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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Chicken Little and Global Warming

We are being bombarded today by such eminent intellects as Al Gore, the Media, and a gaggle of “Scientists” who maintain that Global Warming is not only a fact, but that if we don’t do something to reverse this trend we are doomed because the planet is doomed. The underlying premise is that the industrialization of society has changed the planetary climate dynamics forever and that as a result Earth will become uninhabitable. Of course this is precisely the position taken by Chicken Little who was convinced the Sky was falling because something fell on his head. Critical analysis was never part of Chicken Little’s world just as it isn’t part of the current gaggle of alarmists who are convinced that civilized nations are essentially evil and are greedily destroying the planet at the expense of those poor people in Africa and other places not under the sway of industrialization.

The reality is that there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that supports the current positions regarding global warming. While it is generally acknowledged that the Earth is warming there is virtually no evidence that mankind is responsible or even that any actions by man can even affect the climate. Most recently it has been determined that the Martian polar caps are melting and the surface temperature of other planets e.g. Pluto is also increasing. How industrialization has had this impact in our solar system is unexplained but I’m confident these gifted scientists and intellects will ultimately find a connection to American Industry. In fact, these anti-industrialists have been sounding the global warming – or is that cooling -- alarm for some time Beginning in the 1970”s and into the early 1980’s the media supported by a group of “scientists” with no specified credentials in Climatology became concerned almost to the point of panic that the climate of the Earth was changing and we needed to do something drastic and immediate. The public was aroused to near panic and the congress was pushed to take action, to sign the Kyoto Treaty, to demand that the Auto Industry (Ford, GM, and Chrysler – never a foreign manufacturer) take immediate action to reduce carbon emissions before we entered a new Ice Age. That’s right – those same scientists supported by the same media were citing examples of glacier advances, lowering temperatures, and the imminent disaster facing us as arable land was lost to frost and snow. The world was about to starve because of carbon emissions and it was all due to Western Democracies (read America) polluting the atmosphere with capitalist driven industrial carbon pollutants coming from our factories and automobiles.

Today nothing has changed except the failure of the Ice Age to appear as predicted. In fact the same evidence is presented by the same people using the same media to predict the Earth is warming, the ice caps are melting, and we (America) is destroying the planet through greed and rampant industrialization. Proof of this is warming trend is cited as the habitat of the Polar Bear shrinks the bears are immediate danger of becoming extinct. The census conducted by rhe Canadian government notes that the actual population of Polar Bears has increased is glossed over -- apparently because the factual data does not support the faith based science regarding man's destruction of the planet. Unfortunately the geologic record shows that the Earth has gone through climatic cycles since the beginning of time. At one time Antarctica was tropical and at one time Europe and large portions of North America were covered in Ice and all of this occurred before Man was even a gleam in God’s (or is it Darwin’s) eye. In fact there is solid geologic evidence that there have been mass extinctions of life throughout geologic history brought on by a variety of causes but none (sadly) tied to Mankind or America. The scientific reality – supported by empirical evidence – is that a single volcanic eruption can do more to affect the climate of the Earth than everything ever done by Mankind since God (or some enterprising ape) created man.

Scientists do not totally support the alarmists about global cooling or global warming because they fully realize that Earth’s climate is cyclical and has always been so. The Earth’s temperature demonstrated a cooling trend from 1940 to about 1965, why this happened is unknown but then that trend began to reverse and today it is acknowledged that the temperature of the Earth is increasing but why is not known. Of course at the height of the global cooling scare Fortune Magazine stated:

[F]or nearly half of the current century mankind was apparently blessed with the most benign climate pf any period in at least a thousand years. During this kindly era the human population more than doubled....[It]began with a pronounced warming trend after about 1880. Mean temperatures peaked in 1945 and have been dropping ever since.

This statement is fascinating for a number of reasons, first because the thousand years indicates that climate change cycles are far longer than the alarmists are using to justify their attack on the industrialized nations. The second interesting point is that virtually none of the things which the global warming / cooling alarmists point to as the cause even existed for much of this thousand year period. The industrial revolution didn’t even start until the 19th Century and the automobile, which is cited as the primary cause of climate change didn’t come into widespread use until well into the 20th Century. During this period around 1970 virtually all of the media and “scientists” agreed that “we have been living in warmer than normal times – and we may have to face an increasingly cold future (Popular Science). Then we have Newsweek which stated

“The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions (which is to say global warming) the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down."

At this point it seems clear that no one knows why the Earth goes through climate change and any data – even data going back a hundred years is of no value. To use data collected only in the last hundred years to predict catastrophic climate change is laughable and certainly not scientific. In fact the “scientists” who are in the forefront of the global warming /cooling school of thought generally do not have any credentials in Climatology and are attempting to use these scare tactics to get approval of the Kyoto Treaty which would dramatically impact American Industry, which appears to be their hidden agenda.

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