“Have you noticed that the nature of the crisis du jour may change, but the solutions always involve higher taxes and more power for the political class?” – University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds
There’s a reason some global warming enthusiasts demand that the media refuse to print or broadcast skeptical views.
Polls show Americans continually rank “climate change” near the bottom of lists of important issues. Apparently, “Global warming is harmful because shut up” is the only argument many activists have left.
And there’s a reason the Environmental Protection Agency is rushing to restructure (actually, cripple) the U.S. economy.
If Republicans control all of Congress next year, President Obama’s power could be greatly curtailed. And the 2016 presidential race is wide open.
So, we get predicted disasters that can be forestalled only by giving government huge chunks of our money and liberty, via an EPA proposal to eventually ban coal, which provides 40 percent of U.S. electricity (90 percent in some states).
Meanwhile, other major industrial nations are increasing their use of it. To cut our use without slashing our standard of living means we need more natural gas, which makes expanding fracking to reach our buried fossil-fuel riches a top priority.
But hard-core “greens” seem to believe we can fuel an industrial democracy primarily with inconsistent solar and wind power (which now provide only 2.7 percent of global electricity, according to the 2014 BP Statistical Review of World Energy).
Solar and wind farms would have to cover several states to have that kind of impact.
• Other countries aren’t making these mistakes. The Ottawa Citizen reported June 9: “The political leaders of Canada and Australia declared they won’t take any action to battle climate change that harms their national economies and threatens jobs. (Canadian) Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that no country is going to undertake actions on climate change – ‘no matter what they say’ – that will ‘deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country.’ ”
But we can avoid that, too. In 2017, a new administration could halt the EPA’s “War on Coal” fiasco (which is just a prelude to a “War on Fossil Fuels”) with a simple order.
• We’re told the new rules will “save consumers money” (remember “You can keep your doctor”?), but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the nation’s largest business lobbying group) says, “These rules threaten to suppress average annual U.S. Gross Domestic Product by $51 billion and lead to an average of 224,000 fewer U.S. jobs every year through 2030, relative to baseline economic forecasts.” The group estimates the cost to the average family at $3,400 per year.
For what? According to climatologists Paul Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels (June 12, wattsupwiththat.com), “Using a simple, publicly available climate model emulator called MAGICC that was in part developed through support of the EPA, we ran the numbers as to how much future temperature rise would be averted by a complete adoption and adherence to the EPA’s new carbon dioxide restrictions. The answer? Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100.”
• As evidence there is no “universal consensus” on climate (see the May 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’ “), The Australian newspaper reported June 4: “Australia’s peak body of earth scientists has declared itself unable to publish a position statement on climate change due to the deep divisions within its membership on the issue.”
• Remember the poor polar bears? The conservative Daily Caller website reported May 30: “Researchers with the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature recently admitted to experienced zoologist and polar bear specialist Susan Crockford that the estimate given for the total number of polar bears in the Arctic was ‘simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.’ ”
Crockford, a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, says there are 6,000 to 9,000 more bears than the 20,000 to 25,000 the PBSG guessed at.
• One critic of one of my previous columns on this topic wrote that the Medieval Warm Period didn’t exist. So, why did the Vikings find grapes in Labrador and raise crops and cattle in Greenland in the 1100s, as articles in the Athena Review (Vol. 1, No. 3, 1997) and the German magazine Der Spiegel (Jan. 10, 2013) attest?
Another said Swedish scientist Lennart Bengtsson wasn’t really persecuted by the vicious threats he received after joining the Global Warming Policy Foundation. What frightened him off, then?
Regarding that critic’s allegations about oil company funding of the foundation’s writers, its website states, “The GWPF . . . does not accept gifts from either energy companies or anyone with a significant interest in an energy company.”
Besides, are scientists receiving grants from thumb-on-the-scale governments always unbiased?
A scientist’s findings are either accurate, or not.
M.D. Harmon, a retired journalist and military officer, is a freelance writer and speaker. He can be contacted at: