American Thinker | Brian Sussman | Dec. 16, 2008
Last week, soon-to-be President Barack Obama met with former Vice President Al Gore to discuss global warming. In a brief presser following their closed-door rendezvous, Obama proclaimed, “the time for denial is over.”
Ironically, as Obama yammered, Louisiana hurriedly prepared for a powerful cold front which would arrive the following night. The wintry storm ultimately dumped 6 inches of snow in Livingston Parish and dusted New Orleans with its earliest snowfall since records were accurately established in 1850. And the deep-south cold snap was not an isolated event.
For most of the United States and much of the world, this has been one of the colder autumns in well over a decade, with reports of unseasonable snowfalls and plummeting temperatures from the American Great Plains to the Alps of Europe and into the inner reaches of Asia. Even China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever” in October. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years. In fact, it’s likely that 2008 will go down as the coldest year since in the United States since 1997.
So who’s in denial?
Obama’s inverted hyperbole hardly anomalous. Similar blunders splatter in the faces of the global whiners regularly. On February 13th of last year the Midwest was getting hammered with an unusual dose of bitter Arctic air. Minneapolis, Minnesota, woke up to -4°. Chicago had snow and a temperature of 19°. So ferocious was the weather that Maryville College in St. Louis was forced to cancel its screening of Al Gore’s global warming manifesto, An Inconvenient Truth.
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Despite the House of Representatives’ move to bag their global warming meeting because of non-global warming weather, undaunted, the Senate blindly went forward with theirs. Foreign bigwigs had been called to Washington for this summit and cancelling it would have created great inconvenience-and embarrassment for their Senate host, Senator John McCain. As the dignitaries cruised from their D.C. hotels through the snow-covered city in gas-guzzling 4-wheel drive Suburbans, they witnessed the fluffy white evidence of the biggest snowfall of the season. In addition, the temperature was a stunning 11° below normal. Acting oblivious to the reality outdoors, McCain foolishly addressed the assembled group and said, “The debate is over, my friends. The question is, what do we do?”
What you should do, Messer’s Obama, Gore and McCain, is realize the debate is over — there is no global warming. Yes, between 1970 and 1998 there was a minor warming of a mere .34°F, as verified by the NASA satellite records. However, there has been no notable increase in the global temperature since 1998, (humiliatingly confirmed even by the United Nations). Furthermore, your designer greenhouse gas-carbon dioxide-is neither a pollutant nor a problem.
However, the facts are not getting in the way of their agenda.
Obama’s plan to “stop global warming” is the same one that’s been touted by Gore, and identical to the plan rolled out last week by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Without a vote of the people or the state legislature, CARB approved a roadmap for how California would implement its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. It’s a liberty-sucking roadmap complete with new taxes, economic inflation and a heavy dose of Big Brother.
The centerpiece of the plan in an elaborate cap and trade scheme which will punish businesses with increased costs — costs that will be passed on to the consumer. Automobile CAFE standards will be increased and the production of plug-in vehicles mandated, thus forcing upon the struggling car dealers contraptions that will not be embraced by the consumer. Building codes, already a major pain for anyone doing any construction in the Golden State, will become more imposing in order to appear “green”.
Worse yet, utility companies will have to provide 33% of their electricity from non-fossil sources. This extreme provision is unattainable for a number of reasons. First, environmentalists are privately opposed to wind farms because they require large swaths of land to house the mills and adjacent power lines. They believe such development will certainly threaten obscure species. Second, while solar is an efficient utility, especially residential rooftop applications, it requires a capital outlay that most consumers can’t afford (for the standard house about $20-30,000 after government subsidies).
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