|  Candace Talmadge Read Candace's bio and previous columns April 10, 2009 Global Warming as Religion: Just Say No to Extreme Industrial Makeovers This December, the 15th Climate Conference will take place in Copenhagen. It is the last time that members of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention will meet before their initial agreement, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, needs to be renewed. Before this nation climbs on the Kyoto Protocol bandwagon, we all deserve a good, long, open-minded look at and debate over the latest climate findings. The extreme industrial makeover mandated by this treaty is not only unnecessary, but most likely harmful to our long-term prosperity. Why not? For starters, the latest actual global temperature measurements (not computer model forecasts) reveal that a nearly three-decade period of global warming stopped in 1998. Many of the more than 700 scientists quoted in the Minority Report from the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works think the planet is now cooling again, just as it cooled between 1940 and 1970. Greenhouse gases proponents, however, ignore the latest real-world evidence and continue to lobby hard for severe cuts on industrial activity on a pre-emptive basis, all because flawed computer model forecasts supposedly show such cuts to be the only way to “save” the planet from a warming catastrophe. These same computer models also produce local weather forecasts. Since these models do not provide 100 percent reliable day-to-day weather predictions, how can anyone insist that they project effectively on a long-term global scale? “I am a skeptic,” Norwegian Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaver, a fellow of the American Physical Society, announced at last year’s annual meeting of Nobel laureates in Lindau, Germany. “Global warming has become a new religion.” That’s an understatement. Greenhouse gas partisans have hijacked the environmental movement in much the same manner as neo-conservative ideologues usurped control over U.S. foreign policy during the Bush Administration. Both groups insist(ed) on pre-emptive action based on questionable evidence coupled with scare-mongering scenarios of death and destruction if we do/did not take their prescribed course of action immediately. Most of us now acknowledge that shoving this country into a pre-emptive war in Iraq was a mistake. Do we really want the same fate for pro-environmental causes? That is a scary prospect. I take second place to no one in wanting clear air, clean water and energy sources and industry that do not pollute. But I also reject cooking the science along with the bullying tactics that have been the hallmark of greenhouse gas proponents. They are as unwilling to suffer any questions or doubts about their climate orthodoxy as Bush partisans were about the Iraq invasion. It’s amazing that the majority of liberals readily perceived the folly of the Iraq war, but cannot (or will not) also acknowledge legitimate reservations about the effect of greenhouse gases on the climate. No doubt this is because each argument dovetails with its adherents’ own prejudices, fears and loathing. Conservatives, who cherish the notion of American exceptionalism, love to wield a big stick and are suspicious of foreigners. That is in large part why they lined up eagerly behind the Iraq invasion. And why they acquiesced when Bush absurdly claimed that the United States went there to spread democracy once it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Liberals/progressives distrust industry and blame it for all the ills of modern life, completely ignoring the benefits that industrial activity bestows. That is in large part why they latch on so eagerly to an argument that casts carbon dioxide emissions from industrial activity as some evil climate destroyer. The rest of us are left to choose our preferred apocalypse – weapons of mass destruction or global flooding. How about none of the above? © 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission. Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum. To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it. This is Column #CT149. Request permission to publish here. | 
