The sky is falling (again)
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Give me Liberty
Rodger Williamson
“Climate shock jock” and former Vice President Al Gore popped up in the news this week when he compared climate inaction to “failing to walk through the door”” at the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting where 18 were injured and 22 killed.
In an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Al Gore said, “Climate deniers are really in some ways similar to all of those almost 400 law enforcement officers…waiting outside an unlocked door while the children were being massacred.” …Yes, the former politician just politicized the tragic deaths of innocent children in order to push his flagging agenda.
With these dire warnings about the earth’s climate (now no longer called “global warming”), I am often reminded of the story of “Chicken Little,” a tale about a young chicken that believed that “the sky was falling” and that the world was coming to an end.
It has been 16 years since Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” about the alleged threat of global warming was released. While this film marked a turning point in public debate regarding the changing climate of our planet, it is without a doubt left-leaning political propaganda.
As with all things that happen in government, one must simply follow the money trail to discover who would benefit from taxpayer funds, and here we find that Gore has been advocating for taxpayer subsidies of green-energy technologies in which he has a personal investment.
Pop quiz: How many of you are old enough to recall any of these, or other similar headlines from the not too distant past:
– “The Earth’s Cooling Climate,” Science News, November 15, 1969
– “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age,” Washington Post, January 11, 1970
– “Science: Another Ice Age?” Time Magazine, June 24, 1974
– “The Ice Age Cometh!” Science News, March 1, 1975
– “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975
– “Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead,” New York Times, May 21, 1975
– “In the Grip of a New Ice Age?,” International Wildlife July-August, 1975
– “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable,” New York Times, September 14, 1975
– “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit, Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” Science magazine, December 10, 1976
Like the predictions above, Gore’s “global warming” / “climate change” predictions have not weathered the test of time.
– Rising sea levels – inaccurate and misleading, as Gore himself later purchased a beachfront mansion in California!
– Increased tornadoes – declining for decades.
– New ice age in Europe – they’ve been spared; it never happened.
– South Sahara would dry up – completely untrue.
– Massive flooding in China and India – again didn’t happen.
– Melting Arctic – false – 2015 represented the largest refreezing in years.
– Polar bear extinction – actually they are increasing!
– Temperature increases because of CO2 – no significant rising for more than 18 years.
– Hurricane Katrina was a foreshadow of the future – false – past 10 years, no F3 hurricanes; “longest drought ever!”
– The earth would be in a “true planetary emergency” by 2016 unless drastic action was taken to reduce greenhouse gasses – never happened.
As a historian, I note here two non-climate related discoveries that offer a historical context comparison to the earth’s climate from a time long ago.
In 1991, a frozen and mummified corpse of a man, since nicknamed Ötzi, was found half embedded in the glacial ice on the border between Austria and Italy. Forensic tests determined that Ötzi lived somewhere between 3239 and 3105 B.C. While glaciers are in fact receding, they have simply receded to where they were about 5,000 years ago, to the time of Ötzi. I for one am thankful that we do not live in an ice covered environment.
Also, in just the past week, the “Pons Neronianus” (or Bridge of Nero), emerged out of the waters of the Tiber River in Rome. What modern climatologists have referred to as record low water levels caused by drought are nothing more than what was the regular water level at the time of Nero, in first century Rome.
Oddly, I find myself agreeing with Patrick Moore, the past president of Greenpeace, who stated that “there is no definitive scientific proof through real-world observation that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of global climate which has occurred during the past 300 years.”
The science is never actually settled. Science, by definition, is the continued questioning of all that we currently know. If we were to accept the science as is settled, the earth would still be assumed to be the center of our universe, and we would still believe that the sun orbits the earth the same as our moon.
However, the news media and our government would prefer that instead of you making your own choices, that all of humanity be whipped into a frenzy of fear, and thus easily herded, much like cattle being led to slaughter.
Let us not forget that at the end of the tale of “Chicken Little,” Foxy Loxy invited into his lair all of the animals that had joined in with Chicken Little on his quest, where he then ate them all.