Game Over: the Science is Settled

“Action would have to be radical -- but climate change can be slowed” wrote Alan Zarembo, Times Staff Writer on Feb. 5, 2007. House Democrats have responded with a joint solution to the global warming crisis and the global war on terror with the roll-out their new weapon.

The Pelosi Fighting Vehicle (thanks Ted) was named in honor of the new House Majority Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who is leading the way for effective change in government. Al Gore championed the effort claiming it a victory for both our military and the environment due to anticipated reductions in global warming and dependency on foreign oil. Sources quoted Mr. Gore as stating “This is the most important technological advancement since I invented the Internet.”

Mr. Zarembo cautioned that, however laudatory the Democrat initiative, even more will have to be done to avert a global cataclysm. The recently released UN report warns that there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere that even if concentrations held at current levels, the effects of global warming would continue for centuries. And to stabilize atmospheric levels, CO2 emissions would have to drop by 70-80%.

And how are we to do that, exactly?

“All truck, all trains, all airplanes, cars, motorcycles and boats in the United States — that's 7.3% of global emissions” said Gregg Marland of Oak Ridge National Lab. The Pelosi Fighting Vehicle will help, but all motorists will need to switch to bicycles to have a measurable effect. And Nancy Pelosi will have to forget about her B757-class plane for her coast-to-coast junkets.

Closing all fossil-fuel-powered electricity plants worldwide and replacing them with windmills, solar panels and nuclear power plants would make a serious dent — a 39% reduction globally, Marland said. His calculation doesn't include all the fossil fuels that would have to be burned to build the greener facilities, though. Let’s add that up: 7.3% + 39% = 46.3%. Sadly, not enough.

If the world returned to the Stone Age, CO2 concentrations would still rise. In fact, Robert Socolow of Princeton University said that even if the entire world stopped burning fossil fuels altogether, atmospheric carbon wouldn't approach pre-Industrial levels for several hundred years. Undeterred, Socolow declared: “The U.S. is going to have to decarbonize.”

J.R. Dunn noted in The American Thinker that “the apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West. In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns.”

G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, explained the phenomenon: “A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.” Western Civilization’s secular left needs the demon of global warming to go along with its horde of devils.

In his fine (and scary) new book America Alone, Mark Steyn talks about the “Great Satin” myth. If America were a conventional superpower, the world would worry about it as a threat to France or China or Gabon. “But because it’s so obviously not that kind of power the world has to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not to merely this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy.”

Of course, American lefties fall into line with their global brethren. Recall Al Gore’s accusation: “We are altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the UNIVERSE.” Well gollleee! John Kerry calls the US a “pariah.” Democrats really don’t like us, but they surely like that good ole religion, environmentalism.

National Journal has released a new “Congressional Insiders Poll” which asked members of Congress this question: Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems? The results were interesting. Only 13% of congressional Republicans say they believe that human activity is causing global warming (down 10% from a year ago), compared to 95% of congressional Democrats. You want to talk about religious faith!

So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other. In the 1960s various forms of pollution from car exhausts, household plastics, power generation and DDT were leading to a promised chemical doomsday.

In the 1970s overpopulation was predicted to overstress the Earth's carrying capacity, use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the end of the 20th century.

The 1980s saw a reprise of fears of nuclear destruction in the guise of a “nuclear winter” when firestorms created by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun, causing a collapse of the Earth’s ecology.

Ozone depletion was the next environmentalist flurry, coming along around the same time there were predictions of a looming Ice Age and serious proposals to coat the entire polar caps with soot.

The predictive ability of the environmental religion seeems to be rather poor.

But important lessons learned from previous environmental panics have been carefully applied by the enviro-wackos to the global warming campaign. A skilled cadre of scientists, activists, and publicists has devoted entire careers to nothing else. It has become an industry that, with financial elements such as “carbon offsets,” can easily support itself. (Did you hear about the Chinese hydro-fluorocarbon scam?)

As intensity gathers for action, there is no telling how much mischief the global warmistas will cause. The DDT ban resulting from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring places her in an exclusive circle shared only by Karl Marx as a writer whose work alone caused vast amounts of human misery.

The universal famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb led to a “triage” proposal wherein certain “failed” nations would be completely isolated from the rest of the world to bring about a “die-off” of their “excess” population, a process that would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions. This was a serious policy issue discussed in the New York Times and by the elite. The most popular “failed” nation always seemed to be India, one of our rising economic powerhouses.

I have had recent unnerving discussions with several acquaintances who still believe in Ehrlich's nightmare world. Lord protect us from the new religion.