If you’re building a Noah’s ark, drop that hammer and saw! No time for carpentry now. Run for the high hills!
That’s the advice of Al Gore. His sequel alarmist documentary warns that the climate-change apocalypse is closer than ever.
A warming planet and melting polar caps soon will have humans speaking their last words: Glub, glub, glub.
Gore hopes that his new documentary will draw throngs to the theaters, that it will arouse Washington to confront the evil forces of darkness, known as the “climate-change deniers.”
The denier heresy must be stamped out, he suggests, as ferociously as the heresies of Manichaeanism and Monophysitism were stamped out in their day.
And there’ll be no heckling, please, from the peanut gallery regarding the energy consumption of Gore’s palatial domicile, of his size 18-AAAA “carbon footprint.”
Nor any smart-alec remarks, please, regarding the temperature-hiking emissions of Leonardo DiCaprio as he jet-sets hither and yon scolding slob peons for their unthoughtful carbon-consumption habits.
The Gores and DiCaprios seem to be environmental versions of the Calvinist elect, cleared in advance for divine approval. Besides which, they buy “carbon offsets.” Whatever those are. Maybe something like the favors and benefices of the Church’s simony heydays.
You know you’re nowhere near the realm of science when you hear Inquisition-like curses cast upon climate deniers, upon agnostics who hesitate to kneel before the altar of climate change.
The curse – “deniers” – links skeptics to those odious creeps who, against all evidence, insist there was never a Nazi Holocaust.
The name-calling serves as sleight-of-hand trickery and misdirection. It distracts attention away from the basic questions. Such as:
Exactly how much warming can be attributed to human emissions? And exactly how much to known natural causes such as solar activity, ocean currents, etc.?
And how much warming is there, anyway, really?
Gernot Patzel, an Austrian scientist of considerable standing, answers that last question in these words: “Over the past 10,000 years it has been warmer than it is today 65 percent of the time.”
There are other scientists who quibble with the statement. But that just goes to show that the issue of climate change is far from being the “settled science” proclaimed ex cathedra from the presidential podium of Barack Obama, the pages of the New York Times and other thrones of progressivism.
Despite fire ‘n’ brimstone hectoring from liberal pulpits, even the most basic tenets of the climate-change issue continue to be topics of contention. Even the simple question: What’s the temperature, globally speaking?
A recent paper by three scientists – James P. Wallace 3d, Joseph S. D’Aleo and Craig D. Idso – cast doubt on the official temperature assessments of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies.
The paper concluded that “historical data adjustments” removing “cyclical temperature patterns” have produced readings “totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.” (Seven other scientists associated with leading research universities endorsed the paper’s conclusion.)
Yes, other scientists vocally contest the paper’s thesis. But this, again, only supports the point that climate change is not the “settled science” that liberal choirs keep singing hosannas to.
Here’s another basic question climate alarmism hopes to avoid by creating noisy distractions: What about China and India? China’s now No.1 in global-warming emissions. And India’s fast moving up the ranks.
What are the chances they’ll be willing to rein in their carbon emissions – which is to say rein in their economies – in a King Canute-like gesture of commanding the planet to cool off?
Another dead giveaway that you’re in the realm of politics here, not science, is the use of lawyer-like verbal contortions, small-print qualifiers to hedge the sweeping claims of alarm.
The headlines herald disaster. But in the footnotes of its scary reports, the U.N.’s IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – adds weasel-words walking back its frightening claims.
The panel hedges its cataclysmic scenarios by couching them in terms of “confidence” levels, not actual knowledge. This is the IPCC’ s sneaky way of saying – and hoping you’ll not notice – “We actually don’t know for sure.”
After raising the spectre of soaring temperatures, melting polar caps and rising sea levels, the IPCC goes on to say – tucked away in reams of its own verbiage – that it can’t really quantify with any specificity how much of warming is attributable to nature verses how much to man.
Down below the scary, disaster-movie rhetoric, the IPCC goes on to observe – and the media to largely ignore – that even the most basic parameters of the issue are in some doubt. The IPCC’s scientists state, almost sotto voce, that “confidence in future climate projections remains low,” and the extent to which “regional climate variability will change also remains uncertain.”
Yes, it’s likely that human existence does indeed have some, maybe even significant, effect on climate. After all, even exhalation and flatulence are known to be greenhouse emissions.
Might it not be more sensible, then, to direct government grants away from hysteria-promoting, Chicken Little/Sky Is Falling “research”?
Might it not be smarter to redirect that money into potentially more useful areas? To add it to the ongoing research efforts seeking to improve the efficiency of existing energy? Or to the ongoing research efforts to develop new sources of clean energy?
Is there really a need for the government to go on pouring big sums into “studies” – actually, political manifestos mislabelled “Science” – that use their “findings” as propaganda to expand regulatory bureaucracy and revenue shakedowns?
What purpose do more and more tendentious academic treatises serve in warning us, over and over, that climate apocalypse looms just around the corner?
What purpose other than furnishing university sinecures for prophets of doom who parade around in sandwich boards proclaiming, “The end is nigh!”? What purpose besides affording other activists the opportunity to indulge themselves in self-righteous preening, in virtue-signaling?
A leading article of faith among the climate-change apocalyptics is that “renewable energy” – solar and wind – will be our savior against the Beelzebubs of oil, gas and coal.
You can get an idea how big a leap of faith this is from an Energy Information Agency statistic: Solar and wind now provide a piddling 1.6 percent of the planet’s total energy demands. (And this thanks largely to government fiat artificially driving up the price of gasoline and carbon-fueled electricity to make renewables marginally more competitive.)
Nonetheless, the federal government, and state governments, are rushing out monarch-style edicts decreeing that renewables in short order shall be major sources of energy.
King Canute at least recognized his own limitations.
He commanded the tides to recede not to show off his fanatastic powers but just the opposite – to show his subjects there are things even a king can’t accomplish. Little such humility is evident in high places these days.
Dave Neese grew up on a Midwest farm, received a degree in Slavic Studies (Russian lit), Indiana U., did stints in the U.S. Army and in various news and other jobs from New Hampshire to California. At The Trentonian he covered the Statehouse and was editorial page editor. He won N.J. Press Association awards in numerous categories. Email: davidneese@verizon.net