CRAIGforCONGRESS

Missouri's 7th District, U.S. House of Representatives

  
 

 

 

Congressional Issues 2010
ENVIRONMENT
Global Warming



The 112th Congress should
  • resist attempts to impose costly reductions in the emissions of "greenhouse gases" in order to limit "global warming."

Why this issue is important

The "global warming" scare could be one of the most important public policy issues of this century, because

  • government will be given massive powers
  • to radically diminish our industrial civilization, causing poverty and mass death

Global Warming advocates are asking government to coerce Americans into dramatically cutting their emissions of gases which are alleged to create "global warming," whether by their businesses or their homes and cars. Some groups are calling for the government to force you to stop using using your car 3 or 4 days a week. You may also be asked to cut back on your air conditioning, or to use your refrigerator only for "essential" foods. Industries may be required to cut back production significantly, thus raising the prices of the goods they produce and you use. Is the "cure" worse than the disease?

What exactly is the disease?

Is there Really Global Warming?

According to some climatologists, the planet is still emerging from the "Little Ice Age" of hundreds of years ago. That's "global warming" in some sense. Notice this chart:

This picture is worth more than a thousand words. If you want words, here's the source: Analyzing Global-Warming Science. Sure, there's been global warming: for the last 500 years! And we're still below normal for the last 3,000 years.

The War Against Industrialization

Compare the picture above with the one here -- which ignores the big picture -- and especially consider their conclusion:

Scientists believe that an immediate 70–80 percent reduction in current carbon emissions is necessary to mitigate further climate change.

Any sentence that begins (or implies) "All scientists believe" is probably a lie. There is no consensus on global warming. But beyond the "consensus" question, the larger question is, what will be the cost to you of an 80% cut in technology and industrial civilization?

The global answer is, poverty and mass-death. It's really that simple.

What would be the effect on your life if you and the rest of the world could
• heat your house only on Sundays,
• receive hospital care for an injury or disease only on Mondays,
• drive your car or operate farm equipment only on Tuesdays,
• operate your refrigerator only on Wednesday,
• heat your water only on Thursdays, and
• use electric lights only on Friday?
Answer: you would commit suicide on Saturday.
Either that or after a few years, you and probably 2 billion other human beings would die from our inability to grow enough food and provide safety, shelter, and medical care for billions of people.

But this is what environmentalists want: the death of billions of human beings, whom they see as a "cancer" on the planet. (The link that begins this paragraph is central, must-reading.)

Environmentalists want the political power to destroy industrialization and return us to a more "natural" lifestyle, even if they have to kill you, or control you, or simply profit off your consumption of energy by taxing and regulating it.

Energy is the key to human survival. That is to say, consumption of energy -- large amounts of energy, increasing amounts of energy -- is the key to human survival and the flourishing of human civilization.

How Al Gore kills millions of Africans by Fiona Kobusingye

Can the "Experts" Be Trusted?
The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.
—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)
 
This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
—Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976
 
There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
—Newsweek, April 28, (1975)
 
This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.
—Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling”, 1976
 
If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.
—Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)
 
The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.
—Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)
 
I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
—Paul Ehrlich in (1969)
 
In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.
—Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)
 
Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.
—Paul Ehrlich in (1976)
 
The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don’t suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them.
—Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

There is no evidence that during times of medieval warming, or warming over the last few millennia, where rates of warming were ten times greater than they are today, that plants and animals and human beings suffered. Agriculture -- trees and plants -- thrive in high levels of carbon dioxide.

And obviously, automobiles, nuclear power plants, and refrigeration of food and indoor air were not causes of the Medieval Warm Period or any other global warming over the last 3,000 years.

Update June, 2008
The Most Recent Trends

2007 was a relatively cold year. Many climatologists are now saying we are in a period of global cooling (although this could still be a period of cooling within the larger period of global warming that has been going on since the "Little Ice Age" half a millennium ago).

There is also a growing opinion (but not yet "consensus") that CO2 is not the cause of the warming of the last few hundred years. (In fact, stated that way, there is probably universal consensus that that human emission of CO2 is not the cause of our emerging out of the "Little Ice Age").

No Consensus

The "Earth Policy Institute" says:

Scientists believe that an immediate 70–80 percent reduction in current carbon emissions is necessary to mitigate further climate change.

They want you to think "ALL" scientists think this, but this is far from the truth.

Here's the Petition to ignore GlobalWarmingphobic environmentalists, signed by over 19,000 scientists:

Global Warming Petition Project

These are the questions that policy-makers should be asking:
  1. Is temperature increasing?
  2. Is that a bad thing?
  3. What is causing the warming?
  4. What are the costs of eliminating these causes?
  5. What are the benefits of eliminating these causes?

1. Some scientists say earth's climate is growing warmer. You may have heard stories about ice and glaciers melting, but you probably haven't heard from those scientists who claim Antarctic ice is increasing. Some scientists believe that the Middle Ages (e.g., when Greenland was discovered) were warmer than today. Other scientists were predicting in the 1970's the danger of an imminent ice age! If you don't trust your TV weatherman to tell you if it's going to rain tomorrow, can you trust him to tell you if it's going to be warmer 50 years from now? Perhaps global warming in the next 100 years will mitigate the effects of an inevitable period of global cooling 100 years after that, and diminishing global warming in the near future will result in disastrous global cooling in the more distant future? Who knows?

2. If scientists can't predict the weather, how can they predict the long-term effects of "global warming?" Some scientists predict that warmer temperatures would be good for agriculture, and since plants breathe in CO2, perhaps "greenhouse gases" will increase food production and end world hunger. Others predicted that global warming would cause 2006 to be a year full of Katrina-type hurricanes; something that didn't happen.

3. If scientists are right about the Middle Ages being a warmer period today, then global warming couldn't have been caused by human technology. Where's the proof that today's alleged warming trend (as opposed to the alleged "cooling trend" scientists warned about 30 years ago) is not caused by the same factors that raised temperatures in the Middle Ages, before human beings had cars and air conditioners?

4. The costs of observing such policies as the Kyoto accords would be enormous. The costs of cutting back our industrial production in order to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions by 80% would be a huge change in your lifestyle, all to avoid a temperature increase of several fractions of a degree during your lifetime.

5. How will your life be better if the average temperature is a couple of degrees lower, but you can't drive your car, use your refrigerator or air conditioning, or build a simple house for less than $2 million dollars (even in an area without a real estate bubble)?

Kevin Craig is not convinced that if there is actually a recent warming trend, it is caused by human technology. In any case, Kevin Craig does not believe that destroying industrial civilization to avoid bad weather is prudent. Industrial civilization is keeping billions of people from starvation, and destroying industry to curb its emissions of "greenhouse gasses" will not save us from global warming, but rather make us more vulnerable:

  • If we destroy the energy base needed to produce and operate the construction equipment required to build strong, well-made, comfortable houses for hundreds of millions of people, we will be no safer from bad weather than if we retain and enlarge that energy base.
  • If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate refrigerators and air conditioners, we shall be no better protected from hot weather than if we retain and enlarge that capacity.
  • If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate tractors and harvesters, to can and freeze food, to build and operate hospitals and produce medicines, we shall destroy our food supply and our health services capacity just to avoid the speculative possibility of warmer temperatures and a longer growing season.

The entire direction of global warming advocates is wrong. This is because the fundamental character of those organizations that are orchestrating the global warming scare, and which are being picked up by the media, are anti-human and anti-Christian. In a word, they are "environmentalists."


Michael Crichton speaks at The Independent Institute


Government-Funding Destroys Science
I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train By David Evans

aao.jpg (34462 bytes)

On a hot, muggy day, do you appreciate air conditioning?

Do you prefer eating mango under a thick shade tree in the tropics
over Euell-Gibbons-style pine nuts on a vegetation-free icy tundra?


Here are the resources to arm you against neo-pagans
and their quest to abolish Western Civilization

Go to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine

     This is the website that completely knocks the wind out of the enviro's sails. See over 17,000 scientists declare that global warming is a lie with no scientific basis whatsoever.
     The global warming hypothesis has failed every relevant experimental test. It lives on only in the dreams of anti-technologists and population reduction advocates. The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement which would have devastating consequences.


Executive Summary

  1. The Scientific Evidence does not support the idea that human acts are significantly raising the earth's temperature.
  2. Even if the "Greenhouse Effect" becomes reality, what will be the harm? A longer growing season? More abundant vegetation?
  3. Fear is a tool of totalitarianism. "Global warming" is useful for the political ambitions of a wealthy elite, like Maurice Strong.
  4. The poor and middle classes of the earth will be annihilated if we destroy industrial civilization in order to protect ourselves from a non-existent threat of bad weather.

Good Riddance to Enron
And its Green Corporate Socialism

   
Enron Bet on Global Warming
by Jude Wanniski

The Junk Science Home Page
Citizens for the Integrity of Science debunk pseudoscience as well as misinformation that gets passed along as scientifically factual in the media. Among the active and extensive coverage are food issues, global warming, the environment (do Midwest emissions pollute states on the East Coast?) and medicine.


Why global warming would be good for us


next: Population