Big Green environmentalists and allied politicians have an effective tool in advancing their legislative agenda: Fear of global warming and its alleged catastrophic consequences. Unfortunately, regulations designed to restrict carbon emissions — and therefore “save the planet” — burden energy producers with unsustainable costs and limitations, leading to higher energy prices for consumers when many families cannot afford to pay more to heat and light their homes.
At a time when the United States (and much of the world) teeters on the abyss of fiscal collapse thanks to staggering levels of debt and deficits, the cure environmentalists prescribe for the global warming “fever” would amount to nothing less than economic suicide.
But, as the latest science shows, man-made global warming may be nothing more than a man-made myth after all.
Climate changes. We all know that — it changes from day to day, month to month, century to century. Indeed, the geologic record shows that the climate has been in a state of flux throughout the life of our planet.
Six hundred and forty million years ago, the entire globe was covered in ice (the so-called “snowball Earth”), while 200 million years ago, the whole planet was warm and ice free even at the poles.
So climate has always changed. But in recent decades, a new theory has seized a coalition of journalists, politicians and environmentalists to explain the changes of the last century.
Commonly known as “anthropogenic” global warming, the theory holds that human activity has delivered sufficient amounts of carbon into the atmosphere to trap the sun’s radiation, causing the Earth to warm.
Some activists have even claimed that this warming is a threat to the very existence of our civilization, and painted dire scenarios whereby our great cities will be overwhelmed by deluge as glaciers and ice caps melt and sea levels rise. There was no room to doubt this theory: The science, we were told, was “settled.”
Turns out, it wasn’t settled at all. In August, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal Nature published research potentially vindicating an old theory that the interaction of cosmic rays and the sun’s magnetic field may contribute to Earth’s constantly changing climate:
“It sounds like a conspiracy theory: ‘cosmic rays’ from deep space might be creating clouds in Earth’s atmosphere and changing the climate. Yet an experiment at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is finding tentative evidence for just that.”
And then there are those sea levels. Former Vice President Gore famously warned in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” that global warming would cause massive flooding in densely inhabited coastal areas.
But people knowledgeable about the science have long been troubled by Gore’s willingness to play fast and loose with the facts in service of his career as high guru of the Gaia cult.
National Public Radio science correspondent Richard Harris gave an interview in 2007 about Gore’s movie, wherein he expressed widely held concerns:
“Yes, in fact, in his documentary he talks about what the world will look like — Florida and New York — when the sea level rises by 20 feet. But he deftly avoids mentioning the time frame for which that might happen.
“When you look at the forecast of sea-level rise, no one’s expecting 20 feet of sea-level rise in the next couple of centuries, at least. So that’s another thing that makes scientists a little bit uneasy.”
So what about those levels? Are they in fact, rising? No, at least not now. According to NASA satellite data updated on Aug. 5 of this year, sea levels have actually fallen from 2010 to 2011.
Environmentalists are right about one thing: The climate changes. But it always has, and always will, with or without sport utility vehicles.
Matt Patterson is a senior editor at the Capital Research Center.
Matt Patterson is a senior editor at the Capital Research Center.
