The Santa Fe New Mexican reports a pronounced skepticism of global warming from one of America's heroic astronauts:Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon and a former U.S. senator from New Mexico, doesn't buy the idea that humans are causing global warming. "I don't think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," he said.
Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled speak at an international conference next month, admitted his beliefs fly in the face of the political consensus that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon-dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.
Scientists who disagree with this scenario "are being intimidated," Schmitt said. "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."
The 74-year-old geologist recently resigned from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration, after the group blamed global warming on human activity. "As a geologist, I love Earth observations," he wrote in his Nov. 14 resignation letter. "But, it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a 'consensus' that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise.
" 'Consensus,' as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities."...
