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STUMPTALK: A dangerous movement sweeps the nation
A dangerous movement driven by the notion that global warming is manmade is steamrolling the nation. Though climatologists have known about global warming for decades, the hoax that it was manmade was born when geoscientist Michael Mann published the famous “Hockey Stick” plot in 1998, claiming that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago — just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
But alas, two Canadian scientists, McIntyre and McKitrick, exposed Mann’s poor math; the Hockey Stick is a fraud. Bad science, however, did not discourage the left-wing hacks at the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from publishing a fraudulent report using Mann’s thesis. IPCC claimed 2500 scientists were in support, which the media spun to say, “The majority of world’s top scientists agree that global climate change is due to human activity.” But scientists rebelled. (IPCC revised its Web site to say “2500 expert reviewers,” and further admitted it does not carry out climate research but merely bases its assessment on peer review of published technical literature.)
While most lawmakers and pundits were still skeptical, former VP Al Gore exploited the hoax for political gain: he promoted a fictional movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and a “Cap and Trade” scheme to extort enormous sums of money from American taxpayers. The movie was riddled with scientific falsehoods but nevertheless the hoax drew converts from across the political spectrum and rapidly gained momentum. GOP presidential frontrunner McCain introduced “Cap and Trade” legislation, supported by candidates Clinton, Romney, Edwards, and Obama.
Why do so many people believe this hoax? Inundated daily with propaganda by pseudo-scientists and certified intellectuals, most people mindlessly accept and repeat the nonsense that global warming is America’s fault — the result of too much capitalism. Why target carbon dioxide emissions when it represents only .054 percent of the total atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHG) and the contribution by the world’s autos and factories combined is still a smaller part? (It’s the only GHG that can be blamed on capitalism?) Notice how many times “global warming” is repeated in the media. The public has been conditioned to fill in the blanks.
There is historical precedent for dangerous movements growing out of a lie. Dr. George Reisman, professor Emeritus of Economics at Pepperdine University, said, “The public embrace of a movement as dreadfully destructive as environmentalism brings to mind the rush to embrace Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s, once their victory seemed inevitable, and then once they actually came to power. Nazism was a catastrophe. Environmentalism has the potential to be a far greater catastrophe.”
The truth is that the majority of scientists do not dispute global warming. The entire solar system has been experiencing a warming trend that began over two hundred years ago. But what scientists do dispute is that global warming has anything to do with human activity and it is preposterous and conceited to think man can change it. The actual cause of global warming and cooling cycles is the variations in the sun’s radiation striking the Earth, as it has for hundreds of thousands of years.
Gore’s movie introduction was true enough: global warming does exist, though his “catastrophe” was a gross exaggeration. But then Gore dishonestly fabricated scientific data to “prove” his bogus thesis. His movie graph wiped out the “Little Ice Age” (1500-1700), the “Medieval Warm Period” (1000-1400) and the “Holocene Maximum” (8000 years ago) when the Earth was considerably warmer than today, falsely showing, as Mann claimed, that Earth’s temperature was constant until 100 years ago. Gore finishes with a glimmer of “hope:” all we have to do is to put the brakes on “evil” capitalistic growth by changing our lifestyles.
While it is important that we strive for a clean environment, it is critically important that America does not buy into a dangerous movement, based a political agenda rather than scientific facts, that is calculated to change our way of life.
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GARY'S WORLD: Thank our veterans this weekend
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