Inventing the Next Phony Environmental Crisis

By Alan Caruba

The inventiveness of the Greens, when it comes to creating a new crisis after an old one has run its course, is truly extraordinary.

Since the 1980s we have been living with and refuting the notion that carbon dioxide (CO2) has so filled the Earth’s atmosphere that we are all doomed if we don’t shut down every industry known to man and God. The name given to this invented crisis is “global warming.” The problem for the Greens is that the Earth, since around 1998, is not warming. It’s cooling.

It took a long time for many of the world’s scientists to network sufficiently to begin to respond to the global warming hoax, but now those who led the effort and those that joined it all know each other. In March of this year, the Heartland Institute, a 24-year-old non-partisan Chicago think tank, organized and held an International Conference on Climate Change that was held in New York. I attended.

More than 500 scientists, economists, and other heavy-duty thinkers, people with a fondness for facts and the truth, came together from around the world. Among the speakers at the conference were men with impeccable academic credentials. They were associated with leading universities or had worked in the U.S. government’s space and meteorological agencies.

I am a science writer, not a scientist. From March 8 to March 10, I attended lectures, seminars and presentations that strained my knowledge to the limit. I concluded that what these distinguished scientists didn’t know was clearly not worthy knowing. If they could explain it in ways that even this scribbler could understand, there was hope for the world!

So, when some provocateur named Peter Tatchell published an article in The Guardian, a very liberal British newspaper, entitled “The Oxygen Crisis”, the network of scientists that had organically come together to fight the global warming hoax sprang into action.

If they had learned anything, it was that simply ignoring such deliberate nonsense can create a lot of trouble. Ignore it and pretty soon lawmakers are talking about taxing carbon, swindlers are creating “carbon credits”, and nations are subjected to “cap and trade” schemes involving greenhouse gas emissions.

The August 13 article suggested that there had been a “long-term fall in oxygen concentrations” around the Earth. The basis for the next great crisis, an Earth with less oxygen, was being tested to see if it had any legs.

Dr. Roy Spencer, a NASA scientist, summed up the reaction of his colleagues. “It doesn’t get much more stupid than this.”

Then he provided the real science as opposed to the hodge-podge of nonsense in the Guardian article. “The O2 (oxygen) concentration of the atmosphere has been measured off and on for about 100 years now and the concentration (20.95%) has not varied within the accuracy of the measurements.”

“There is SO much 02 in the atmosphere,” said Dr. Spencer, “it is believed to not be substantially affected by vegetation, but is the result of geochemistry in deep-ocean sediments. No one really knows for sure.” The reference to “vegetation” reflects the way all vegetation takes in CO2 for its growth and gives off O2, in the process. Animals breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. It is the symmetry of all life on earth.

Based on a forthcoming book, “The Oxygen Crisis” by Roddy Newman, the alleged loss of oxygen was causing deserts to spread and forests to decline. It posed, of course, a threat to all mankind.

The real crisis for the Greens is that they and their allies in the mindless media have run out of ways to frighten huge numbers of people who are more rightly concerned about the price of a gallon of gasoline, crazed Islamic fundamentalists, and the prospect of the Russians starting World War III.

With great enthusiasm, Dr. Spencer’s many colleagues joined in the discussion and, no doubt, if the idiotic assertion that the Earth is running out of oxygen should pop its head up out of its little Green hole, it will be assailed at great length.