The global warming hysteria is getting to be somewhere beyond ridiculous..
reviewjournal.com
VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Lifting the global warming gag order
A 2003 poll of 530 climatologists in 27 countries showed 34.7 percent of interviewees endorsed the notion that a substantial part of the current global warming trend -- which might see temperatures rise by a degree or two, on average, by century's end -- is caused by man's industrial activities (driving cars and the like).
More than a fifth -- 20.5 percent -- rejected this "anthropogenic hypothesis." The rest (two-thirds) were undecided.
The skeptics now include the 85 climate experts who signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration; the 4,000 scientists from around the world (including 70 Nobel laureates) who signed the Heidelberg Appeal, and the 17,000 American scientists who signed the Oregon Petition. (Find these all through www.sepp.org or www.globalwarminghysteria.com.)
Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg bought the sky-is-falling scenario until he bothered to check some of the numbers, which led him to do his own research, at which point he wrote the book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and became The Man The Greens Love to Hate. He reminded the folks at www.techcentralstation.com on Nov. 30 that most economists believe the projected level of warming would either have no effect or be beneficial.
Cold weather kills people, Lomborg reminded us. "It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths." And that's before we even get around to increased food production. (If you want a real climate catastrophe, let's talk about the next Ice Age, which is due relatively soon.)
What's more, scientists at Ohio State University announced Feb. 12 that Antarctic "temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models." In fact, they went down (www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/osu-atd021207.php).
So why would one get the sense from the daily barrage of electronic news that "all experts now agree" the earth is heating catastrophically, and that mankind's use of fossil fuels is at fault?
First, pay attention to the wording. Many who want American taxpayers to provide welfare schooling and welfare health care for everyone who can walk here from Mexico and points south blithely lie and say their opponents "oppose immigration" -- rather than acknowledging the debate is about "illegal immigration." Likewise, those who aim to cripple the industrial economies of the Western world are careful to ridicule those who "deny global warming," instead of acknowledging that most skeptics agree there is indeed some minor warming going on. Instead, those skeptics object to the notion that this is a crisis and that mankind's activities are primarily "at fault" -- along with the corollary nutty prescription that destroying every power plant and automobile in America and Western Europe would make much difference.
"Spreading the global warming gospel with unified voice are 12,000 environmental groups controlling about $20 billion in assets," the Tucson-based Doctors for Disaster Preparedness reported last month. In comparison, "Truth seekers have at most a few million, lack the support of the press or Hollywood, and are generally shut out of government-funded schools and universities."
Which is where the foulest and most inexcusable abuses occur, of course.
In direct contravention of the First Amendment guarantee that our tax dollars will never be spent to impose any "establishment of religion," our children are in fact being spoon-fed the Green doctrine of global warming -- memory bytes in doggerel and song -- when they're far too young to bring any critical faculties to bear on this hypothesis.
And some critical perspective sure is needed.
Spiralling energy costs fueled by green hysteria "have caused the loss of 100,000 jobs in the UK over 18 months," report Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, again citing techcentralstation.com. Al Gore's anti-global warming plan would leave the average person 30 percent poorer by 2100, according to the Jan. 18 Wall Street Journal.
In the book "Unstoppable Global Warming -- Every 1,500 Years," authors S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery point out that scrapping every car, truck and SUV in America would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only about 2 percent. Meantime, merely extinguishing all the coal deposit fires that continue to burn unchecked around the world would reduce those emissions by 2 to 3 percent. Which is a more sensible thing to try?
Clearly, those who want to cripple our industrial economy have some other motive. And maybe that explains how shrill they can get in their attempt to silence the hated "climate deniers," who they now liken to "Holocaust deniers."
According to U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe's own Web site, she and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, sent a letter to ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson in October demanding the firm stop funding "a small cadre of scientists" who question global warming dogma, instead insisting the heavily regulated oil company "publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it."
ExxonMobil, whose executives presumably know where gasoline taxes and offshore oil leases come from, cut off its funding for the Competitive Enterprise Institute last year.
But when it comes to intimidating the opposition, the senators are pikers. The British foreign secretary "has said that skeptics should be treated like advocates of Islamic terror and denied access to the media," Doctors for Disaster Preparedness report in their January newsletter. George Monbiot wrote in England's "Guardian" that, "Every time someone drowns as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned."
Grist magazine has called for Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for those who deny the internal combustion engine is about to cause a global climate disaster. Heidi Cullen, host of the weekly global warming TV show "Climate Code," has called for the American Meteorological Society to strip its certification from any weatherman (or gal) who publicly questions anthropogenic global warming.
Meantime, European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas tells the BBC that people should view the battle against climate change as a war -- accepting the privations of a wartime economy and expecting millions of casualties.
And we were wondering why we only seem to hear one side of the story, these days? Isn't that kind of like asking why no one ever stood up in church in early 16th century Europe and started explaining how unlikely it was that these witches were really flying around at night, causing other people's cows to go dry?
It is dangerous to be right, Voltaire warned us, when those in power are so very wrong.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.LibertyBookShop.us. |
