate.
"I don't think the human effect is significant compared to the
natural effect," said Schmitt, who resigned from the nonprofit
group The Planetary Society when the think tank came out blaming
global warming on human activities.
The "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to
increase government control over American lives, incomes and
decision making," Schmitt wrote in his resignation letter,
asserting scientists "are being intimidated" to follow the
politically-correct view that global warming is manmade.
Schmitt, 74, says geological evidence shows the temperature of
the planet Earth has warmed by about one degree per century since
the 1400s, with a commensurate rise in carbon dioxide levels.
Changes in ocean levels and melting glaciers may also be explained
scientifically, without asserting that global warming is an
unnatural act, he added.
"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 says.
The climate change conference will be hosted by the
Chicago-based Heartland Insitute. Publisher Dan Williams invited
Schmitt to speak after learning of his resignation from The
Planetary Society.
"Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we'd
all still be in the Ice Age," Williams 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 -- who has a science degree from the California
Institute of Technology, a doctorate in Geology from Harvard, and
who studied Geology at the University of Oslo in Norway -- says
he's looking forward to presenting his views before an audience who
has hopefully not been manipulated by politics.
"[The global warming debate] is 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," he
said.