The weather for the re-enactment of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware seems to have been about the same as for the original crossing back in 1776. That was at the dawn of a mini-ice age. Are we at the dawn of another one? No serious scientist can say. Mary Iuvone
Something to think about between blizzards
By Paul Mulshine
Just like us, the Europeans have been hit by an early blizzard. It comes on the heels of that hand-holding session in Copenhagen at which politicians from all over the world agonized over that wave of global warming that keeps failing to break.
Pretty funny.
Even funnier, flights were delayed all over the Continent. But that doesn’t stop the Brits and those other wacky Europeans from pushing for billions in fees on future flights in an effort to deter that wave of global warming that persists in failing to occur on schedule.
As this Bloomberg article notes: “Airlines may need to spend as much as 35 billion euros ($50 billion) between 2012 and 2020 on carbon permits.”
The article tells how executives at American-based airlines are suing to stop this wacky scheme of carbon offsets, a plan guaranteed to do wonders for the income of carbon-trading firms like Blood and Gore, but unlikely to have any measurable effect on the climate.
Wait a minute! What’s that? It’s some clueless liberal reading this blog who is about to write in the comments section: “You’re confusing climate and weather.”
No, I’m not. That’s what liberals did when they insisted on linking solitary events like Hurricane Katrina to greenhouse-gas levels.
What I’m doing instead is pointing out that despite the most pessimistic predictions of Al Gore and his fellow alarmists, the planet’s temperature hasn’t risen over the last 11 years. And when we get a big blizzard before Christmas, we can’t help but be reminded of this. If that climate change had happened as predicted, pre-Christmas blizzards would likely be a thing of the past – though I can’t remember one quite this big in my past, which goes back to the mid-1950s. When I was a kid we always wished for a white Christmas and only rarely got one.
We might have quite a few more if Henrik Svensmark is correct. The Danish physicist theorizes that the Earth’s temperature varies not with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but with solar activity. Svensmark may be wrong. But the global-warming alarmists may be wrong, too. The big difference is Svensmark is not demanding we hand control over our lives to an international government that will never give that control back.
One amusing aspect of the Drudge Report is that Matt Drudge loves to tweak the alarmists by continually posting reports of below-normal temperatures. His lead headline at the moment I was compiling this blog entry was “Dallas Experiences First White Christmas in more than 80 years.”
By the way, when I was driving my sports car across the country in late November I was lucky enough to get weather that was the exact opposite. It was bizarrely warm. I had the top down in Indiana on my way to the final Notre Dame home football game of the season. And I had it down again crossing Nevada on Thanksgiving. You know what the meant? Absolutely nothing, that’s what. You can’t draw conclusions from isolated events. That’s why the best scientists rely on measurements of the planet’s temperature taken from space, the source of that revelation that we haven’t been warming for a while. And that’s why even leading supporters of the global-warming theory are now admitting that the planet may not get any warmer for the next couple decades. Of course, if they can’t predict what will happen one decade out, their prediction for two decades out is even less reliable. And so on.
Turnabout is fair play, especially after the alarmists have employed that infamous photo of a polar bear on an ice floe to mislead gullible types into thinking there is something amiss when a polar bear sits on ice. Something would be amiss if the bear were in a banana tree, I’ll concede, but they spend their lives on ice. And they’ve been making the mistake of floating to sea on them for all recorded history.
And Drudge also points to more serious problems in the alarmist approach, such as the fiscal idiocy of the cap-and-trade approach. Every serious economist believes that if the politicians were serious about cutting carbon emissions they would impose a direct tax on carbon. But they don’t have the nerve to present the public directly with a bill for their fantasies. So they permit industry to pocket the profits and send a little bit their way now and then.
Thank God our cap-and-trade bill has not yet passed the Senate. The obsession with global warming was an affectation of pre-recession times. Back when America seemed to have an invincible economy, liberals could entertain wacky schemes about slowing that economy down. But now, as Pat Buchanan points out, we realize our economy is being financed by the Chinese:
“Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack just pledged $1 billion at Copenhagen to developing countries who preserve their forests,” Buchanan writes. “Thus, America, $12 trillion in debt and facing a second straight $1.4 trillion deficit, will borrow another $1 billion from China to send to Brazil to bribe them to stop cutting down their trees.”
This fad was fun while it lasted. But it’s time to get serious.
