Combining Hypocrisy and Absurdity

By Alan Caruba

Just how much hypocrisy will it take for people around the world to conclude that global warming is a massive fraud?

I was thinking of this as I read a December 12 Associated Press article, “Storm of Ice Cripples Much of Midwest.” Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma declared states of emergency and at least 23 deaths were attributed to this massive weather event. But it’s winter, I hear you say. Every winter there’s always snow and ice. Yes, there is.

The weather is measured in days, weeks, and the calculations that determine averages for a year. Climate is measured in hundreds and thousands of years. There are known cycles to climate and there are the occasional anomalies such as the mini ice age that occurred between 1300 and 1850. Or the odd lack of sunspot (magnetic storms) activity occurring of late.

So, while people in the nation’s midsection cope with freezing weather, some 10,000 other people are enjoying the warmth of Bali, using modern transportation to get there, depending on the air conditioning to keep them cool in luxury hotels, dining out on their all-expense-paid accounts in between issuing dire predictions that the poles are melting and all life on earth is in peril.

Flying in from Oslo after receiving his Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore will no doubt repeat and repeat and repeat his warnings, urging the representatives of nations to extend the UN Kyoto Climate Control Protocol and sign up to reduce a very minor (0.038%) carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas in the earth’s atmosphere. The way they are expected to do this is to reduce energy use.

The people in the Midwest without energy are rediscovering the value of energy. It keeps their homes warm. It powers all the electrical items on which they have come to depend. If it was safe to get on the road, it powers their automobiles and trucks. Reducing energy there or anywhere it is used to enhance life in the 21st century might seem odd, if not obscene, to them.

Al Gore’s home uses enough energy to keep twenty of the homes of his less wealthy neighbors going all year long. While 600,000 homes and businesses in Oklahoma are without electricity, he travels by private jet and he is driven around in big limousines. Some might call his lifestyle hypocritical. And they would be right.

Daily the media is saturated with all manner of “news” about global warming. Everything is now blamed for causing it. Divorce is said to be bad for the environment because it creates two households from one. The alleged “obesity epidemic” is part of the problem say public health “experts.” If we all just walked more or used a bike we would reduce “emissions.” They neglect, however, the two pounds of carbon dioxide we exhale every day.

So both absurdity and hypocrisy are linked by the assertion that the earth is dramatically warming or will at some point; perhaps five years, fifteen years, or fifty years. This from people who cannot predict what the local weather will be in five days.

The local weather in the Midwest is cold and freezing. In a few days a big snowstorm will hit the northeast. Why? Because it’s winter.