Climate Change: Man-Made Problem or Man-Made Myth?

Now, as you all know, my great and wonderful
readers, there has for quite some time been a raging
debate, a roaring argument really, concerning whether
or not there is climate change and if so to a dangerous
extent, and whether it is due to human activity or to
the capriciousness of nature. The international Left
is on the side of affirmative on all counts; they want
very much for the governments of the world, especially
the United States, to enact regulations restricting the
output of carbon emissions, which they claim causes
a warming of the climates of the planet, which in turn
could melt, or is currently, melting the polar ice caps,
thus raising the sea levels to dangerous highs where
coastal locales are concerned. Heavy industry is to blame
in their estimation, and they see the U.S. as the most
egregious offender. Those who are against such sweeping
regulations and their suffocating mandates, which would
adversely affect businesses and their creation of jobs as
well as hamstring the economies of many countries state
that there is no such scientific evidence that this is so,
and that it is but a ruse to significantly increase
governmental control over individual countries by their
national governments, and to establish an international
regulatory body which would add and enforce their own
regulatory burdens upon said countries. The latter would
very likely be under United Nations auspices. One of
these opponents of this notion and its accompanying
remedies is Patrick Moore, Ph.D. and Greenpeace
co-founder who left the environmental activist organi-
zation in 1986 when he became uncomfortable with what
he saw as its steady leftward march. This is what Moore
said when testifying before the U.S. Senate Environ-
mental and Public Works Committee's Subcommittee
on Oversight on February 25:

"There is no scientific proof that human emissions
of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of
the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over
the past 100 years. If there were such a proof, it
would be written down for all to see. No actual proof,
as it is understood in science, exists."

Moore went on to state that "The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states: 'It is extremely
likely that human influence has been the dominant
cause of the observed warming' since the mid-20th
century ... "extremely likely' is not a scientific term
but rather a judgment, as in a court of law."

The Greenpeace co-founder was not through yet, not
by a long mark: "Perhaps the simplest way to expose
the fallacy of 'extreme certainty' is to look at the his-
torical record. When modern life evolved over 500
million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher
than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an
ice age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2
was 10 times higher than today.

"The fact that we had both higher temperatures and
an ice age at a time when CO2 was 10 times higher
than they are today fundamentally contradicts the
certainty that human-caused emissions are the main
cause of global warming.

Moore still had another weapon to fire: "The increase
in temperature between 1910 and 1940 was virtually
identical to the increase between 1970 and 2000. Yet
the IPCC does not attribute the increase from 1910
to 1940 to 'human influence'. They are clear in their
belief that human emissions impact only the increase
since the mid-20th century. Why does the IPCC believe
that a virtually identical increase in temperature after
1950 is caused mainly by 'human influence', when it
has no explanation for the nearly identical increase from
1910 to 1940?"

Moore concluded by saying "Today, we live in an
unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and
there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would
be anything but beneficial to humans and the majority
of other species. There is ample reason to believe that
a sharp cooling of the climate would bring disastrous
results for human civilization.

"It is 'extremely likely' that a warmer temperature than
today's would be far better than a cooler one."

Moore, who is chairman emeritus of Greenspirit
Strategies in Vancouver, Canada, makes a strong case
for climate change, including major shifts in climate
temperatures, capable of occurrence without help from
humans. The organization he helped create now dismisses
Moore as an apostate for his taking this tack rather than
that of his old Greenpeace colleagues. But consider the
following: Throughout history, whenever a new idea
(or a rediscovered and reintroduced one) runs counter
to conventional wisdom or prevailing opinion, three things
happen --- one, ridicule of the idea and whoever has
introduced it into the realm of opinion and debate;
two, vehement opposition to both the idea and its champion(s);
three, acceptance of the idea and at least an easing of hostility
and opprobrium toward those in advocacy of said idea. The
final happenstance comes about after a long and sustained
promulgation of assembled facts and supportive data. This
is how scientists and scholars in related disciplines came
to finally accept, for example, that the world is round
rather than flat, and that the earth revolves around the sun
and not the other way around. Funny how the crowd which
believes that climate change is man-made calls those who
believe it to be a natural phenomenon modern day flat-
earthers.

Your faithful Peasant contributes this to the conversation
of climate change: in medieval times the land mass known
as Greenland really was green, hence its name given it by
the Vikings. These hearty sea-goers built homes and farms
there, taking advantage of year-long mild temperatures and
long growing seasons --- until at some point the climate grew
severely cold, to the point of snow and ice covering most of
the land for nearly all of the year. So much for the vikings'
comfortable haven. England had a warm enough climate to
grow grapes; English kings had English wines in their royal
wine cellars, wines of a high quality comparable to French
and Italian wines. Then climate change hit the British Isles,
and although they were not locked into lasting frigid conditions
their vineyards withered away and the wineries closed for
all time. Climate change occurred in both cases, but as this
occurred long before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th
and 19th centuries there were no factories, no foundries,
and not a single smokestack to blame for affecting the
atmosphere to the point of influencing the temperature in
either Greenland or England.

Can humans befoul an area to the extent that living conditions
decline in quality and safety? Certainly; an acquaintance of
mine visited Beijing during a Chinese jaunt a couple of years
ago, and he had constant irritation of his throat and nasal
passages the whole while he was in China's capital city.
I have read that this has been so for many travellers visiting
that city, and it is due to the unbridled pollution caused by the
local industries there. But can humans do enough said damage
to befoul or warm the entire planet to the point of peril to us all?
Quite doubtful, according to Patrick Moore and those in
agreement with him on the matter of climate change. They
think that it is hubris to believe that humans are capable of
environmental mayhem on such a grand scale. It seems as if
the enviro crowd is both aggrandizing and castigating
humanity in their adherence to this belief!

By the by, the Chinese communist government to date
has done little, if anything, to regulate the amount of noxious
elements spewed into the air by the factories and other
industrial entities, unlike the United States with its EPA and
other regulatory bodies that issue regulations which are de
facto laws which manufacturing businesses must obey,
including automakers, whose cars exhaust is also similarly
regulated. Yet many environmental activists make the U.S.
out to be a villain regarding industrial pollutants while
hardly making a peep about China and the handful of other
communist-run countries and the formerly communist run
countries of eastern Europe. And in accordance they blame
the U.S. for climate change rather than China and the other
communist- and former communist-governed countries.

And these countries, along with many European and Third
world countries, raise a ruckus at the U.N. to draft and enact
international regulations --- laws --- to rein in the polluters
in the U.S. and the western world. With the worldwide Left
heavily involved in the modern day environmental movement,
they, too, want to frighten people into thinking that smokestack
emissions will cause dramatically warmer weather which will,
among other things, melt the polar ice caps and the snow on
mountaintops from North America to Switzerland to Africa to
Asia, causing floods of biblical proportions and threaten wildlife.
a favorite image of the environmental crowd is that of a polar
bear standing on a small island of ice, seeming to be stranded,
cut off from the land and from food and comfort. I guess these
people don't realize that polar bears are incredibly strong
swimmers, capable of swimming for several miles to get around
when they need to. Or perhaps they do realize this but hope that
others don't and never will.

Anyway, Patrick Moore realizes something much more important,
and much more urgent: the proponents of the idea of climate
change being largely, if not solely, mankind's fault want to scare
the people of the world into supporting the adoption of stringent
regulations of their industries, regulations which would not affect
anything to do with any climate but would certainly affect econ-
omic growth and employment in their countries. And the results
would be horrifying, more so than what the environmental activist
crowd claim would happen if the aforementioned regulations were
not immediately adopted.


MEM