“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”–Ronald Reagan
As New England digs out of another snow event that can be measured more in feet than inches, it’s a great opportunity to review how much the left knows about “climate change” that isn’t so. And when their entire belief structure is repeatedly proven to be false, they are all too happy to fudge data and attack the truth tellers.
In 2007 the noted weather prognosticator Al Gore told us that the Arctic sea ice could be completely gone by 2014. The reality is that last year the Arctic ice was shown to be steadily increasing.
Last year a team of global warming scientists traveled to the Antarctic to prove that the ice shelf there was disappearing. What were their findings? They generated no findings because their ship got stuck in a preponderance of ice along the way. And the ship sent to free them got stuck in ice, too. You can’t make this stuff up.
Less than a year after the New York Times lamented “the end of snow” on Mother Earth, meteorologists are reporting, with predictably nonexistent media coverage, that we are living in the snowiest decade in the last sixty years.
What is going on here? Despite the alarmist claims about apocalyptic consequences from climate change, the only thing settled is that one side is consistently wrong in their predictions. The best thing the climate change crowd has going for it is a mastery of language manipulation that would make Napoleon, the pig from Orwell’s Animal Farm, proud. Those who raise legitimate questions about all the failed predictions are “deniers.”
Fraudulent academic research that puts political agendas over empirical data (see East Anglia University) is described by politicians as “settled science.” Obama bundlers are allowed to make obscene profits on failed ventures with taxpayer-funded loans so long as the official goal is “clean energy.”
The true debate is not whether the Earth’s climate is changing. It has changed over many millions of years and is probably changing right now. The issue is what we insignificant humans think we’re going to do to “fix” it. According to the Star Wars cantina that includes Democrat politicians, environmental lobby groups, smug Hollywood actors and agenda-driven journalists, the answer is to crack down on American consumers by raising taxes, tripling gas prices, killing the coal industry, and reducing the number of gaseous cows.
In addition to creating more human misery in the world, that agenda would likely not move the needle one iota towards their stated goal of “healing the planet.” Much like Obamacare, the entire man-caused climate change theory is just another Trojan horse to apply greater government control on our lives and put a clamp on individual liberties. Does anyone seriously believe that the same crowd that bungled the Obamacare web site is going to slow the rise of the oceans if only we pay them more taxes? Someday historians will scoff that such a theory was actually given merit.
Such scrutiny generates rage from those who consider climate change not only settled science, but a vital tenet in the progressive orthodoxy. Never mind that a solid majority of Americans rank climate change near the bottom of the nation’s priorities. The grandees of the left and the people who support them have an emotional feeling about climate change, and no weather event or logic contrary to that feeling will sway them. One might expect to find such a worldview among attendees of a local marijuana legalization rally. That these beliefs are held by the holders of the highest offices in the land should motivate even the most apathetic among us to get out and vote.
Image: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2184151
