Contributed by Warren Mowry
The ongoing debate over regulation of “greenhouse gases” and the attempts of the EPA to bypass Congressional legislation by regulating emissions has reached a head recently. Given the overwhelming number of scandals related to the “scholarship” surrounding climate change activism and the outright fraud associated with much of its statistical analysis, it is somewhat of a surprise that this continues to be a viable issue. But because it is part of the Left mantra, it does.
Don’t get me wrong – there is climate change. But there has been climate change throughout the history of Earth. And the people of Chicago, for example, had better be glad there has been climate change since the most recent Ice Age, or they’d still be buried under a mile of ice. Al Gore prophesied in his (now) much lampooned movie “An Inconvenient Truth” that, if global warming isn’t halted, polar icecaps will melt and sea levels could rise twenty feet. Talk to people around Columbia, SC, who can occasionally dig up shark teeth left behind when the Midlands of South Carolina, now more than 100 miles inland, were covered by a primordial sea. Might things like that happen again? It’s possible. Is the possibility of such conditions proof of manmade global warming? Absolutely not.
One of the real problems the Left has is a lack of a coherent message. It started, of course, with the now infamous Newsweek cover story from April, 1975. In it, it was predicted, using the same data and statistics that today have caused the global warming stir, that we were about to enter a new ice age – and it has only gone downhill since then. Michael Crichton wrote in his bestseller, State of Fear, that politicians, lawyers, and media maintain a drumbeat of doom over one issue or another for their various motives: Politicians to promise change to thwart the threat and exert control over the population, lawyers to create an atmosphere of unrest to file lawsuits and make money, and the media to fan the flames in order to sell newspapers and air time in the 24-hour news cycle.
In researching his book, Crichton, a Harvard Medical School graduate and the author of such blockbusters as The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, as well as the executive producer of the television series ER, started out as a global warming believer. But the further he dug, the more he was convinced that his initial premise was just plain wrong. He became, then, a global warming skeptic. The book is a thriller (a fairly implausible one, truth be told), but so full of information and data on the subject of climate change as to be a gold mine for anyone seeking the accuracy in the debate. One thing he discovered, according to NASA data, is that the warmest year in the past century was not circa 2000 – but 1934.
Which brings us back to Al Gore. Gore, in the last several days, opined that the cause of the massive blizzards that have struck the United States, blizzards that at one point covered nearly 70% of our landmass and were present in 49 states, was – you guessed it – global warming. See this blog post.
The problem for Gore is that his fellow doomsayers were off-message for much of the prior decade. Over the past several years, his fellow liberals in Congress have said just the opposite – that the decrease in snowfall and their claim that glaciers are retreating worldwide (since largely debunked) was caused by global warming. Watch and enjoy.
Gore, who may have become one of the most cynically opportunistic individuals we’ve ever seen, has capitalized on his shrill claims for years. He has invested in companies that will boom should the “green revolution” take hold. Never mind whether it will wreck the economies for most countries or ruin the average American financially, it will make Al Gore a billionaire. That way he can continue flying around the world, practicing Gulfstream V Liberalism.
How can we be so sure that this “state of fear” is being imposed on us? Consider the number of times we have been told that this change or that one is being caused by global climate change. In fact, there is a website that contains a list of links to about 600 such claims over the last few years, some of them baldly wrong.
So, we are left with this contradiction – are we witnessing warming or cooling? Are we witnessing more snowfall or less? Is man the cause of this, or not? Gotta tell you, folks, I don’t know – but neither do those who claim they do.
