OPINION:
The globalists are taking the next step in the war on carbon dioxide. Scientists have linked this gas to the feeding of healthy plants and the blossoming of flowers, so the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ global warming alarmist arm, last week let slip a plan for getting rid of it when the U.N. summit on the climate convenes on Sept. 23.
President Obama is preparing to use his executive authority to impose the carbon-dioxide limitations dreamed up by the climate hysterics when they meet next year in Paris. He intends to ignore his constitutional duty to ask the Senate’s consent, and use the Environmental Protection Agency and other departments to impose the rules. Ignoring the Constitution can be habit-forming, as Mr. Obama has shown us.
A 127-page draft by the U.N. climate panel insists that humans must drastically reduce their production of carbon dioxide because it’s heating the globe. Urgent action is needed lest “abrupt and irreversible change” result. The European Union just banned the most effective vacuum cleaners and has announced it is about to ban powerful hair dryers, lawn mowers, smartphones and kettles, all suspects in the continuing plot against the planet.
They’re all in a hurry, but the planet isn’t. The “warming” produced one of the coldest winters on record in most areas of the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica has been cooling and gaining ice for years, according to data gathered by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois.
A little warming might even be nice right about now. We’ve seen temperatures hold steady for the past 18 years, as measured by Remote Sensing Systems, the most accurate thermometers in the world.
The leaked report by the U.N. panel claims that global warming is responsible for cutting grain production, but that may not be true, either. Don J. Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University who is a reviewer for the U.N. panel, tells the website Climate Depot that wheat production is declining “not because of global warming but because of global cooling that has affected the growing season.” Mr. Easterbrook points out that hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and other serious weather events are declining, not increasing.
The palpable lack of global warming has naturally encouraged skepticism to the point of worldwide indifference to the doomsayers. So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change worries that it might become irrelevant.
The panel was at the peak of its glory, such as the glory was, in 2007 when it shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for terrifying the easily terrified from Manhattan to Mozambique, claiming the planet was at the edge of an abyss, and we were all about to fall in. The Environmental Protection Agency cites the panel’s “research” to justify the shuttering of coal plants across the country. Thousands lost their jobs and the costs of essentials such as electricity shot up, the result of green socialism.
It’s all so unnecessary. Carl Wunsch, one of the world’s most respected oceanographers, estimates that the U.N. panel exaggerated greenhouse warming of the oceans by at least 2.5 times. He’s a believer in global warming but rebukes the left for “over-dramatization and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts.”
A recent study in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres came to this conclusion, too. That awesome ball of fire that rises over the eastern horizon every morning has far more effect on Earth’s weather than all the soccer moms who trade their SUVs for a Prius or their vacuum cleaners for a broom.
When the hysterics — and the opportunists determined not to let hysteria go to waste — meet in New York to discuss a global pact on carbon dioxide, we’ll see who stands up to the Obama administration and the U.N. panel and their fashionable hoax.
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