Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   1/08/2019

The best or the worst—you choose

It’s worthwhile to look back as well as forward in early January, try to see the narratives, analyze events, compare and connect them. For instance, the climate alarmists (you can’t deny the palpable alarm and frightened consternation in their rhetoric) have had a constant stream of reports and news stories reinforcing the “Catastrophic Anthropogenic (human-caused) Global Warming” perspective. What’s really happening?

An August issue of the Daily News contained a seemingly irrefutable story, “Under the sea, marine heat waves can wreak havoc on wildlife,” concluding that the oceans are warming in alarming ways, threatening both coral growth and ocean species. As with atmospheric temperatures, the emphasis on the last 100+ years of measurements completely misses the long-term climate trends and extremes over not just tens but hundreds of thousands of years as recorded in ice cores, proxies for temperature trends. Those show that for over half a million years, glacial periods extended for 80 to 90 thousand years, followed by “inter-glacial” periods of warming, allowing mammalian life, more importantly human life, to flourish and spread in formerly glacier-covered expanses.

If the only scientific data deemed valid or legitimate are the data supporting the climate alarmist perspective, the modern scientific approach itself is in jeopardy of being politicized into partisan, even propagandized, irrelevancy. No one in or out of the scientific field can dispute the fact that a “little ice age” ended in the late 1800s, after which all of humanity experienced a welcome warming, allowing crops to increase production and people to no longer huddle indoors, sharing diseases, etc. When you see reports that focus on the post-ice age warming without acknowledging the fact that the climate, including oceans, was warmer during the Medieval, the Roman and even the Minoan Warming Periods, it’s an attempt to ignore the recent 12,000 years of relative comfort compared to ice ages.

Citizens of France revolted over taxes deemed necessary to force people to use less fuel, less energy in their lives and, as with PG&E, conform our usage to the availability of inconsistently-produced wind and solar energy. This will not stop no matter what temperatures, weather extremes or, more importantly, lack of extremes, we go through. The “alarmists” won’t acknowledge that anything undermines their theories, even going so far as to demonize those casting doubt on their global warming/climate change/disruption/pick-your-term cause.

They now propose a “Green New Deal,” costing many trillions, requiring confiscatory taxes. We have outgoing Gov. “Moonbeam” Brown—on a Meet the Press show that pointedly excluded climate realists who question the orthodoxy—criticizing and dismissing the rural residents of California for wanting his fuel tax reversed. In “Jerry Brown Blasts ‘Rural Areas’ for Not Liking Gas Tax That Disproportionately Harms Them,” by Paul Crookston, the sub-head is “The California governor also compared fighting climate change to WWII.”

Such enviro-warriors use “the moral equivalent of war” rhetoric when talking about imperceptible (statistical, not noticeable) warming, based on measurements with significant margins of error for any given study. Warming nut Samuel Miller-McDonald wrote approvingly of a global nuclear holocaust; bring on the elimination of a third of humanity and the radically reduced energy usage of people thrown back into a pre-industrial state. Wow! They have gone from “War is not healthy for children or other living things” to “A war that kills billions of people and modern civilization ain’t all bad.”

Other ongoing stories in the new year: 1) The partial government shutdown, over Trump’s border wall, is now on Democrats Pelosi and Schumer due to their refusal to compromise on border security structures. Democrats won’t allow or endorse barriers (but they used to) stopping the entry of people, drugs, human traffickers and terrorists. However, they don’t want existing barriers taken down, a consistent position if they were fighting over a sincere principle.  Shameless hypocrites!

Pundit Kurt Schlichter’s take is spot on: “What’s a Few More Dead Americans If It Means the Dems Can Score More Political Points?” It’s just mindless “stop Trump at all costs” lunacy.

2) Speaking of lunacy, Thomas Lifson summed it up in “Dems debut their clown show strategy for the 216^th Congress.” A weekly column won’t suffice for the tasteless and outlandish Democrat stunts to come. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was cheered on by Democrat faithful when she yelled “We’re gonna go in and impeach the m*****f***** (Trump).”

Brad Sherman (CA) and Al Green (TX) introduced an article of impeachment, charging President Trump with obstruction of justice because he fired James Comey. “The director of the FBI serves at the pleasure of the President. Firing an incompetent, dishonest and treacherous FBI Director, who is colluding with enemies to destroy the administration he ostensibly serves, is a presidential duty, not an impeachable offense.” (J. Hinderacker) Do Dems really think the voters will buy their hairbrained theory?

3) Dennis Prager’s “The Left Will Make 2019 a Dark Year” is worth reading. “Thanks to the left's control of the House of Representatives and the news media, Americans will be kept in a fevered state throughout 2019—with innumerable hearings, exposes, criminal investigations and possible indictments of those around the president and the president himself. Truth will not be the point. Defamation will. Anything that might muddy the president, no matter how spurious, no matter how thin the evidence, will be pursued with gusto. The media will drop ‘bombshell’ after ‘bombshell.’ If lives and careers are ruined, so much the better; no one should be associating with this president anyway.” That’s the left’s view.

Also worth reading is Victor Davis Hansen’s “Actually, 2018 was a pretty good year.” He cites massive increases in oil and natural gas production, solid 3 to 4 percent economic growth, historically low unemployment, black unemployment and poverty, millions off of food stamps, carbon reductions exceeding countries still in the Paris climate accord, reduced tension with North Korea, and NATO and NAFTA improvements. Half-full or half-empty? Your call.