Don's Tuesday column (a few days late)

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News 7/31/2012

On the fraud of human-caused warming

Before providing readers the arguments, positions and supporting facts refuting the idea that human activity causes global warming (or the currently favored term: climate change), a note on tonight’s Tea Party Patriots meeting agenda. Erin and Terry from the Redding Tea Party Patriots will present information and a DVD on the subject of voter fraud and registration. It’s summer and travel beckons, but this meeting and subject are worth going out of your way for.

There have been fraudulent registration convictions involving ACORN activists; Minnesota U.S. Senator Al Franken and Washington Governor Christine Gregoire both benefited from vote fraud, owing their electoral success to phony ballots. Democrat Secretaries of State chose not to pursue the matters, coincidentally. As Hugh Hewitt pointed out in his aptly titled book, “If it’s not close, they can’t cheat,” Republicans must win by margins beyond the levels of fraud that accompany Democratically-aligned unions and lawyers. Cleaning up voter roles and insisting on voter ID – you know, the kind that allowed people to enter the NAACP hall where Attorney General Eric Holder was speaking – is one of the defining issues going forward to insure that legitimate votes are not cancelled out by phony or dead voters.

Human-caused global warming/climate change is going to eventually be recognized by clear thinking people as perhaps the greatest misconception ever foisted on humanity. When you consider alarmism within the last century over cooling, then warming, then cooling, then most recently warming yet again, each time with whatever level of scientific certainty that technology allowed, it’s hard to keep a straight face.

I encourage those with open minds to take some time to review the information readily available from local-and-widely-cited meteorologist Anthony Watts, at wattsupwiththat.com, which has 30+ articles on the first page alone, dating from just the last 4 days. Also, as space here will quickly run out, go to “Polecat News and Views” (donpolson.blogspot.com), scroll down the right side to “global warming” and you can access 240 individual articles that have been accumulating since my blog began in 2005. I openly cite sources in those posts; I don’t take liberties with facts.

It just struck me that there seems to be no end to climate change connections and rationalizations. Climate change is apparently the all-purpose, universal “go to” cause cited in, just to name a few examples off the top of my head: Governor Brown’s $20+ billion twin water tunnels, wind turbines from one end of the state to the other including the 400-foot wind mill at the Walmart DC, the $70 billion High Speed Rail boondoggle, California’s AB 32 cap-and-trade law together with other mandates for higher portfolios of so-called “green” or “renewable” energy, electricity rates that subsequently have spiked over 35 percent in 4 years, and, finally, suggestions that air pollution fees – such as those proposed last year for all new development to offset ozone and particulates – be applied in the same way to mitigate CO2 (a so-called “greenhouse gas) from those same projects.

In no particular order, here are just a few examples of factual disconnect: It doesn’t matter how bitterly cold it gets anywhere on earth in winter, that’s always weather, not climate change; however, record heat, drought and fires are “what global warming looks like.” The ten hottest years were supposed to be recent phenomenon until the records showed they occurred over the last 80 years, particularly in the 1930s, 1950s and 1990s; warming narrative failure. Tornado frequency supposedly demonstrated another portent of climate change until a graph plotted half a century of tornado numbers and intensity, showing a random pattern entirely disconnected to warming. Same thing with those killer hurricanes that were supposed to wreck increasing devastation due to warming – hasn’t happened and records show again that frequency and intensity have been randomly spread over decades.

Increasing levels of carbon dioxide, or CO2, the primary greenhouse gas, is supposed to be mankind’s fault, for which California passed AB 32 to force us to cut our output. Well, whatever reduction is achieved as a result is nothing more than a rounding error compared to the United States total output; America’s CO2 is no more than a rounding error compared to the whole world’s output; the world’s human-caused CO2 is a small fraction of the entire natural generation of CO2 from all sources, primarily earth’s oceans. It is foolish and ludicrous beyond belief to think human generation of CO2 changes earth’s climate.

Finally, it has now been documented that, due to the global recession and increasing reliance on natural gas for energy, America’s CO2 has declined to 1990 levels; for those paying attention, consider that every single recession or depression has reduced human economic activity resulting, by definition, in less CO2 from declining industrial output. Yet, according to the chart at wattsupwiththat.com (with link to NOAA data), there has been no detectible decline in the rising parts per million (PPM) of CO2 over the last century, proving that human contribution is practically irrelevant to world wide carbon dioxide. If there is a connection between CO2 and temperatures 1) it has little connection to economic or industrial sources, and 2) ice core and tree ring analysis suggests that past increases in CO2 followed, rather than preceded, rising temperatures. (to be continued)