The cover on the October issue of Architect magazine displayed a question that I would not have dreamed possible in this day and age,

“Who Believes in Climate Change?”

Given the bent toward belief that global warming is a reality that most of the architectural community holds, I thought this question to be strangely out of place.

The article cited a Gallup poll that said that only 58 percent of the general public believes that global warming is caused by man.

This surprising outcome led the magazine to conduct its own poll of 960 design professionals, and what they found was also surprising.

Here are the results to a series of statements that respondents were asked which statements “most closely describes your personal views on sustainable design and the environment”:

• 46.4 percent identified with the statement, “It’s vital that we design and build sustainably, in order to conserve scarce resources and prevent further global warming.”

• 34.1 percent chose the statement, “I’m not sure that global warming is caused by man, but energy conservation makes economic sense if we’ll be less dependent on other countries’ oil.”

• 6.7 percent identified with, “I’m not sure whether building green in the United States will help the environment when China and India are becoming industrialized so rapidly.”

• The final statement was, “Global warming is a myth perpetuated by the media, and green building is a fad – it’ll be forgotten in 20 years time.”

12.8 percent identified with this statement. This surprised me since I believed that the most architects were liberal, and given that the architectural community has been inundated with sustainability issues for several years.

When the results for the two skeptical statements are combined, the result is that 46.9 percent of the respondents were either skeptical of global warming or rejected it altogether.

Recently, one of our local AIA (American Institute of Architects) members conducted a similar poll among Oklahoma architects, and similar results were found.

Before that, I thought there were few like myself that had not bought into the global warming hoax.

And a hoax is exactly what it is.

Last week someone hacked into the Climactic Research Unit’s (CRU) files and found documents that indicate that data has been intentionally manipulated to “prove” global warming to have been man-made.

This is significant because the CRU is a primary source for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has had much to do with the formation of global warming policies world-wide.

The CRU is responsible for developing the so-called “hockey-stick” graph that plots a history of stable average world temperatures until the early 1900s, when it begins to skyrocket at about the time of the invention of the car.

This graph replaced an earlier more accurate graph that demonstrated that temperatures fluctuated up and down, including the Medieval Warm Period from about 1000 AD to 1400 AD.

According to a report in the American Thinker online, a University of Oklahoma geophysicist testified to the Senate that he recalled “an astonishing e-mail from a major researcher in the area of climate change” who told him that “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”

There is some reason to believe that that researcher later went on to become a lead author of policy for the IPCC.

The article in American Thinker went on to say that researchers at the CRU had refused to provide the data that was used to formulate this new “hockey stick” graph for verification, but it was eventually was obtained and re-analyzed.

The results showed that the there was no significant upturn in temperatures during the 1900’s as global warming alarmists espouse.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to the hacker who was able to expose these scientists.

But we also owe an even greater debt to our own Senator Jim Inhofe, who has tirelessly fought the battle against the global warming alarmists.

He is now calling for an investigation to see if the scientists in question purposely manipulated data.

He said, “The stakes in this controversy are significant, as it appears that the basis of federal programs, pending EPA rulings and cap-and-trade legislation was contrived and fabricated. Moreover, it appears that, in an attempt to conceal the manipulation of climate data, information disclosure laws may have been violated.”

My hope is that this will lead to a complete and final debunking of the global warming myth, so that we can take a scientific, reasoned approach to environmental polices that will enhance, instead of destroy, our economy and our property rights.

©2009 Randy W. Bright

Randy W. Bright, AIA, NCARB, is an architect who specializes in church and church-related projects.

You may contact him at 918-664-7957, rwbrightchurcharch@sbcglobal.net or www.churcharchitect.net.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 and is filed under Columns.