Ceaseless Hot Air and Wasted Dollars

By Alan Caruba

There is a point at which one’s contempt for the environmentalists and their allies is irredeemable. There is no longer the usual excuse that’s there’s room for argument or discussion regarding global warming. Having been labeled “deniers” for years, the sense that the end of this hoax is in sight brings no desire to forgive and forget.

Recently, Dr. Roy Spencer, an atmospheric scientist who formerly worked for NASA, testified before a Senate committee. Free now to speak without the impediments of bureaucratic oversight, Dr. Spencer told the committee, “I am pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research.

“Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…the warming we have experience in the last 100 years is mostly natural.”

Read that again, “mostly natural.” The notion that human beings have had any impact on the Earth’s climate, while absurd when compared to that of the Sun, the Oceans, and other natural factors, is now headed for the trash bin of really bad ideas.

As Dr. Spencer put it, “If climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control and is likely to end—if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now…”

Why then has the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Center for Integrative Environmental Research at the University of Maryland, financed by the Environmental Defense Fund, just announced that, “climate change threatens New Jersey’s economy and coastal communities”?

Let me put the question another way. If it’s a short summer, filled with lots of rain, with a spate of colder weather before Labor Day, everyone who makes a living at Jersey’s famed shore knows that their economy has been affected by “climate change.” That’s because the climate or, more specifically, the weather changes all the time.

We don’t need a report saying that coastal residents and businesses could, might, possibly will, be affected by changes in the weather. We know that already! This report, like all the others that have preceded it, is about “scaring” people into believing that policy makers, i.e., legislators can do anything whatever about the climate.

They can’t. They never could. This, however, will not stop them from coming up with all manner of laws whose justification is “climate change.” These people should be driven from office with a combination of votes and pitchforks.

We have in this nation, an army of so-called scientists who devote themselves to conjuring up this kind of hogwash because it means a paycheck. The environmental scam has put their children through college, put a new car in the garage, and provided a vacation for the whole family. All they have to do is keep churning out idiotic, useless, and very expensive “research.”

Consider the Environmental Protection Agency announcement that they are going to throw $2.25 million at a study of “biodiversity” because it is deemed “critical for environmental well-being.” You cannot make up stuff like this. Several institutes and university entities will divvy up your money to study whether the “differences in animal community composition affect the risk of Lyme disease transmission in Duchess County, New York.”

Others will “investigate the relationships between diversity in plant, bird, and mosquito populations and West Nile virus prevalence in urban wetland community in northern New Jersey. Not to be left out, the University of California, Los Angeles, will investigate “the role of migratory birds in West Nile Virus transmission and use earth observations to better understand how climate and anthropogenic changes to the environment might predict risk.”

Those getting this money are going to dine out on your hard-earned dollars and eventually tell you that various species of ticks and mosquitoes are known to transmit these diseases. This, I assure you, is already well established and well known, but you have just forked over $2.25 million to be told the obvious.

The Greens specialize in taking the obvious and turning it into costly research that always results in a scary headline that we’re doomed in some way.

Meanwhile real scientists like Dr. Roy Spencer will try to make the boneheads we elected to high office understand that THERE IS NO GLOBAL WARMING BEING CAUSED BY HUMAN BEINGS, DRIVING CARS, USING AIR CONDITIONING, OR ANYTHING ELSE WE DO.

Since I live in New Jersey, I will wait breathlessly for the results of the EPA’s $2.25 million research grants. In the meantime, I will give thanks to the sensible folks who, decades ago, before the advent of environmental charlatans, set up a mosquito eradication program to protect people from this well known transmitter of a variety of nasty, nasty, nasty diseases.