Climate Change

  • 1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
  • 1923 – “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
  • 1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
  • 1975 – Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
  • 1975 – “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine

Now shifting back in the other direction……..

  • 1981 – Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
  • 1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
  • 1998 – No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
  • 2001 – “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
  • 2006 – “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the media’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” –Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006

Now folks, this is just a sampling of the climate change controversy we have seen in the past. It is not a new issue. With over 100 years of fear mongering and “scientific studies”, you can see, we are now no closer to the truth than we were in 1895.

James Fite July 21, 2022 –Liberty Nation News

The Climate Emergency Even Biden Doesn’t Seem to Buy

President Joe Biden announced action on what he calls a climate emergency Wednesday, July 20. But the measures fell far short of fulfilling the list of progressive demands, and the president stopped just shy of actually declaring an emergency.

Despite the loudest voices on the left screaming for more, recent polling shows that a mere 1% of total voters – just 3% of Democrats and 3% of voters aged 18-30 – see climate as the most important issue today.

“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world,” Biden said Wednesday. “This is an emergency, an emergency, and I will look at it that way.”

With words like this, one might expect a declaration of emergency, followed by some bold executive action that stretches the bounds of the president’s power. That’s precisely what progressives and Democrat lawmakers wanted. Instead, the commander-in-chief announced a comparatively modest list of orders.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is directing money toward shoring up infrastructure against heat waves, drought, hurricanes, and the like, while the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is issuing guidance for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

The Department of the Interior is exploring wind energy in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will be conducting heat-related inspections and developing standards to protect workers from overly hot conditions whenever the heat index is 80 degrees or higher.

As reported by the Washington Times, the left has a “laundry list” of demands – the first of which was an official declaration under the National Emergencies Act. So far, at least, that hasn’t come.

Activists and politicians also pushed for Biden to direct the Department of Justice (DOJ) to get involved in local and state lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, invoke the Defense Production Act and apply American manufacturing might to renewable energy technology, end domestic and international federal subsidies on fossil fuels, restrict imports, and ban exports.

They wanted a fully electric USPS fleet, stricter vehicle emissions standards, and an end to oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters.

“We’re urging the administration to do things that it can do administratively,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, “and we’re going to look at everything that we can do.”

“If President Biden was ever serious about being a climate president, this is his last chance,” said Kat Maier, national coordinator for Fridays for Future, an international climate group founded by Greta Thunberg. “Everyone from Republicans to Democrats, institutions to individuals, has shown their hand, and we know who stands on the side of climate action. There’s nothing to wait for anymore, no compromises to make anymore. It’s time for the bold action.”

Left-wing politicians aren’t worried about some crisis of climate change – but they are terrified of the very real electoral emergency looming over them as the midterms approach.

And this puts Biden in a precarious position. The president and the party are too invested in climate change and a green agenda to do anything short of moving forward – yet Congress has failed to deliver a significant legislative win. Even though none but a few are buying it, the narrative must go on. At this point, it may be all they have left.

July 21, 2022

Saving the Planet, or Themselves?

By Jeffrey Folks

American Thinker

Since well before the publication of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit in 1992, we’ve been told we can “save the planet” by eliminating fossil fuels.

Bjorn Lomborg’s book False Alarm exposes a host of false claims by environmentalists, including the notion that warming has been producing more storms, drought, and floods.  

In fact, all of these have remained at the same level over the past 100 years.  As Lomborg writes, “deaths caused by climate-related disasters have declined precipitously over the past century” (p. 73) — not because of fewer storms, but because increasing wealth has made it possible to protect ourselves from climate events.  

The real danger lies in useless spending on climate change that will bankrupt societies and make it impossible for their people to protect themselves.

The global economy has now constructed an entire society atop the myth of catastrophic man-made global warming, and activists like Gore collectively have made billions if not trillions of dollars off their predictions of doom.  

Now under Biden, activists promise to transform the global economy at a cost of hundreds of trillions.  

