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.

FMI: www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/schmitt-hh.html, www.heartland.org