Special Issue:
Global Warming
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A Fraud Running on
Fumes
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A Fraud Running on Fumes
Truth Eruptions
 Earlier this month, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) headlined a story, “What happened to global warming?”
When a leading propagandist for man-made climate catastrophe feels the need to run a story admitting that no warming has been detected in 11 years, demolishing a thousand media claims, something is up. Two days before, U.S. News and World Report published a story about a prominent geologist roaming congressional offices, making the argument that carbon dioxide simply did not cause the warming recorded in the late 20th century and warning lawmakers to back off before they do real damage.
That a major U.S. media outlet would report this at all is remarkable. Even more remarkably, U.S. News acknowledged the scientist bases his arguments on “a mountain of studies and scientific evidence that suggest CO2 is not the cause for warming.”
A week later, London’s Daily Mail weighed in with this headline: “Whatever happened to global warming? How freezing temperatures are starting to shatter climate change theory.” The Mail ventured to say “some experts believe we should forget global warming and turn our attention to an entirely different phenomenon—global cooling.”
Shades of 1974, when Time and Newsweek were running cover stories about signs that a new Ice Age was taking hold.
But the trillion-dollar question remains: Will Congress push on with massive tax and regulatory changes regardless of growing proof that what we’ve seen over the past three decades is no big deal? The answer is it will if the leadership believes they can get away with it. There is no excuse for permitting them to hold that belief.
The Proof
One needn’t search hard to find scientific opinion that carbon dioxide is incapable of performing the feats attributed to it. In fact, data shows that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have risen steadily since consistent record-keeping began in the 1950s. This demonstrates that there is no correlation with global temperature averages that fell and rose and have begun falling again.
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It’s also borne out by little ironies like water vapor having roughly 1,000 times the heat-trapping capacity of CO2. ( It’s even borne out by Al Gore’s bombastic display of Antarctic ice core records, matching graphs of past CO2 concentrations with reconstructed temperature averages, but carefully not superimposing the two. Superimpose them, and it’s clear that temperatures rise first, then CO2 follows. The ex-vice president has discovered what must be the only instance—dare we say in the history of the universe?—of effect preceding cause.
So, if the climate aspect is malarkey, what is this about? We’d say power and money. Surprise!
Marriage of Convenience
The finest irony of all is that under any other circumstances it would gladden the heart of every environmentalist to expose who drives the bandwagon of human-induced global warming. Prominent among those shouting the alarm are interests the green community loves to hate: big utilities, corporate America, and multinational corporations.
Forget conspiracy theories. What’s really involved is nothing more than an otherwise commendable quality: the ability to recognize commercial opportunity.
The urgent and sometimes almost visibly angry demands from some parts of the commercial sector to adopt climate legislation begin to make sense when you understand that these people aren’t horrified by things few seriously believe will happen to Earth’s climate as a result of human activity. They’re horrified by the prospect that a nickel might roll past their door.
Recognizing an unparalleled opportunity to use the coercive power of government to make people buy things they sell, the biggest of big business have joined in common cause with their natural enemies to promote the ridiculous notion that the U.S. Government is the place to turn for relief if you think it might get too hot outside a hundred years from now.
Consider the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), self-described as “a group of businesses and leading environmental organizations that have come together to call on the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”
USCAP members include oil giants Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP America, the U.S. arm of the world’s biggest petroleum producer. They include Chrysler, Ford and General Motors, and General Electric. Big utility members of USCAP include Duke Energy, Exelon, Florida-based FPL, New Jersey-based NRG, Pacific Gas and Electric and New Mexico’s PNM.
What do they have in common, aside from activities involving large quantities of greenhouse gas emissions and the fact that several have gone through bankruptcy? They have the ability to see they can game the system by flogging the perils of global warming while offering to sell us the solutions.
In this case the solutions are solar panels and wind turbines that have to be backed up by fossil-fueled generation before anybody can risk connecting them to the power grid; cars nobody wants to buy because their knees will stick out the windows and get soaked when it rains; coal-fired power plants with dubious carbon-capture technology that will double the price of their product; in short, anything the marketing department thinks it can fob off as “green.”
But why does Congress care, especially the current one, which seems to regard the continued existence of any private business as a concession given grudgingly and subject to withdrawal on a whim?
Follow the Money
Congress hopes to create a gigantic revenue machine, which ought to send chills up the spine not only of every consumer of carbon-based energy—which is to say absolutely everyone. Once government comes to rely on the sale of t CO2 emissions for hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue every year, its level of interest in reducing CO2 emissions will be nil. In fact, government will have a compelling motive to see emissions grow, so it can spend the revenue on activities far more appealing to voters than hypothetical questions about what might happen in 2110 if a little more carbon dioxide gets into the air.
If you aren’t cynical enough to believe this, the world—especially Congress—needs more people like you. But only after you correctly answer this question: Who, pockets the most money from the sale of of gasoline andf cigarettes? It certainly isn’t the merchant who sells the gasoline or the cigarettes.
Some have always viewed the global warming issue as a race against time—not in the usual sense but rather in the sense of wondering which would happen first: Would alarmists succeed in imposing draconian “abatement measures” or would nature go its own way and tip people off to the scam? The environmental community’s increasing shrillness shows which way they think things are heading, and parts of the business community are taking up the cry. So as public enthusiasm for climate legislation fades, we can see how tight this race is going to be.
Even as Congress insists it will soon rescue the Earth with massive, economy-strangling taxes on energy use, it grows more obvious that man-made global warming is the invention of self-worshiping environmentalists, bureaucrats andopportunistic CEOs. It’s failing the laugh test.
Congress may choose to ignore the laughter, betting that no one will make Congress pay. Congress deserves—yes, even they—deserve fair warning.
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