An SEC proposed rule on “climate change reporting and control” would, if enacted, lower profits and productivity for large businesses and bankrupt smaller ones.  And the SEC is just one among hundreds of federal agencies targeting fossil fuel emissions and exposing the private sector to huge reporting and legal costs.  

According to the National Law Review, “companies will likely need to consider and quantify the impact of environmental factors on both the upstream and downstream aspects of their business.”

Ironically, the global warming society is beginning to crack as European nations reverse their behavior, if not their rhetoric, on warming.  

Germany never fully complied with the Paris Agreement to begin with, but on May 24, it announced that it may use idled coal-fired power plants to compensate for lost Russian natural gas supplies.  

All of this government action, in the U.S. and abroad, is avoidable.  The reality is that wind and solar supply only 1.1% of global energy needs at present and will not supply more than 5% by 2040 (Lomborg, p. 104) — and this at a cost of trillions of dollars in subsidies and credits.  

It is madness for politicians and corporate leaders to promise “net zero” by 2030 or even 2050.  We must face reality and insist, for both strategic and economic reasons, that an adequate supply of fossil fuels is produced in our own country.

Despite the history I stated earlier, environmentalists present a doomsday scenario of rising seas, catastrophic storms, and worldwide drought — none of which is happening.  

A simple test is to examine the number of major hurricane strikes on the U.S. soil.  According to NOAA, with data going back to 1850, that number has remained entirely stable: 27 from 1850 to 1900, 32 from 1900 to 1950, and 28 from 1950 to 2000.  The deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history occurred in 1900, 1919, and 1926, not in the era of so-called global warming.

Katrina, the only devastating 21st-century storm, was the 33rd deadliest storm in our history — and it was devastating because of inadequate government preparation and response.

Climate alarmists also point to purported drought as evidence of warming.  

Again, examine the evidence: a chart showing wet and dry periods in Oklahoma shows beyond all doubt that Oklahoma was far drier in the period from 1900 to 1980, and greener from 1980 to the present — just the opposite of what alarmists claim it should be.  

The fact is that the Central Plains, our country’s breadbasket, has become greener precisely during the period of greater warming.

Even if we wished to change the climate, there’s little we could do about it.  

…The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has admitted in the past that a portion of recent warming is due to natural causes and that even a complete global transition to “net zero” would have not prevented further temperature increases, or declines for that matter.  

In any case, why would we wish to return to cooler “pre-industrial” levels when there are many advantages to warmer temperatures, including higher agricultural productivity.

Today’s warming of one degree Celsius is not an “inconvenient truth” — it is, for some, a minor inconvenience.  

But for most of us, it is not even that; it is an opportunity, as, with warmer temperatures and higher CO2 levels, plants grow more quickly and in regions where they could not have grown before.  

Warming increases the Earth’s productivity, making it possible to feed the 10 billion persons expected by 2050.  If the Earth entered a period of sudden cooling, as it well might, the Earth’s poor would be at risk of starvation.

Our values with regard to climate, as with regard to so much else, have been twisted by a nihilistic generation that prefers enslavement and government control to freedom and opportunity.  

It is the ordinary American who is the loser in environmental politics.  Radical environmentalists have expressed pleasure at seeing working Americans paying $5 and $6 for gas and seeing the price of natural gas, which heats half of homes and offices and most electricity production, rise from an average of $2.03 per m Btu in 2020 to $6.07 in 2022.

Environmentalists celebrate the harm that comes to others who disagree with them, even as they relish their own power and control.  

In the end, it is a matter of who thrives and who does not.  Once we realize this fact, it becomes clear that we must reject the myth of climate catastrophe and return to a rational policy allowing for the unrestricted production of fossil fuels.

The truth is that we are facing a climate catastrophe — in the form of trillions of worthless spending on so-called renewables.  

Our economy is already beginning to collapse under the burden of this spending, but it is not too late to save it.  One must question and oppose all spending on climate change and support rational policies that include reliance on fossil fuels.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).