The Environmental Church

I began as a skeptic and after quite a lot of reading up on global warming I’m still a skeptic but I have reached one conclusion. There is more religion than science in the current environmental movement. It’s a shame. There is so much good we could be doing but aren’t. We have bought into a mindless barrage of propaganda and are focused on saving the planet from dangers it doesn’t face. We are bent on impoverishing ourselves, and on keeping the third world poor, in a futile effort to control a climate that is utterly beyond our control. Rather than prepare and adapt to whatever change might come, we would stand at the shore and try to hold back the tide. We don’t clean up after ourselves, we wallow in our own filth while we endlessly wash sheets that are already clean.

I live in North Texas, down wind from a group of cement plants belching unbelievable amounts of mercury, nitrous oxides, sulfur, and heaven knows what other nasty stuff that makes the air so polluted I can see it. We could clean it up but don’t in part because we insist on restricting carbon dioxide emissions at the same time. That makes it too expensive. CO2! Plant food! We have been told that man made CO2 will destroy the earth and we have believed it. There is no science behind the idea. CO2 is at worst a minor green house gas. Man’s contribution is minuscule. The world is no warmer than it was in the middle ages. The computer models that predict it will warm further in the next century aren’t really science at all. They are an exercise in cooking the books. They represent incomprehensibly complex mathematical calculations based on so many assumptions as to be of no value; garbage in, garbage out. So we propose to tax ourselves. The cement plants will move to China along with the other energy intensive industries. There will be no reduction in CO2, and maybe not in the other stuff either.

It’s an argument based on exaggeration, half truth, and outright fabrication. Al Gore’s famous hockey stick graph was a fraud. It failed to show either the middle age warming period or the little ice age. The spike in twentieth century temperatures was only about one degree. Sea level rose about a foot. Current ocean temperatures appear to be cooling and, with denser water, sea levels falling. The Antarctic ice cap is growing, not shrinking. Warmer water on one edge appears to be caused by volcanic activity. The hurricane season is affected far more by ocean currents than by minor fluctuations in temperature. If polar bears are in danger it is from hunting, not warming. The increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past 150 years has lagged the rise in temperature, not preceded it. It can’t possibly be the cause.

The United States sits on coal reserves that could provide all our energy needs for centuries yet we dissipate our national wealth on imported petroleum. We could clean up our mining operations but don’t because of efforts to stop mining all together. We could clean up our coal fired power plants but don’t because of the CO2 bug bear. We could burn clean diesel fuel but don’t for the same reason. We would destroy our automobile industry in an effort to promote electric cars when the technology isn’t there to produce them, and without a thought as to where the electricity will come from. We would move our society to a pre-industrial state and forget the misery that comes with that. We could help the world’s poor move to prosperity but fret that they will then want automobiles and air conditioning. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a beneficial byproduct of the energy that has fueled our emergence from the dark ages. There is no plausible alternative. We can’t go back to burning wood to warm ourselves. Wood smoke really is a pollutant.