Another Earth Day has come and gone. This one passed with little fanfare or news coverage. In many areas, snow rained on the Earth Day parade. Attendance at Earth Day rallies nationwide was down sharply from prior years. Ironically, the lack of attendance was attributed to poor weather. Apparently many Earth Day supporters are fair weather environmentalists.
The news event that received the most coverage was President Obama’s Earth Day extravaganza tour. The tour burned an estimated 35 thousand gallons of fuel and created 385 tons of carbon dioxide so he could lecture us about climate change ... and we paid for it.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in climate change. If you accept the credibility of carbon dating, dinosaurs roamed the earth many millennia ago in a warm and humid climate. Aging of ice banks at both poles shows that the earth subsequently cooled. Otherwise we would be dodging T-Rex and velociraptors ala Jurassic Park while they were distracted from dining on mastodons.
Supposedly, it cooled so fast that a mastodon was trapped in an ice cave and preserved intact. I tend to believe he didn’t get the message to migrate south and instead decided to wait the storm out in a cave, but who knows?
The message here is that the earth’s climate has changed over many eons. That has been fairly clearly documented. Unfortunately for Obama, Gore, and others trying to cash in on the climate change gravy train, it changed without any effect at all from hydrocarbons or humans. None. Nada. Zip. Zero.
That is why I am subject to sneers and snubs from the climate change crowd. In their minds, climate change is settled science and no one should question it. I am reminded of the flat earthers of the Christopher Columbus era. As I remember from history books before they were rewritten for Common Core, Columbus was supposed to fall off the end of the earth because the earth was deemed flat by a consensus of scientists. Sound familiar?
I was heavily into science in college, to the extent that I spent a lot of lab hours assisting professors in the agriculture building with their research on nutrition and micronutrients. From that experience, I have a good idea of the protocols necessary to run unbiased tests. I can assure you that when the input data has no real basis in fact but are instead assumptions, computer models don’t fit those protocols. In other words, garbage in, garbage out.
Many of those climate change computer models are now being disproven or shown to be fraudulent. Much of the input data was made up to show a predetermined result. It is telling that Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore changed his mind about the influence man has on climate change based on his study of facts. He actually left Greenpeace because they in his words, “began to adopt policies that I could not accept from my scientific perspective.”
One convincing factor that man has minimal effect on the climate is that a single volcanic eruption (Mount Pinatubo, June 15, 1991) emitted more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in a single occurrence that human activity does in six months. There are over 500 active volcanoes in the world, most admittedly of much lesser scale, that emit anywhere from 200 million to 600 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, depending on who you believe. That is significant, and humans can’t do a thing about it.
One of the last books the late Michael Crichton wrote was “State of Fear” that was based on the hypocrisy and greed of environmental groups. The book is fiction, but he managed in a way only he could, to work in many facts about climate change. They were all properly annotated and the sources prominently shown. I checked a random sample of the citations and found them to be accurate. It is worth the read for the information as well as the entertainment. Needless to say, it was not well reviewed by Al Gore.
So there you have it. I guess I am a racist, sexist, homophobe because I dare to question the “science” of man-caused climate change. Someone at some point might be able to present well documented facts and reasoned conclusions instead of hype and assumptions. At that time I might be inclined to change my mind. Until then, I am content to remain a blasphemous naysayer mired in a quagmire of fact and common sense.
Tom Riggins is an LVN columnist, and he may be reached at news@lahontanvalleynews.com