“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”
—Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]
“Pick up any 40-year-old science textbook – on chemistry, biology, geology, physics, astronomy or medicine – and you’ll find a slew of “facts” and theories that have been proven wrong or are no longer the “consensus” view. Climatology is no exception.
Yesterday’s Cooling Scare
Back in the 1970s, many scientists warned of global cooling – and fretted that a new ice age brought on by fossil fuel use would cause glaciers to expand, wreaking havoc. They predicted every conceivable disaster, short of roving herds of wooly mammoths stampeding through ice-covered streets. (The possibility of cloning a well-preserved mammoth could buttress the next scary ice age scenario.)
Newsweek’s 1975 cover story “The Cooling World” breathlessly reported that, “after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” Meteorologists are “almost unanimous” that the trend will “reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” it intoned, and “the resulting famines could be catastrophic.”
The CIA, NASA, National Academy of Sciences and many news organizations issued similar alarums. Dr. John Holdren, now President Obama’s science adviser, joined Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich in penning an essay that warned:
The effects of a new ice age on agriculture and the supportability of large human populations scarcely need elaboration here. Even more dramatic results are possible, however; for instance, a sudden outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.
Today’s Warming Scare
The Chicken Little ice age never arrived. Instead, the new “consensus” view is that our planet now faces fossil-fuel-induced catastrophic global warming. A 2006 Newsweek story conceded that its ice age theme had been “spectacularly wrong.” But the admission came amid decades of Newsweek, Time and even BusinessWeek and National Geographic stories about an imminent global warming “apocalypse.”
The tales of doom remain standard media fare, even as the science continues to evolve – and even as Climategate and other revelations of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shenanigans and duplicity join the backlash against Michael Mann’s hockey stick. New theories about solar cycles, cosmic rays and the dominant role of solar activity in determining Earth’s climate are becoming far more common in books and peer-reviewed research compendia of science-based climate realism.
Cooling? Warming? How about something in between to settle the debate, neuter the alarm, and let us get on with our lives?
Energy Policy Pollution
Manmade global warming, climate change and “weird” weather remain the foundation of environmentalist and leftist political agendas for ending our “addiction” to oil, ushering in a new era of “eco-friendly” renewable energy, and “fundamentally transforming” our economy and society. Their power, prestige, control and access to billions of dollars a year for biased research and crony-corporatist energy schemes super-glue their dependency to this issue.
With fracking and other new petroleum discovery and extraction technologies proving beyond doubt that we will not run out of oil or gas anytime soon, climate change is really all they are left with. Those realities are driving an extreme policy agenda.
The Democratic Party platform stated emphatically:
We know global climate change is one of the biggest threats of this generation – an economic, environmental, and national security catastrophe in the making … The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe.
Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) recently told Politico that Democrats would again seek cap-tax-and-trade legislation if they ever control both Congress and the White House. Because Congress rejected regressive climate legislation, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency, under Lisa Jackson, has issued thousands of pages of regulations designed to shut down coal-based electricity generation and impose a true-believer view that carbon dioxide controls the climate and must be drastically reduced to prevent a global warming Armageddon. Meanwhile, legions of subsidized researchers are trying desperately to tie every conceivable phenomenon and event to global warming – even rape and murder!
By making fossil fuels scarcer and more expensive, while spending billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize wind, solar and biofuel energy, EPA’s war on fossil fuels is designed to force Americans to abandon the energy sources that power our economy. The goal is to force Americans to turn to inefficient, unreliable, impractical, expensive, job-killing energy sources that emit less CO2.
Is Their Weird Getting Weirder?
There is plenty of science showing that neither average global temperatures, nor tornado and hurricane frequency and severity, nor droughts, rainfall, sea level rise or Arctic climate and weather patterns and events in recent decades differ measurably or significantly from historic norms, cycles or variations.
The hysterical and spectacularly wrong predictions would be hysterically funny, except for one thing. Too many global cooling/warming/weird weather scientists, activists and politicians are using the issue to justify policies that are compromising our economy. Congress and the Obama administration are already implementing draconian laws and regulations that make energy less reliable and affordable, destroy jobs, weaken our national security, make us more dependent on foreign energy supplies, raise consumer prices, and slow America’s economic growth.
