Climate alarmist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently said, “Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’”
I love end-of-the-world stories. Cormac McCarthy wrote perhaps the most compelling work along these lines, The Road, which depicts the granular detail of a father’s desperate struggle to protect his son in a post-apocalyptic world. The Pixar movie “Wall-E” will change the way you look at mobility-assist scooters after you see this depiction of future human impotence resulting from over-dependence on robots. Another favorite of mine is “Snowpiercer,” about a post-disaster world in which the last of humanity must survive on a train perpetually doomed to circle a dead planet.
“Snowpiercer” is of particular interest because it shows a world destroyed by counter-climate change efforts. Foolish climate alarmists apparently destroy the world in a misguided effort to save it. It may have been inspired by an idea from the book SuperFreakonomics, in which the authors credibly hypothesized that if global warming ever became truly dire, humans could offset the warming with simulated volcanic activity. I can remember in my childhood the ash from the Mount St. Helens eruption cooling the continental United States. Scientists noted that the volcanic plumes of the eruption caused a net cooling resulting from the loss of solar radiation due to scattering, reflection, and absorption by the volcanic ash.
The authors of SuperFreakonomics made the point that the Earth has a demonstrated record of adjusting to volcanic ash. Reintroducing ash back into the atmosphere artificially would allow humans to cool the planet without departing from what nature periodically does anyway. Their solution, notwithstanding the warning of “Snowpiercer,” is cost-effective and scientifically proven.
In other words, the solution might just be pollution.
But, if you’re a liberal, the solution to climate change is money. I’m reminded of a “South Park” episode years ago in which Magic Johnson discovered that the cure for AIDS could be found by turning comically large stacks of money into liquid form. The parody made the point that untold money can be misdirected by the good intentions of activists. The authors of SuperFreakonomics, argued that feel-good, Ocasio-Cortez-style climate change solutions are ineffective at addressing global warming and so costly that they will do more harm than good.
Questioning the proposition that the world is about to end could place you in legal jeopardy. In March 2016, 17 state attorneys general held a press conference with former Vice President Al Gore announcing their plan to sue ExxonMobil for opposing President Obama’s “Clean Power Plan,” which I believe involves stuffing money into the pockets of allies until they begin belching electricity. The Washington Times cataloged other efforts to punish people criminally for expressing skepticism: “Climate change denial should be a crime,” declared the Sept. 1 headline in the Outline. Mark Hertsgaard argued in a September 7 article in The Nation, with the understated title, “Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us,” that “murder is murder” and “we should punish it as such.”
Because that’s how we resolve scientific debate: by prosecuting dissent like murder.
The Heartland Institute recounts another example of how climate science is debated, “when physicist Dr. William Happer, then-Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy, testified before Congress in 1993 that scientific data did not support the hypothesis of manmade global warming. Gore saw to it that Happer was immediately fired. Fifteen years later, Happer quipped, ‘I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism. I did not need the job that badly.’”
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, federal funding for climate change has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014 and $13.2 billion in 2017. According to FiveThirtyEight, in 2018 the U.S. government spent an eye-popping $154 billion on climate-change-related activities since 1993.
Are these programs working? The GAO recommended that the government conduct a detailed analysis of federal climate change programs it considered to be fragmented, overlapping, or duplicative. In July 2018, the Office of Management and Budget sent a letter disagreeing with this recommendation. If climate change is an emergency, shouldn’t supporters demand that money for that purpose be deployed and stewarded effectively?
As Investor’s Business Daily noted, taxpayer money was used fraudulently to adjust data so it would support the conclusion that the scientists were ordered to find: that the earth is getting warmer. A detailed analysis of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration fraud may be found here. One wouldn’t want to find something that challenged settled climate change science or one could be labeled a “denier” and lose his job. The climate change studies costing taxpayers billions always arrive at a pre-determined conclusion—or else. That makes one wonder why we should study something that nobody is allowed to dispute? But, of course, there’s money involved in the studying, too.
Prosecuting climate deniers like murderers, faking data to support predetermined conclusions, firing dissenting scientists, and refusing to review current climate change funding for effectiveness—these are not the hallmarks of the scientific method or reasoned debate. Am I the only one noticing the remarkable resemblance between the persecution of Galileo for heresy (for saying the Earth was not the center of the universe) and the tactics of modern climate change believers?
The essence of the climate change hoax is not that the climate isn’t changing. It always is. Or that the levels of CO2 in the environment aren’t rising. CO2 is going up. The hoax is the solution. The climate change hucksters are like unscrupulous contractors defrauding homeowners after a hurricane with phony promises to fix a roof with bricks of cash that you will never see again. Giving leftist activists trillions of dollars to build their socialist dystopia will not change the climate.
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