Why the Sky is Not Falling

[for those of you with children]

Holly Fretwell, an economist by training, has done her best to bring some needed critical thinking to the global-warming debate by writing “The Sky’s Not Falling! Aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds and their parents, it is a good, reasoned, 115-page antidote to the Chicken Little hysteria and propaganda found in the mainstream media and in places like Laurie David’s kids book “The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming.” Fretwell is a research fellow who focuses on natural-resource issues and public-lands management at the free-market Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Mont.[snip]

But as any scientist can tell you, correlation is not causation. If you actually go back and look at the data that shows CO2 levels and temperature changes over the last 650,000 years, what we find is that temperature actually changes first and CO2 in the atmosphere follows that temperature change. Maybe I should say that again: Temperature changes first. CO2 lags the temperature change. We know that humans are emitting CO2; the point being, however, there is no reason to believe that CO2 is causing temperature change when it is following temperature rises over the history of the data we have.

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