The needless regulations are prolonging the recession, keeping unemployment high, impairing civil rights progress, and hurting poor, minority and elderly families most of all. Any conflicts and refugees will result far less from future weather and climate events, than from ill-advised US, EU, UN and other policies that make energy, minerals, food, water, healthcare, and opportunities out of reach for millions or even billions of people.
Contrary to President Obama’s intent, we don’t need to “fundamentally transform” our energy, economy or society. We need to fundamentally demote bad thinking that diverts our attention and resources from real challenges and problems.
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[1] Boulding, Kenneth. “Fun and Games with the Gross National Product—The Role of Misleading Indicators in Social Policy.” In The Environmental Crisis, edited by Harold Helfrich Jr., 157–70. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Quoted in Robert Bradley, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy. Salem, MA: M&M Scrivener Press, 2009, p. 238.
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”, Ottmar Edenhofer, UN IPCC
The goal is a carbon-free global vegan commune with dramatically lower population, governed by some subset of the tin pot despots represented in the UN General Assembly.
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”, Animal Farm, by George Orwell. I predict there would be no shortage of contenders for the role of Napoleon.
Nice post.
I think the alarmists are out-of-season now with cooler weather setting in–and football season. We have real problems with our favorite team(s) in this zero-sum-game situation.
Keep in mind that these folks claim they are able to foretell the future and they can control the climate by adjusting a few parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. Truely amazing claims.
Ray,
A review of the graph of future global average temperature presented to Congress by Dr. James Hansen of NASA GISS in 1988 would suggest that their crystal ball might have been a bit cloudy at the time. However, retroactive adjustments have made their predictions look better over time. 🙂
Perhaps you should “cut them a little slack”, since: “Prediction is very hard, especially about the future.” (Yogi Berra, American philosopher)
I can give the very fine Yogi Berra quote a scientific basis. Niels Bohr first said it.
I would like to extend to you personal invitation to check my feature length documentary on the “cold facts” of Global Warming entitled “The Boy Who Cried Warming,” available in full at http://www.theboywhocriedwarming.com. The virtual premier has been enjoyed by over 12,000 viewers due to a grassroots campaign effort of handing out flyers and emailing people just like you! We are independent filmmakers without corporate sponsorship, every view counts to us, and we would truly appreciate if you would take a look and (if you enjoy the film) encourage others to check it out. The list of websites mentioning our film growing, and we would be honored if you would join the growing list distinguished sites below:
“The Boy Who Cried Warming” has enjoyed recommendations from:
Watts Up With That?
Examiner.com
Digging in the Clay
Bishop Hill
Junk Science
Climate Depot
No Trick Zone
Before it’s News
Climate Change Dispatch
Climate Ponderings
Jammie Wearing Fools
Oh What Now
SCEF.org.uk
Tom Nelson
And the list keeps on growing… PLEASE feel free to Google the name to check out the comments, and as always, enjoy the show!
Jesse Jones
Producer/Writer “The Boy Who Cried Warming”
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[…] 0.00018% of Earth’s atmosphere (1.8 ppm, equivalent to 18 cents out of $100,000); its link to climate change is conjectural at best; and whatever might possibly escape from US operations is dwarfed by CH4 […]
[…] 0.00018% of Earth’s atmosphere (1.8 ppm, equivalent to 18 cents out of $100,000); its link to climate change is conjectural at best; and whatever might possibly escape from US operations is dwarfed by CH4 […]
[…] 0.00018% of Earth’s atmosphere (1.8 ppm, equivalent to 18 cents out of $100,000); its link to climate change is conjectural at best; and whatever might possibly escape from US operations is dwarfed by CH4 […]
[…] 0.00018% of Earth’s atmosphere (1.8 ppm, equivalent to 18 cents out of $100,000); its link to climate changeis conjectural at best; and whatever might possibly escape from US operations is dwarfed by CH4 […]
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[…] 0.00018% of Earth’s atmosphere (1.8 ppm, equivalent to 18 cents out of $100,000); its link to climate change is conjectural at best; and whatever might possibly escape from US operations is dwarfed by CH4 […]