Sunday, June 15, 2008

Mother Nature and Man's Foolish Games

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has spent any time outdoors knows that Mother Nature is a cruel mistress. She can be awesomely beautiful and astonishingly cruel. This no doubt accounts for the way early man concluded that prayers, rituals, and other efforts to cajole, flatter, and influence nature were necessary to explain and avoid the many ways nature will find to kill you if you are not prepared.

Recently a camp full of Boy Scouts, famous for their motto, “Be prepared”, discovered that truth when a tornado tore through without any warning, killing some of them.

Indeed, one can trace the rise of civilization to the development of agriculture, irrigation, cities, road building, dams, and other efforts to ensure that enough food would be available and enough habitats built to withstand too much heat and too much cold, all to survive earthquakes, floods, and all manner of threats, including plagues of insects.

In the long, billions-year history of Earth, man has put himself at the center of his own brief history despite ample evidence that Mother Nature, the Sun, the oceans, reoccurring ice ages, and other phenomena are really in charge. Despite our astonishing ability to construct cities, it only takes a really big flood to remind us that we are not in charge.

That is, of course, what is happening today in the Midwest. Again. In California, the weather is perfect for wildfires. Again. In Japan an earthquake has destroyed roads and bridges with a bit of a jiggle. Again. Elsewhere, largely unnoticed and ignored, the world’s wheat crops in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are being threatened and destroyed by an epidemic of stem rust, a deadly crop infection.

The ignorance and arrogance of man continues unabated. Since the 1980s the world has been told that it is threatened by “global warming” and, as people are slowly discovering, the entire threat is based on flawed and often deliberately false computer models put forth by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Literally thousands of scientists worldwide have finally mustered the courage to sign their names to petitions saying it is all a lie.

The politics of the environment, not its realities, cause almost comical efforts to please both the environmentalists—anti-human and anti-progress to the core—and the rest of us who need gasoline to fuel our cars and, come winter, oil to heat our homes. Then, of course, there are the literally thousands of ways petroleum is used to serve a modern, advanced society. Plastic comes to mind.

The latest example is word that, despite idiotically identifying an estimated 25,000 polar bears as “endangered” due to “global warming”, the U.S. government has issued regulations to provide legal protection to the oil companies risking $2.6 billion to explore for oil in and around the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska. The environmentalists are calling this a betrayal of the sacred polar bears whom they worship and, more truthfully, their incessant efforts to deny oil to a nation full of people whose budgets are being savaged by rising prices of both oil and food.

This is further proof of the stupidity of politics that deny citizens access to their own nation’s natural resources while trying desperately to look and sound “green” despite the lies and failures of so-called environmental “alternatives” to a nation’s energy needs.

The United States of America is now at least thirty years or more behind the proverbial eight ball when it comes to oil because its elected leaders thought they were in control when, all the time, it was Nature and the demands of a society that literally runs on oil.

A real respect for Nature and for the security and welfare of American citizens would have rejected the environmentalist’s lies, but that would have required the kind of courage that few politicians ever exhibit.

Instead, Americans will go to the polls in November to decide between two presidential candidates who still believe that global warming is happening despite the fact the Earth is well into a decade of cooling. This is the kind of stupidity that ends up endangering people’s lives while simultaneously destroying the economy.

It’s going to get cold for the next two or three decades. The blizzards everywhere in the northern hemisphere will be worse than the memory of most alive today.

The Sun, meanwhile, is not cooperating with the global warming hoax. It has gone very quiet in recent years, a well-known indicator of the cooling that is occurring and, indeed, of the next ice age, due any day now in this or the next century.

It doesn’t matter what the government says. It doesn’t matter what the United Nations says. Mother Nature will have the last word. Again.

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