We are daily fed lies by the news media and by the Democrat Party which has embraced the far left socialists and communists. But of all of these lies, there are two which are destroying our economy and tearing Americans apart, dividing us into waring factions. In this blog and the following one, I am going to expose these lies for what they are.
The first lie concerns climate change. I do not mean to suggest that climate change does not exist. It does. But Climate Change does not! What is the difference between the two? From the very beginning of time on earth, the climate has changed. We have all heard of the ice ages that were times of extreme cold that caused great glaciers of ice to extend well down into the upper Midwest, as far as Indiana and Illinois. Obviously, the climate changed to create the ice age and changed again as the earth warmed and the ice melted, receding back to the artic area where we see it today.
Climate Change is the term that certain groups have now settled on to describe an increase in the earth’s temperature. At first, we were warned of a coming ice age with the sub-zero temperatures of the late 1970s. But as the temperatures moderated again, the panic call changed to “Global Warming!” Now, however, as the predictions of the computer models that predict this cataclysmic burning up of the earth have proven to be wrong time after time, the Climate gurus have changed their clarion call to “Climate Change.” Thus, if it warms, Climate Change! If it cools, Climate Change! It is a win/win situation for them.
I have lived for 73 years, and I can recall winter after winter when I was a child when deep snow and freezing temperatures were the norm. But I can also remember my high school years when a friend and I went hiking in December in temperatures so warm that we didn’t even wear jackets. Then again, just before I moved to Paris, I taught in Yorktown, Indiana where week after week we would be in school for a day or two and then a storm would drive us home early and leave us snowed in for days. We lost three entire weeks of school that year, and snow was on the ground from December through March before it finally melted.
Those cold times continued into my first years here in Paris. We had a blizzard in 1978 that closed even I-70 down, and winter temperatures for several years often hit sub-zero. One year we had days of 25 below zero temperatures in a row. But then, it warmed up again, and our winters were milder with summer temperatures in the upper 90s and sometimes over 100 degrees. In 1988-1989 nearly half of the nation was affected by drought and extreme heat which killed, by some reports, as many as 17,000 people as well as livestock. Damages from the heat and drought are estimated to have been between 80 and 120 billion dollars. But the heat did not stay, and was soon followed again by cold, snowy weather with blizzards that left snow so deep in the northeast that cars were almost entirely covered.
What climate alarmists hang their hats on is the fact that high temperatures over the last 200 years are gradually getting higher. But is this something that we can control? Is it something that is even bad for us? Apparently not. According to Thomas Gale Moore, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, “Advocates of reducing greenhouse gases typically assert that a warmer climate would increase disease and deaths worldwide. But fortunately those zealots are wrong. In fact, a warmer world would be a world with fewer fatalities. Cold, not heat, is the biggest killer as more and more researchers are finding.” In addition, as the Medieval Warm Period demonstrated, the warming of the earth allowed the spread of civilization and farming into more northern reaches, producing more food.
But what about the idea that carbon emissions are causing the earth to warm to a dangerous degree, so dangerous that several, including John Kerry, have only given us 9 years to save the world. Below is a chart of global temperature changes from 25B.C. to 2040A.D. prepared by LongRangeWeather, Harris-Mann Climatology. Note the cyclical rise and fall of temperatures.
This charts predicts that there might be hot, dry weather in the 2030s, perhaps helped in part by carbon emissions, as Climate Change alarmists warn. However, the warming of the earth in past centuries has come between periods of sometimes extreme cold, always following a decrease in solar radiation and major volcanic activity. The eruption of 90 volcanos over a period of several hundred years probably brought about the Little Ice Age that lasted until the mid-1800s, and the plunge in temperatures in the 2010s was likely the result of the 5 volcanos that erupted from the mid 1800s to 1991. Following the cold, the earth warmed up again.
Obviously, the warm periods of the past were not produced by carbon emissions from the use of fossil fuel since the populations at those times were considerably less than now, and their energy use was limited to heating food and burning a fire in their homes in the winter. Yet, there were warming periods, the one in 1100 B.C. being hotter than our 2020 temperatures were. But 1100 B.C. was not the hottest time on earth. Roughly 56 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, global mean temperatures were estimated as high as 73 degrees Fahrenheit, over 14 degrees above today’s levels (LongRangeWeather).
NOAA data also records that record high temperatures in the majority of states in the U.S. (36 of them) happened before 1960, not in 2019 or 2020, and that record highs in 23 of them occurred during the 1930s. Think about that. 23 of the then 48 states had their highest record temperatures in the same decade, a decade when we had half the population that we have now (around 140 million when we entered WWII in 1945), fewer cars and trucks, no SUVs, no private jets, no air-conditioning, no computers, no cell phones, no televisions, few people traveling, few people with telephones, rural people who had no electricity— far less carbon emissions from people, yet record high temperatures. That kills the Climate Change argument right there!
In addition, according to research at the University of Alabama in 2013, “a natural shift to stronger warm El Nino events in the Pacific Ocean might be responsible for a substantial portion of the global warming recorded during the past 50 years.” Researchers are discovering more and more undersea volcanos and heat releasing thermal vents where tectonic plates are pulling apart, as many as six times more than they previously knew of, which are warming the oceans. Yet, as some areas of Arctic ice melt, ice in Greenland and in Antarctica has grown, and the polar bears whose demise Al Gore warned us of are flourishing in greater numbers than ever.
Should we seek renewable sources of energy? Sure. Should we reduce our carbon emissions? Yes, but let’s remember that carbon dioxide is what makes plants grow and without it we will have no food. We must proceed with caution rather than jumping into the “Quick! Save the earth!” cult. Those who believe that we are the cause of the earth’s warming and that this is the greatest threat to the United States would have us turn to expensive electric cars with batteries for which we have few recharging stations and which would be far too expensive for many Americans. Physicist Frank Jamerson, one of the architects of GM’s EV program, wrote in a 2020 Society of Automotive Engineers paper there is no evidence that gas-fired transportation is changing the climate, so why create things for which there is no need and which are less productive than what we already have?
And James Taylor, president of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, said in an interview that the Biden administration plans to power an electrified vehicle fleet with wind turbines in the next decade that would require nearly half the land mass of the United States – “the most environmentally ruinous plan we can think of.” Wind turbines and solar panels that destroy the landscape, kill thousands of birds, and use up valuable farm land still can not produce the amount of energy that we need each day. To try to move to them exclusively would be catastrophic as the country would be covered with brown outs and black outs.
The earth warms and cools from a number of sources, one of which is the emission of carbon dioxide. But to attempt to close down all fossil fuel producing plants and switch to wind and solar energy is both reckless and unworkable as was recently proven when 40% of Texas was without energy because the wind turbines froze up and back-up fossil fuel plants could not absorb the increased load. The wind doesn’t always blow. The sun doesn’t always shine. Wind turbines freeze. But for hundreds of years we will still have gas and coal energy to sustain us as we learn how to produce nuclear or other truly eco-friendly sources of energy. And we have hundreds of years. To suggest that we have only 9 years or even 90 years is a lie. Given the cyclical warm and cold periods of the past and the record high temperatures which have not for the most part happened in the last sixty years, we can expect the earth to continue on as it is until Christ returns. That should be more feared by many Americans than Climate Change!