(Mike Zahara) – The fate of another failed round of post-Kyoto global interference with successful industrialized nations versus the rest of the world in Copenhagen, occurred earlier this year when Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was publicly told by both China and India that they won’t be doing anything to shackle their economies in the face of ‘global warming’, now called ‘climate change’ because the evidence of ‘warming’ has become an Inconvenient ‘Untruth’.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/12/AR2009041202452.html
Regular readers know that though I am not a ‘denier’—now akin to a Holocaust Denier by the extremists, I’m not a hyperventilating alarmist either—I certainly am a skeptic on the effects of ‘global warming’ because I’m seeing the bigger picture and trying to assess motivations too. If there is a warming uptick, science has also told us that in excess of 20% or more Co2 in the atmosphere is caused by rapid deforestation.
Of course, living things with chlorophyll in them to affect photosynthesis remove most of the planet’s excess Co2.
I’m serious; I actually paid attention in Science classes and took an interest in the Earth Sciences since grade school. In high school, my sister’s graduating class was a ‘can-do’ class that raised a boatload of money and donated as their class gift, a huge, 25K foot outdoor greenhouse for our Horticulture, Biology, and Earth Sciences programs.
And after perfecting the growing of really intense hothouse marijuana, several years later, my graduating class was less motivated and donated to the school its own beer keg tapper as our class gift.
But throughout, I did pay attention to my instructors—all MSc holders or PhD’s; how many high school kids here are taught by that level of brain-power?—and I learned to do a lot of very cool things, one was to always be skeptical and to keep questioning and analyzing.
This is by definition, Science!
But today, we’ve bastardized Science in the never ending chase for money, grants, publicity…stoked by scientists looking for easy money and international notoriety.
They’ve developed their own religion which I’ve dubbed Environmental Pentecostalism. Like all religious fundamentalism, there is no reason, there is no dialogue, and surprisingly, a lot of ‘junk science’…there is only ‘what Is’…in their religious views.
The Earth has destroyed herself and been destroyed from outer-space, many times and she’s recovered very nicely! Again, if you weren’t doing bong rips in class, you’d know that fluctuations and oscillations are very normal; from 11 years sun spot cycles and solar flares and Earth’s elliptical wobbled orbit, many, many things affect climate.
To be brazen enough to claim mankind (read: just the US) has permanently altered our biosphere in just 150 years, ignores billions of years of climate record literally set in stone and ice, and it is patently ridiculous that any ‘treaty’ can somehow instantly reverse things.
Born of the guilt of the western world’s Urban Elite, they’ve gotten them all to drink the Kool-Aid without what Science always requires: Skepticism!
My skepticism is born from what I’ve lived through to date. I was a little kid in 1970, the US had its first Earth Day, and we all planted trees, and the hippies were growing and smoking weed, and then we passed the very necessary Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
It was all down hill from there!
Suddenly, the Environmental Pentecostals found the pot-of-gold of endless federal subsidies and university grants so they started to really go off on all sorts of tangents and their irrational hysteria has yet to reach its crescendo!
The first coming catastrophe was ‘Snowball Earth’:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
Ummm, that didn’t pan out.
Neither did acid rain, the ozone layer, Ebola, Planet X, Y2K, or the Raeliens (remember those idiots?), just to mention a few of the hundreds things that were supposed to already have destroyed all of humankind just since 1970!
Another issue in my skepticism is my favorite place in all of the US of A; the Florida Keyes. Again, if you were paying attention in school, you’d know that the lunar gravitational tug and rising sea levels would ‘bulge’ the oceans at the equator.
The Keys are about 2 inches above sea level, and I haven’t noticed any changes in 30+ years of going there; they are about 4 blocks from the equator too!
Trust me on this, if the cushy beaches of Malibu were showing any sign of being submerged by melting polar ice caps, those folks would be the first to be complaining—all being members of the Church of Climate Change!
Ice melting would have effects on ocean currents given the density differences between fresh and sea water and would plunge Europe into much more snowfall and mini-Ice Ages, and would have Seattle and San Francisco buried in snow too; London wouldn’t be foggy, it would be Buffalo New York, buried in snow! With this phenomenon, though the atmosphere may have warmed up, the surface of the planet would have cooled down.
It’s the Gaia Theory, the most reasonable explanation I’ve read about how the earth controls and regulates itself. It’s a theory that’s been around been around since 1965 and its conclusions are hard to argue with:
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/5d.html
‘Gaia’ is an Inconvenient Truth to those looking for more and more grant money and donations from the gullible public who really do believe the sky is falling because of too much Co2, despite those beachfront dwellers in Malibu not seeing any appreciable effect to date.
Recent hacking into British scientists’ 3500+ emails shows an even more cynical drive for money and the cooking of the books and statistical models to terrify people and to produce desirable conclusions to keep the gravy train going:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR2009112004093.html?hpid=topnews
Folks, these people don’t give a damn about the planet; they want our money!
Thankfully, President Obama will go to Copenhagen empty-handed and the cap and trade tax hike scheme punishment of the US economy is dead-as-a-doornail. He’ll make them think twice now about Chicago not getting the Olympics!
Yes, we are a very wasteful nation and culture, yes, we should be more prudent and wouldn’t it be lovely not to ever have to have oil interests in the Middle East again? Yes, we all should treat our own planet better, but that doesn’t mean we should arbitrarily shackle the nations most likely to come up with viable solutions.
This is how you know they’re not serious about ‘climate change’ because as a product of the Apollo program, we perfected the way to extract hydrogen from water. Unfortunately, you need as much energy to produce the hydrogen as you get back from extraction. Basically, it involves electrifying the water to separate the H from the O in H2O.
Oh, by the way, hydrogen in the most abundant element in the universe. The Sun—our star, not the local paper—burns thermo-nuclear on hydrogen and helium each moment—and we have an inexhaustible supply of hydrogen in every drop of fresh and salt water right here on our Earth.
The interesting corollary here is that the Apollo program was driven by private industry on the order and challenge of President Kennedy. Things from Tang to microwave ovens, silicon semiconductors to photovoltaics, are what they came up with all on their own nickel and initiative!
My point here is that yes, the federal government eventually did pay for these breakthroughs, but they came about by private enterprise and stockholder money, based on a hard goal.
If you’re paying attention, President Obama failed to give anyone a hard, specific goal, instead embracing all sorts of ‘alternative energy’ programs all inclusively; that’s special interest money talking, not credible national energy policy.
So, the question isn’t how do we punish this consumption, but how do we arrive at clean energy to fuel our own survival as a species? We do need to wean the planet off of fossil fuels; we don’t because they are currently the cheapest available energy sources.
The only answer is hydrogen—an answer they’ve had for 40+ years—but they’ve revealed themselves within the Church of Climate Change that clean energy was never their goal.
Again, punishing the United States and others for their successes is their only goal, and internationally taxing that success as punishment for said success, and giving that ‘guilt-tax money’ to poorer, unproductive nations, their ultimate goal.
So, next time you see President Obama, ask him why he hasn’t given a Kennedy-esque directive to American initiative and ingenuity to come up with a cheap and viable way to extract hydrogen the way Kennedy did with the Apollo mission.
And relax! Stop the needless hand-wringing borne of those only driven by money and contempt for capitalism and the United States!
Enjoy our planet and her exceptional beauty and uniqueness, respect it, and know that it is just as audacious to assume we’ve already destroyed her, or that we can somehow repair her through the US tax code and international treaties.
We can’t do either, so enjoy!
(Mr. Zahara publishes the WatchdogWag.com blog)