Global Warming Boils Over

From Bulgarian brothels to Australian cockroaches, with a pinch of Johnny Edwards thrown in for sweetening, the global warming hysteria brew is boiling over.

You heard it right. Brothel owners in Bulgaria are blaming global warming for staff shortages. Petra Nestorova claims her best girls are working in ski resorts because the lack of snow has forced tourists to seek other pleasures. “We have hired students, but they are temps and nothing like our elite girls.”

Down Under, global warming is being blamed for a changing of the guard among Sydney's cockroach population. The most common roach-species was the German cockroach until it disappeared about seven years ago, now replaced by the Australian house cockroach, methana marginalus, which likes warmer climates.

Then in a hissy-fit on national television, Johnny Edwards exclaimed: “This is an emergency. It's a frightening thing. It'll make world war look like heaven.”

And if all that is not bizarre enough, PETA has warned Al Gore about the most “Inconvenient Truth”: According to UN, animals raised for food generate more Greenhouse Gases than all cars and trucks combined. PETA sent a letter to Al explaining that the best way to fight global warming is to go vegetarian and offering him a faux “fried chicken” introduction to meat-free meals. Researchers have determined that switching to a vegan diet is more effective in countering global warming than switching from a standard American car to a Toyota Prius.

And that’s not the end of the troubles for Uncle Al. In his documentary, the former Veep calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home. But the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy. Gore’s mansion consumes more than 20 times the electricity of the average American home. The reaction from the Gore camp is instructive. Spokesperson Kalee Kreider told ABC News: “I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics.” The Gores are rich, and rich people are not going to let their belief in global warming crimp their lifestyles.

Yet, there is some hope for sanity. Except amongst the silly people, the tide seems to be turning.

Claude Allegre, one of France's most celebrated scientists (and a leading socialist) has recanted his views on global warming. Allegre is a scientist of the first order, the architect of isotope geodynamics and renowned for his research on the geochemical evolution of the Earth. To his surprise, Allegre found that the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.

In England, a television documentary aired last week condemned man-made global warming as a myth that has become “the biggest scam of modern times.” The program titled “The Great Global Warming Scandal” dismisses claims that high levels of greenhouse gases generated by human activity causes climate change. “Solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit.”

The program featured an impressive collection of experts including professors in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeography and paleoclimatology. The truth is that global warming “is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists, supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding, and propped up by compliant politicians and the media.”

Martin Durkin, the program’s producer said, “I think this is a turning point, and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bunk.” Paul Reiter of Paris' Pasteur Institute calls the U.N. report a “sham” because, he says, it included the names of scientists -- including his own -- who disagreed with the report and who resigned from the panel. Some sued to get their names removed.

Environmentalism is a religion that is based more on political ambitions than science, the president of the Czech Republic warned. President Vaclav Klaus, said that environmentalists who clamor for policy change to combat global warming “only pretend” to be promoting environmental protection, and are actually being driven by a political agenda. “Environmentalism should belong in the social sciences,” much like the idea of communism or other “-isms” such as feminism, Klaus said, adding that “environmentalism is a religion” that seeks to “reorganize the world order as well as social behavior and value systems worldwide.”

Even the New York Times is starting to see the light. In a piece called “From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype,” William Broad declared that Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.” But his scientific audience is uneasy, many claiming that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration.

Gore claims that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change. But a report by the National Academies contradicts Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appear to be the highest since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period, long before the industrial revolution.

Don Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology, hotly disputed Gore’s nonsense. Easterbrook showed the crowded session at a recent Geological Society convention a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

In January, Paul Reiter, director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria. “For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”

Some scientists have sacrificed their integrity for politics. In Science magazine Richard Kerr warned that “Climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”

And some in the movement are becoming downright hostile. The debate on global warming has been hijacked by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions. Some scientists who question mankind's impact on climate change have even received death threats.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five death threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

“Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened,” said the professor. “I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.”

Myles Allen, from Oxford University, agreed. “The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do.”

Even thought FDR wasn't my favorite president, his famous quote, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” should help us realize what these wackos are doing to the public.