Demonstrating their impeccable timing, liberals have been ramping up talk of global warming and carbon dioxide restrictions smack dab in the middle of a historic cold stretch that has obliterated spring across North America and threatens to encroach on summer.
South Dakota is seeing its first May snowfall in half a century, Arkansas its first ever, interstates and schools are shutting down across the Upper Midwest, and cherry blossoms are bloomed a month late. But The New York Times proclaims in a piece called “Climate Warnings, Growing Louder” that 2013 is the year we must finally get serious about the impending planetary meltdown.
As I sit here in Manhattan shivering this Memorial Day weekend, I thought I’d ponder all the questions that must be answered before our nation even thinks of passing expensive, intrusive legislation to regulate CO2 emissions, for all those liberals who claim to care about science. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:
Is global warming happening?
Contrary to all climate change models’ predictions, there has been no global temperature increase since 1998. But that’s alright; According to liberals’ specious, ad hoc explanations, global cooling is actually evidence of global warming, because warming leads to extremes in temperature, which can include cooling. This differs from the global cooling from 1940 to 1970, which was evidence of global cooling.
Does CO2 cause global warming?
Physicist Richard Muller recently examined which factors predict global temperature over the past 250 years and wrote, “By far the best match [is] to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from… air trapped in polar ice.” Great, but how does Muller know increases in CO2cause temperature increases? In fact, ice core records indicate that CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes, which implies that temperature alters CO2 levels. In layman’s terms: The Earth warms, ice melts, plants thrive, animals multiply, and presto!—there’s more CO2 in the air.
Is man contributing to global warming?
Maybe not. Skeptics note that most 20th-century warming happened before 1940, despite the explosive growth in industrialization after 1940. And non-anthropogenic sources such as sunspot activity, cosmic rays, cloud cover, volcanic eruptions, cyclical variations, and even bovine methane emissions may be contributing more than man.
Is global warming harmful?
Even if the Earth is warming and man is causing it, global warming may not be harmful to mankind and other species. Looking on a scale of tens of thousands of years, plants and animals have typically thrived in warmer temperatures. Ice ages, after all, aren’t known for their lush vegetation and tropical lifestyles. So it’s not obvious that an increase of a degree every century would wipe mankind off the map.
In summation: We definitely should destroy industrial civilization to mitigate the effects of global warming—if it’s actually happening, if it’s caused by CO2, if it’s caused by man, and if it’s harmful.
As global warming alarmist-friendly magazine The Economist recently admitted, the jig may finally be up on global warming hysteria, and not a moment too soon.
