OPINION:
Al Gore goofed. Instead of talking up “climate extremes,” he should have spoken about the dangers of an increasingly mild climate. Washington is likely to wrap up the month (and the summer) with the mercury having topped 90 degrees only once or twice. This has been shown to lead to increased lounging in the backyard and heightened consumption of grilled hot dogs.
The error was apparent last month when Mr. Gore tried to give away ice cream from his “I’m too hot” truck at An Environmental Protection Agency field hearing in Denver. It was a clever idea for a July event, but at 58 degrees he had no takers. Gong-show liberals have ramped up alarmism, apparent over the past few days.
The left-wing magazine Mother Jones blames global warming for “ruining your breakfast.” Mankind’s penchant for exhaling carbon dioxide is supposed to be responsible for the rise in the price of cornflakes, a bacon shortage, bland coffee and a 2009 flood that reduced waffle production. No mention was made of ethanol mandates cutting into corn production, which could cause a shortage of cornbread, nor of the Food and Drug Administration’s shutting down the Georgia factory where Eggo waffles are made for a session of “enhanced cleaning.”
Disasters make great headlines, so The New Zealand Herald blames global warming for “pandemics and plagues,” as though the Ebola virus spawned from large carbon footprints.
Leonardo DiCaprio, the wealthy actor with time on his hands, is producing a series of short films advocating raising gasoline and electricity prices through higher taxes. “We need to keep this carbon in the ground,” says the star of 1997’s “Titanic.” “In order to prevent a catastrophic warming of the planet by 2 degrees Celsius,” he says, “we cannot burn more than 500 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.” It all sounds so official and precise, but the process of releasing “carbon” into the atmosphere is what we all do when we exhale.
Shortness of breath abounds at the Huffington Post, which treated its online readers to a gallery of “scared scientists,” black-and-white photographs of hyperventilating researchers whose brows furled for the cameras as they read the results of their own research predicting the extinction of species, global conflict and widespread famine. For maximum effect, each photo shoot ended before smile-inducing government grant checks arrived.
Inspired by the snapshots, frightened editors at The Washington Post opened a multipart series on the “urgency of action” needed to prevent the rise of the sea level, heat waves, floods and wildfires, as if these perennial problems would go away if only Congress would adopt a carbon-dioxide emissions credit-trading scheme.
Such a tax would cure every ill, since in the alarmist mind, all the world’s problems derive from global warming. Are the California and Florida coastlines sinking? Is climate change melting the polar ice caps and raising the sea level? Is California rising? That, too, is caused by global warming.
Last week, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reported GPS measurements that show the ground is rising throughout the West, with mountains growing between 0.15 and half an inch. Scientists surmise that the tectonic plate lifted because 63 trillion gallons of very heavy water evaporated during the recent drought.
Proof that global warming is a fraud isn’t found in a few weeks of pleasant temperatures, but in the complete failure of the climate models to predict the weather over the past decade and a half. Instead of ringing the alarm bells, everyone should unfurl the hammock and grab a glass of lemonade (before it turns into a Popsicle).
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