America Goes Insane Over the Weather... By Alan Caruba

America Goes Insane Over the Weather
By Alan Caruba
_______________

It’s official. America is now totally insane over the weather.

Even the Weather Channel that used to simply provide reasonably accurate, short-term information about the weather is now telling everyone we’re doomed because global warming is going to destroy the Earth. Why not just rename it the AlGore Channel?

The weather used to be the concern primarily of farmers and ranchers. It determines how well or not crops would grow and herds will thrive. As America became more urbanized, the rest of the population wanted to know whether to bring an umbrella or what to wear. Now it is a source of daily anxiety over the fate of the Earth.

To make matters worse, people are being told and actually believing that what they do or not can affect the weather in ways to keep the seas and temperatures from rising. It is no longer the domain of the sun, the oceans, volcanoes and clouds. These puny things are nothing compared to what kind of car you drive or what you use to heat your home.

That is a definition of insanity. It is so far removed from reality that Hollywood has to conjure up films showing New York under miles of snow or so-called documentaries demanding that industry must come to a stop in order to save the Earth.

I suggest we need to save the Earth from the legions of fear mongers who are seeking to control our lives for the crime of having abundant food, longer life spans, technological and scientific advances, or that permits you to get on a jet and be anywhere in the world within hours. We take for granted that trucks, the heart’s blood of an economy, will deliver anything you purchase on Monday by the following Wednesday. Try to imagine our nation without cars?

Let me provide an example of how far we have come since I was a child nearly seventy years ago. We had an icebox, not a refrigerator. A man would come and provide a big block of ice to keep food cool for a day or so. Air conditioning meant opening the window and turning on a fan. Washing clothes involved using a washboard and then hanging them out to dry in the sun. There was no television, no computers, no iPods, and no cell phones. Milk was delivered by a horse-drawn wagon during World War II because gas was scarce. Polio crippled thousands of people, including then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Do you really want to return to those “good old days”? In essence, that is exactly what the Global Warming Gestapo wants to inflict on every American these days.

The single most insipid phrase that any environmentalist or politician says is “climate change” because they actually believe humans are responsible for the change and ignore the fact that climate is always in a state of change.

None of us can read a newspaper or a magazine, or turn on the radio or television, without being told that we are just years, if not months, from the horror of global warming. A few weeks ago Colorado was digging out from three horrendous blizzards the likes of which have not been seen in a lifetime, while the East Coast had temperatures in the 70s.

The definition of weather and climate is “chaos.”

Mother Nature has a message for you: Get out of the way! Here comes a flood, a blizzard, a tornado, a tsunami, a hurricane, a wildfire or an earthquake. Get out of the way!

The wisest climatologists who study weather trends over hundreds of years have no idea why mini-Ice ages or warming spells occur and meteorologists with access to the most sophisticated computer models cannot tell you with any certainty what the weather in your area will be a week from now!

In Congress, the newly empowered Democrats are getting ready to impose an insane program of “caps and credits” on so-called greenhouse gas emissions that is straight out of the UN’s Kyoto Protocol that totally exempts China and India, home to more than two billion of the six billion people on Earth.

Meanwhile, those same greenhouse gases are being emitted globally by millions of livestock that are responsible for 9% of anthropogenic CO2 (Carbon dioxide) emissions, 37% of methane emissions, 64% of ammonia emissions, and 65% of global nitrous oxide.

When you add in the methane and other emissions of the world’s swamps and forests, and all the chemicals emitted by the world’s active volcanoes, plus the fact that every human on Earth exhales two pounds of CO2 every day, the notion of crippling every element of the nation’s economy to “control” such things is, well, insane.

Carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant” no matter how many times Speaker Pelosi, Senator Boxer, Governor Schwarzenneger and a legion of global warming alarmists say it is. It exists in the Earth’s atmosphere and, other than the oxygen that keeps us alive, is the single most important part of our environment because all vegetation, forests and crops, depend on it.

Is there more of it around? Yes, since 1850 the Earth’s population has increased 600%! Is it a bad thing? No. The Earth has had periods of far higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and life thrived.

Right now, that eminent body of scientists, the Supreme Court of the United States, is deciding whether CO2 is a pollutant. That is insane.

Finally, during the last 100 years, the average global temperature has increased less than one degree centigrade. Some places like the poles remain encased in ice and snow all year. Other places like the deserts remain arid all year.

What we do not lack is a legion of “scientists” who cannot wait to run out in the streets and announce that their research conclusively proves we are doomed. We have others who run around saying that our weather is unusual or getting worse. It’s the weather! The weather is always in a state of change.

Are we supposed to return to the days when virgins were thrown into volcanoes or hearts were cut from living bodies in order to appease the gods that “control” the weather? Or are we all going to fall victim to those in Congress and elsewhere who insist we ruin our lives in order to achieve “control” over the weather?

It’s the weather! Get over it!

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, post on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com/. His new book, “Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy”, has been published by Merril Press.

© Alan Caruba, January 2007

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