Global warming’s ship of fools
TOM BURGUM
Staff Columnist
burgum@lbknews.com
As Oscar Wilde might have said in his day, “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to fall down laughing at the sight of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition stuck in the ice that they had set out to prove had been melted by global warming.
You have to give the expedition folks credit, they don’t give up easily. They remained adamant that the sea ice was melting, even as their boat remained trapped in the ice. Kind of reminds one of the famous “Baghdad Bob” who talked of a great Iraqi victory while American tanks rumbled past his TV studio. Still, no one should be very surprised because if you look back at all the dire warnings of climate doom, you’d quickly realize that the expedition’s predicament and denial were metaphors for the current state of global warming alarmists.
It seems there are always predications of gloom and doom from Paul Ehrlich’s over-population bomb, to Newsweek’s new ice age, to Al Gore’s global warming which was altered to climate change when the temperature refused to increase, to climate collapse. (I’m a little unclear on the collapse theory but it seems to be global warming on steroids.)
In the late 1990s Al Gore predicted we had just 10 years left before global temperatures melted ice caps and submerged costal communities. He then defied his own warning and purchased ocean front property in California. Could it be even he doesn’t believe his warnings? In December 2008, Gore predicted the entire North Polar ice cap would be gone by 2013. “Oh sure, it‘s still there,” Mark Steyn noted, “but he got the general trend-line correct, didn’t he?
Arctic sea ice, December 2008: 12.5 million square kilometers; Arctic sea ice, December 2013: 12.5 million square kilometers.”
If Al Gore’s climate idiocy isn’t enough, Christiana Figueres, the UN Climate chief, has now booked passage on global warming’s ship of fools. Late last week she said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. China, according to her, is the best model, they are doing it right.
“The Chinese Communist Party can push key policies and reforms all on its own. The country’s national legislature largely enforces the decisions made by the party’s Central Committee and other executive offices.”
Townhall.com columnist Heather Ginsberg took issue with Ms. Figueres, “I guess the UN chief forgot that communism was responsible for 94 million deaths in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan and Eastern Europe in the 20th century.” That is, of course, one way of reducing the threat of over population but it does seem a bit harsh.
On the environmental front, the Chinese Central Committee, so admired by Mrs. Figueres, has presided over the building of 2500 coal fired electric generation plants to date and are putting a new one into operation every 4 to 7 days. Have to wonder how the Al Gore acolytes would view a proposal to do that in this country. More and more the UN seems to be nothing more than an incubator for really, really stupid ideas.
To be fair, the UN does not have a monopoly on really, really stupid ideas. The warming gloom and doom bunch also have a pretty big inventory of that sort of thing. The central thesis of the alleged fight against global warming is that man can influence and change the well recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle. If you believe that, get over it.
But, you are concerned about global warming and will do your bit, just in case. So, you buy a Prius, you bring your own bag to the grocery store, buy only approved green cleaning products, you replaced all your incandescent light bulbs with $8.00 bulbs that have health warnings attached, you compost your garbage, you even traded in your power mower for the old push kind. You only buy clothes made from organic cotton, you ride a bicycle made of bamboo, use a drying rack or cloths line instead of a dryer, you have pledged to eat only organic food, and you even joined the Eat Local Challenge. How, you ask, cannot the world be saved by such intense effort?
I hate to be the barer of bad tidings but one relatively small volcanic eruption in Iceland in 2010 put enough ash in the air in just four days to negate every single effort to control CO2 emissions you and the like minded made in the past decade.
Volcanoes alone put the lie to the claim that man can alter or control the climate. In 1815 the Tambora eruption in Indonesia spewed so much debris into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer,” and caused the worst famine of the 19th Century. According to columnist Walter Williams, “Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions, Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947), spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind’s activities in our entire history.” Mr. Williams might have mentioned Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines that in 1991 emitted more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than man has in his tormented stay on the planet.
I am thought to be a “denier” by some readers who have been offended by my climate apostasy. Truth is, I am a doubter. The climate has declined to follow the doom predicting climate models and when a group manages to get their ship locked in the ice while trying to find evidence the polar ice caps are melting, forgive me, but it calls the alarmists competence into question
Less ice, more ice, whatever. It’s global warming! — Flashback 2007: Global warming means LESS ice around Antarctica — 2013: global warming means more ice around Antarctica
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