There’s one kind of disaster that will most assuredly never happen:
The one everybody is worried about.
History teaches this. While Winston Churchill warned of Adolf Hitler’s dangerousness, others pooh-poohed the matter and few foresaw WWII. Prior to then, how many expected the Great Depression? Did any Pompeians predict the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.? How many Romans worried about the Goths sacking the Eternal City in 410? Did medieval Europeans foresee the Black Death disaster of the 14th century? You can go right down the list.
This brings us to what everyone is worried about today: global-war…er…climate chan…uh…. What’s the latest iteration? Ah, yes, “global climate disruption.” However they change the name, though, they can’t change a simple fact:
The global-warming agenda is increasingly being revealed for the scam it is.
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There was the Climategate scandal of 2009, in which “scientists” at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were conspiring to suppress data that contradicted their global-warming agenda; there was the British judge who ruled, in a lawsuit to ban Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth from UK government schools, that the movie contained nine significant errors; there was the revelation that the claim that 97 percent of scientists agreed with the AGW (man-caused global warming) thesis was bunk. Now a mainstream publication, the UK’s Telegraph, has published a scathing denunciation of warmist propaganda. Citing information from Steven Goddard’s blog Real Science, Christopher Booker writes:
Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s] US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.
Booker also asks what it means when a theory has to be promoted with continual “fudging” of the data. Is it science at all? Perhaps, however, he has those English manners that preclude one from saying what I, in my colonial brashness, will put bluntly: these so-called scientists aren’t merely “fudging.”
They’re lying.
If they were Pinocchio, their collective nose would be the size of our national debt. If they were shepherds, they could be a whole boys’ school that cried wolf. Despite this, Western pseudo-elites are still running around like Chicken Little.
For example, while Iraq becomes an Islamic state, Russia moves on Ukraine, China angles to be the world’s hegemon, and the United States is in moral freefall, Barack Obama gives a commencement speech at the University of California, Irvine, condemning climate-change “deniers” (translation: people in touch with reality). He also recently commended New Zealand prime minister John Key for being a fellow Chicken Little in his “crusade” against climate change, and Obama’s EPA continues to unconstitutionally enforce regulations designed to reduce carbon emissions, even though calling CO2 “carbon” is a lot like calling H2O “hydrogen.”
Of course, Obama and Key have much company in their hen house. Former treasury secretary Hank Paulson, for instance, recently wrote the following in the New York Times (hat tip: Thomas Lifson):
We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy. The warning signs are clear and growing more urgent as the risks go unchecked.
This is a crisis we can’t afford to ignore. I feel as if I’m watching as we fly in slow motion on a collision course toward a giant mountain. We can see the crash coming, and yet we’re sitting on our hands rather than altering course.
We need to act now.
Yes, act now, think later. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
The irony of this is that even if the AGW thesis were correct, there would be little we could do about it. First, China and India — which together boast 36 percent of the world’s population — are rapidly building coal-fired power plants. Any Western reduction in CO2 will be dwarfed by these behemoths’ increases alone. Add to this other CO2-happy developing nations and Russia, and the fruitlessness of the uniquely Western climate-change obsession becomes apparent.
Second, there are scientists who believe that AGW is a reality, but said long ago that it was too late to do anything about it, anyway. So are we cooked? Now the good news.
Whatever the cause, there’s no reason to be afraid of the big bad climate change.
Not if it’s in the direction of rising mercury, that is.
Contrary to the doom-and-gloom rhetoric, it seems a warmer planet’s benefits far outweigh its downsides. Like eating? Note that greater temperatures probably mean more arable land. In addition, higher CO2 levels increase plant yields 30-plus percent across species; this begets better crops. This is why botanists pump the gas into their greenhouses, mind you. It’s why the age of the dinosaurs was one of dense foliage — CO2 levels were five to 10 times what they are today. The gas is not a pollutant. It’s plant food.
Moreover, as the aforementioned Jurassic CO2 levels indicate, climate change is not unprecedented. There was a time when the waters surrounding Florida were 300 feet lower and another when they were 100 feet higher. The Earth was completely or almost completely covered with snow and ice during the Cryogenian period while during another time the snow and ice were virtually gone. There have been four or five major ice ages and numerous minor ones; there are 100,000-year glacial periods followed by 12,000-year interglacials (approximations) and 1,500-year cycles of heating and cooling within them. Climate is no more stable than are people.
Speaking of which, there’s a philosophical point to be made here. The liberal climate alarmists are the first to say that humans are just animals, just part of nature like an amoeba. If this is true, however, wouldn’t we then just be another “natural” factor in naturally occurring climate change?
At most, though, we appear a negligible factor. This raises a question: Why won’t Obama, Gore, Paulson, and the other Chicken Littles fly the coop of climate fear?
One reason is that everyone needs something to give his life meaning, and, absent true faith, an environmental crusade in Gaia’s name perhaps best fits the bill. This means that, for some, leaving the Church of Warmism is like a jihadist leaving Islam. Related to this is that when you’ve devoted a good part of your life and your passion and energy to a cause, it’s hard to admit you’re wrong.
But there’s another reason. Many individuals and companies, such as those producing ethanol, are profiting via doomsday prophesying. For instance, Al Gore — perhaps one of history’s most shameless con-men — “could become [the] world’s first carbon billionaire,” reported The Telegraph in 2009. This, not to mention all the climate-change grants governments give malleable scientists for “research.”
What this means is that, despite its unraveling, the climate-change con will be around for a while longer. But driven by a combination of naiveté (gullible followers), envy, and cash, at least we can say that the “green” movement has certainly earned its name.
