As predictable as the path of an apple falling from a tree, you can always count on Liberals to bring up the canard of human-caused global warming in any discussion that touches upon nature.
You can reasonably expect that they will blame any natural disaster on our refusal to surrender to the self-destructive fallacy of the Kyoto agreement. Well, current natural disasters, anyway -- they don't seem to blame the 1900 Galveston hurricane on global warming the way they lay blame for Hurricane Katrina, nor do they accuse mankind of causing the 1868 Nazca earthquake as they do the earthquake that caused the 2004 South Asia tsunami.
Before the rain even stopped falling in New Orleans, Liberals like Robert Kennedy Jr. were already on the attack. "As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippiâs Gulf Coast, itâs worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bushâs iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2," he wrote. People like Kennedy have spent years using natural disasters to demand that the Western world dismantle its industrial base, while allowing countries like China and Indonesia free reign. It's a sort of industrio-socialism, using propaganda to enforce a homogenised economic and industrial outcome in entirely different countries.
Kyoto, beloved of Liberals, demands that signatories reduce their emissions of certain greenhouse gases to below 1990 levels. The only way for America to comply would be to force companies to reduce production and spend money on expensive environmental controls. This would result in companies relocating their operations to non-Kyoto countries to avoid going bankrupt. And Liberals complain about "sending jobs overseas" now! No wonder Congress soundly rejected it in 1997. Such a move would cause the biggest jump in unemployment in the Western world since the Great Depression. Another result would be the worst pollution imaginable, from countries that have no little or no environmental regulation at all.
Polluting the other side of the planet doesn't seem as important to some Liberals as not polluting the backyards of the rich and famous, however. Indonesia is responsible for releasing one-seventh of the total CO2 (carbon dioxide) emitted every year, but Liberals never seem to mind that. They would be more strident about peat-burning in Indonesia if the reduction of greenhouse gases was their real aim. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry and the Kennedy clan, great proponents of wind and solar power that they pretend to be, threw up legal roadblocks to prevent a company from building a wind farm within sight of their Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket retreats.
"People want to look out and see the same sight the Pilgrims saw," said Robert Kennedy Jr. -- yes, the same man who attacked President Bush for not reducing CO2 emissions. By "people," he must have meant, "the important people."
At the root of all this hysteria and hypocrisy is the absolute Liberal certainty that global warming is caused by humanity, particularly industrialised capitalist Western nations. You know... the bad guys at the heart of any Liberal fantasy. It was only a few decades ago that the media was full of calamitous warnings about the coming global freeze. Liberals are sure they're correct this time, though. This time, they tell us, the world really is going to end. Scout's honor.
Proponents of anthropogenic global warming deliberately ignore the fact that the global mean temperature, along with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, have risen and fallen in an easily discernible pattern for at least 400,000 years -- all without interference from lowly humans -- and that it's just reaching a high point between cold snaps. If we all try really hard, we just might be able to add enough CO2 to trip the cycle into the next 50,000 year downslope a few years early.
The keystone of anthropogenic global warming is that the global mean temperature has risen sharply in the last 150 years, since scientists began to measure it. Of course, in order to make their case, Liberals have to ignore the fact that we're still emerging from the Little Ice Age -- a cold spell that gripped the Northern Hemisphere for centuries, until about 150 years ago. Of course the temperature is rising. But is it really due to human influence?
For years, Conservatives have tried in vain to explain to eco-freaks and enviro-nazis that the Earth is largely self-regulating, when they're the ones who often claim it's a living organism. There's a reason we talk about cycles and seasons. When the level of CO2 rises -- which plants certainly don't see as "pollution" -- it triggers natural modulating influences. Higher temperatures melt ice, which causes heavier cloud cover due to moisture, which reflects more of the sun's light back into space, which lowers the temperature. And so on.
When CO2 levels fall too low, natural processes cause it to be released from the soil -- as seems to be happening now. Researchers from the UK's Cranfield University found that some 13 tons of carbon are being released from the soil every year, as Reuters recently reported. "Since the carbon appears to be released from soil regardless of how the soil is used, the researchers conclude that the main cause must be climate change itself. Though they could not say where all the missing carbon had gone, much of it may be entering the atmosphere as the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, which many scientists say is causing global warming." Scientists from Germany's Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry wrote, "These losses thus completely offset the past technological achievements in reducing CO2 emissions, putting the UK's success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a different light." In other words, many Kyoto signatory nations have crippled their industry, spent vast amounts of money and caused rampant unemployment for absolutely nothing.
Science -- not junk science based on hysteria and ideology, but real science based on data and reason -- suggests that global warming is driven more by the sun than anything humans have done. A recent study by Swiss and German scientists indicates that the sun is burning hotter than it has at anytime in the past thousand years.
"The Sun is in a changed state," stated Dr. Sami Solanki, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. "It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently -- in the last 100 to 150 years." Does that time frame sound vaguely familiar? It's about the same time the Little Ice Age began to end -- the same time that Liberals claim humans began to cause global warming. Isn't it clear that the sun is the real cause? Shouldn't we at least examine this before ruining our economy for nothing?
Every experiment must have a control, or a source of data uncorrupted by the experiment itself. There are no humans on Mars, and there's no way we could influence its climate. Yet Mars is also experiencing global warming, which strengthens the hypothesis that Earth's global warming is heliogenic, or sun-based, to the point of positive proof. It's simply not possible that the sun could cause environmental warming on Mars, but that similar warming on Earth is caused by SUVs and capitalism.
In the absence of any evidence to support it, the anthropogenic global warming argument is as dead as the dinosaurs whose ancient remains I put in my gas tank this afternoon. I'm going to celebrate with a cookout.
Hat tip to Mike's America for the Cranfield University story.
Joe Mariani is a computer consultant born and raised in New Jersey. He now lives in Pennsylvania, where the gun laws are less restrictive and taxes are lower. Joe always thought of himself as politically neutral until he saw how far left the left had really gone after 9/11. His essays and links to articles are available at http://www.guardianwatchblog.com/