Global Warming Scares Heat Up! ... by Alan Caruba

Global Warming Scares Heat Up
By Alan Caruba

To understand the whole global warming debate you have to understand that it is not about any dramatic warming of the Earth. The Earth has been warming since the end of the last Ice Age with time out for some mini-Ice Age episodes.

As Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, has repeatedly written, the average global temperature has increased about one degree Fahrenheit over the past century. It’s a natural cycle and, since we are at the end of the current 12,000-year interglacial cycle of temperate climate, we are due another Ice Age.

Global warming is about controlling the world’s population by impeding or making more costly the use of energy—oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear—in developed, industrial nations and thwarting efforts to expand the use of electricity in Third World nations. Keeping people ignorant and ultimately dependent on a vast one-world government based on failed socialist utopian policies is the name of the game.

This explains in part why so much of the global warming propaganda has been coordinated and emanated from the United Nations. Its International Panel on Climate Control and its Kyoto Protocol on Climate Control are just two examples of the mischief that is generated by the UN. The Panel has revised its estimates of global warming so many times that it has become a farce. Worse yet, those estimates are all based on deeply flawed computer models.

So what explains just a few of the headlines we are all reading every day now? “Earth spews troubling amount of methane”, “Winter ice declining rapidly in the Arctic”, and “Nastier hurricanes? Just blame us: Study links human activity, monster storms.”

A friend of mine, John Brignell, a British professor emeritus, runs a website called NumberWatch.com. On it you will find a page that documents how just about every imaginable natural phenomenon has been attributed to global warming. It’s a very long, often totally contradictory, list and a tribute to the idiocy and hypocrisy that fuels the global warming hoax. [http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm]

While the global warming hoax has an economic component whose focus is energy use, there is a political component because it is through the implementation of laws that the control of human behavior is achieved. This was seen most recently when California’s legislature voted to implement controls on “greenhouse gas emissions” from utilities and other industrial activities said to be the primary cause of global warming. California has notoriously failed to keep pace with the growth of its population and the provision of sufficient electrical power.

The global warming hoax is also intended to force people to use public transportation or to select alternative forms of energy such as solar or wind. These latter two are totally inadequate to our needs and exist, like ethanol, largely because of government subsidies and mandates.

So why are we reading this sudden new spate of articles about things alleged to cause global warming? It is not a coincidence as, indeed, nothing one reads or hears incessantly is accidental. Where it takes on a very dangerous potential is the proposed legislation emanating out of Washington, D.C. these days.

Largely unable to find traction with its anti-war diatribes, the Democrat’s fallback position is to scare everyone with global warming. It began in the summer of 2005 when Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) proposed a bill calling for modest mandatory limits on emissions of greenhouse gases said to cause climate change.

These limits are moving forward despite the unanimous rejection of the Kyoto Protocol by the Senate some years ago.

It is essential to keep in mind that climate change is caused by factors such as solar activity, the heating or cooling of the oceans, cloud formation and activity, and volcanic activity. Human beings have absolutely no “control” over these climate factors.

The vast bulk of the Earth’s surface isn’t inhabited, despite the fact there are six billion humans extant. Humans and other animals’ lives depend on the oxygen we breathe. We exhale carbon dioxide. The Earth’s vegetation benefits from the carbon dioxide as the essential element it requires for growth. And yet there are people in government and elsewhere that will tell you that CO2 is a greenhouse gas or even a “pollutant” that is bad for the Earth.

Some of those people are in Congress and these days it is, in the words of Business Week reporter, John Carey “awash in carbon-capping bills and proposals from Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Jim Jeffords (I-VT), Tom Carper (D-DE), John Kerry (D-MA), and others. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) plans to introduce legislation on the first day of the next session of Congress.”

Perversely, they will find support from the utility industry that would prefer regulatory certainty. This has nothing to do with the dubious, often duplicitous, science of global warming and everything to do with running a business. Similarly, the agricultural lobby will no doubt support this legislation in order to benefit from crops used to make ethanol, a gasoline additive that actually and grotesquely costs more to produce and provides less energy per use.

Finally, these proposed regulations to cap emissions are immediately nullified by the obvious fact that other nations such as India and China, with a billion people each, will not be joining this fraudulent effort. We could shut down all energy use in America without having any affect even if the false assertions about global warming were true.

The proposed legislation must be stopped before Congress in its stupidity imposes it. Previous Congresses thought Prohibition and the War on Poverty were good ideas. If you think life in America is expensive today, you have no idea how that cost will increase if global warming “controls” are imposed.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com/. His new book, “Separating Fact from Fantasy” has just been published by Merril Press.

© Alan Caruba, 2006