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Thoughts on Earth Day
by Jeff Fullerton
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Heads they win. Tails we loose.

[LINK]

Now the climate scientists at NASA have discovered that CO2 may cool the atmosphere by blocking a portion of the sun's spectrum that warms the surface of the Earth. On one hand it sounds like a good thing since it implies that global warming from human CO2 emissions was just another red herring.

On the other hand, proving that CO2 causes cooling instead of warming fits nicely with recent trends toward unseasonably colder weather in many parts of the world which is still going to be argued as cause to regulate and tax us for our so-called sins and excesses. And for devious people to cash in on carbon offsets or whatever creative ways they can come up with to scam their fellow man.

We know that climate change does exist based on historic records and the studies of tree rings and pollen from core samples of lake bottoms and bogs. We also know that it varies over both the long and short term. Our current cooling trend- which was punctuated by an unseasonably warm winter and early spring followed by a hot summer last year in Western Pennsylvania- and numerous droughts and fires in the West may be related to natural trends in solar activity that fluctuate short term in 20 to 30 years intervals of cooling and warming- and longer term trends between centuries of climatic optimums and mini ice ages that oscillate within the interglacial periods between major ice ages that are infrequent episodes in longer periods of oscillation between Snowball Earths and Greenhouse Earth's that may have something to do with positioning of continents near the polar regions and the blocking of warm ocean currents by the continents.

In the shorter term- it appears that we recently came out of the Little Ice Age that gripped the world near the end of the Middle Ages and it's last really serious bout was felt circa 1816- aka The Year Without a Summer when a series of massive volcanic eruptions that injected dust and sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere coincided with a solar minimum. [LINK]

The Little Ice Age is believed to have ended about 1850 beginning the current trend of short term warming and cooling trend going into the 20th Century which started out on the cool side. My Grandmother told plenty of tales of big snow events including 18 inches of snow on the 18th of April 1928! Which is a bit late near the latitude of 40 degree North in Western Pennsylvania. Later into that century there was a warming trend that brought about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s in which farmers on the more arid parts of the Great Plains got wiped out because they were lulled into thinking the land was suitable for growing certain crops which did well during the cooler phase previously when rainfall was more abundant locally. This mistake was made previously in history- here and other places in the world and the most recent noteworthy example being the Sahel Region of Africa and the famines of Ethiopia and Somalia that were compounded by wars in the late 20th Century.

That was probably the result of our most recent warm period of the 1980s and 1990s that followed the cooler period that started in the 1950s and hit full force in the 1970s. I was a kid then, but I remember some of the terrible winters of that time which had sparked a lot of alarming predictions of a coming Ice Age with some scientists arguing that it was part of a natural cycle of climate change that we could do little about while others contended that the cause was man-made. The result of particulates from industrial pollution being injected into the atmosphere and dimming the sun much like the natural process of volcanic eruptions. The solution was naturally: more government control of the economy and society much the same as that prescribed for man-made global warming which was just beginning to gather steam in that decade: the decade where central planners were beginning to discover the potential of environmentalism as a means to justify a command economy in light of the growing failure their efforts to justify it on the grounds of achieving fair and equitable distribution of wealth and efficiency of production.

And if it was the result of natural change- it would just be another emergency that would call for the same, like your run of the mill economic crisis, natural disaster or war.

In the context of the current day; Global warming / aka climate change is a rent seeking racket being pushed by the progressive movement which has been forever in search of a conflict or crisis it can exploit as an excuse to get their hands on the levers and switches of the economy to fulfill a century long dream of a centrally planned society governed by their expert consensus. For them it is a birth right and if anyone should prove that humans are not contributing to climate change, they will quickly find some other burning issue to argue a compelling case for total surrender to their agenda. In other words their desire to save the planet has always been a thinly disguised desire to rule it. Which means even if they are right, you should resist them anyways because the cure they proscribe- eternal tyranny over the whole of humankind for the sake of unattainable perfection as a conservation goal- is far worse than the disease!

And given the fact that nations like China and India are increasing their carbon footprint while North Americans are shrinking theirs- by adopting more efficient modes of production and switching from coal to natural gas- we will only end up hurting ourselves and enriching other nations who refuse to play by the rules and the treasonous progressives who've invested in carbon credit trading schemes while CO2 continues to pour into the atmosphere and the world changes regardless of our sacrifice.

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