Alan Caruba
Okay, children, let’s all sit up straight at our desks. We are going to begin 2009 with a lesson about carbon dioxide (CO2).
Why do we need to know about CO2? Because the President-elect, several of his choices for environmental and energy agencies, the Supreme Court and much of the U.S. Congress has no idea what they are talking about and, worse, want to pass legislation and regulations that will further bankrupt the United States of America.
Do I have your attention now?
For the purpose of the lesson, I will be borrowing heavily from a paper on CO2 written by Robert A. Ashworth. It requires some understanding of science, but anyone with a reasonable education and common sense should be able to read it on their own. Ashworth is a chemical engineer.
Suffice it to say that if any of the nitwits babbling about CO2 and global warming ever went to any of the several dozen excellent websites that provide accurate scientific data and analysis, they would cease from their abusive manipulation of the public and perhaps find honest work. To begin at the beginning; at the heart of the global warming hoax is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While it purports to represent the views of thousands of scientists, it does not. As Ashworth notes, “Most scientists do not agree with the CO2 global warming premise. In the United States 31,072 scientists, including the author, have signed a petition rejecting the Kyoto global warming agreement.” An additional 1,000 scientists are being verified to be added to the list. Thousands more exist who find the assertion the CO2 will destroy the Earth totally absurd.
Here’s what you need to know; if an increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) is directly related, i.e. causes changes in the Earth’s temperature, there would be a direct correlation between the two. As CO2 rose, we would see a comparable rise in the Earth’s temperature. This correlation does not exist.
Global warming liars, however, insist that CO2 builds up on the atmosphere over a 50 to 250 year period, but this is untrue. “Every year around April, increased CO2 absorption by plants in the Northern Hemisphere starts reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere,” notes Ashworth, “and the reduction continues until around mid-to-late August when plants start to go dormant.”
“It is clear that nature reacts very fast in its consumption of carbon dioxide.” Farmers call this the growing season, followed by the harvest season, followed by snow and cold during which nothing grows. Modern civilization, beginning about 5,000 years ago, is predicated on the ability to provide food to both humans and livestock, all based on these obvious seasonal cycles.
The ancient Egyptians and Mayans understood the seasons, but they are apparently too difficult a concept for today’s many ex-politicians, some PhD’s, United Nation’s flunkies, and high school teachers.
Warming and cooling cycles are well known throughout human history, reaching back to the days of ancient Rome. There were Viking settlements in Greenland because they arrived in warmer times. By 1410 the place froze up. Shakespeare lived during a Little Ice Age when the Thames would freeze too. The man-made emissions of CO2 had nothing, zero, to do with these climate events.
The IPCC, however, with its agenda to tax and control energy use that produces CO2, is not based on either the obvious or more complex science involved. Its “data” is the invention of computer models that are deliberately manipulated to produce false results which, in turn, can be announced and repeated worldwide.
In March 2008, The Heartland Institute brought together more than 500 climatologists, meteorologists, economists, and others for two days of seminars and addresses that totally destroyed the IPCC’s lies. It will do so again for a second time, March 8-10 of this year in New York City. Suffice it to say that the mainstream media did it best to ridicule or ignore the event and will no doubt do so again.
Here, then, is a fundamental fact about CO2 you need to commit to memory. “Nature absorbs 98.5% of the CO2 that is emitted by nature and man.” Nature is a totally self-regulating mechanism that dwarfs any mindless effort to “control” the amount of CO2 produced by coal-fired utilities, steel manufacturers, autos and trucks, and gasoline fueled lawn mowers, not to forget fireplaces where logs glow or just about any human activity you can name, including exhaling two pounds of the stuff every day!
“Further,” says Ashworth, “no regulation by man is necessary because CO2 is not a pollutant; it is part of the animal-plant life cycle. Without it, life would not exist on Earth. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases plant growth, which is a very good thing during a period of world population growth and an increasing demand for food.”
“Taxing carbon,” Ashworth adds, “would do absolutely nothing to improve the climate but would be devastating hardship to the people of the world.” For example, U.S. Representative John Dingell’s plan to tax carbon would add 13% to the cost of electricity and 32% to the cost of gasoline; just what we need during a Recession that threatens to become a Depression.
Dr. Tim Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, recently asked, “How many failed predictions, discredited assumptions and evidence of incorrect data are required before an idea loses credibility? CO2 is not causing warming or climate change. It is not a toxic substance or a pollutant.”
It is time to rebuke everyone attempting to foist the global warming hoax and carbon taxes on the United States and the rest of the world. It is time let Congress and the White House know that Americans will not be ruled by laws that have no scientific merit.