The climate crisis is ... a planetary emergency. The voluminous evidence now strongly suggests that unless we act ... quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes ....
— "An Inconvenient Truth," from the introduction, Al Gore, 2006
Gore's circumstantial arguments are ... pathetic. ... The man is an embarrassment to U.S. science and its ... practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda is mostly based on junk science.
— Professor Robert Carter of Marine Geophysical Laboratory at Australia's James Cook University, as quoted in the Canadian Free Press, June 12, 2006
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And so the technical arguments go. Gore and his supporters tout their cause vigorously and point to "two thousand scientists in a hundred countries" who support them; his many detractors, mostly climate experts, scorn Gore's professional supporters because only a fraction of them work in the climate field.
Gore, with his Nobel Peace Prize and his movie, is winning the public relations argument, the most dangerous example of this being the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill. Democrats generally support it; Republicans don't. It has been stalled in the Senate, but the trend is clear — it will become law if Democrats do as well in the upcoming election as pundits predict.
The provocation for this bill is Al Gore science and the degree to which it has been accepted by powerful politicians. There are two aspects to his case: Global warming is persistent, and emissions caused by the use of fossil fuels are responsible for this.
That being the case, the argument goes, the use of fossil fuels must decrease. And that is what Lieberman-Warner is supposed to do, as, in the process, it pulls economic control into Washington to a degree that makes Bill and Hillary's power grab in the late 1980s appear trivial.
Now let's take a layman's run through the so-called facts.
In 1800, average global temperature was 56.9 degrees Fahrenheit; in 1900, it was 56.7; in 1950, 57.2; in 1970, 57.2; in 1980, 57.7; in 1998, 58.5 — and it has been essentially flat for the last decade.
In short, temperature was steady for 170 years, went up 1.5 degrees over the next 28 years and hasn't increased since. Some experts say it's going to get warmer; other experts say a cooling trend is underway.
Gore is right when he says temperature has gone up. But do these numbers and the arguments on both sides suggest that anyone knows enough to turn our industrial base upside down?
Is global warming, whatever its degree, caused by the use of fossil fuels — by our lifestyle — as Gore says it is?
Since 1800, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide increased 35 percent. It's still going up. During the same period, average global temperature went up 2.6 percent. Interestingly, the CO2 increase over the past decade was not followed by a temperature increase. This suggests mankind's activities have a minor impact on global temperatures.
Why then is Congress in such a rush to make a mind-boggling grab for control over the private sector — like forming a Carbon Market Efficiency Board that will monitor the system and a Climate Change Credit Corp. that will invest federal fees from emissions auctions "in many things"?
The answer? This isn't an energy bill. It's a hidden tax bill.
It's estimated by Lieberman that emissions permits will have a market value of $7 trillion by 2050. In other words, a ton of money will pour into Washington to be spent on "many things."
McCain and Obama support legislation at least as horrendous. Only the people can stop it, just as they stopped the comprehensive immigration bill of recent memory. If they don't, those who have managed the nation's 50-year slide into socialism will celebrate.
nnn
Robert Kelly writes regularly for the opinion pages. E-mail him at robert.kelly5@verizon.net.
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