TELLING IT LIKE IT IS !

Just recently, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are “pollutants that threaten public health and welfare.” This so-called “threat” comes from the effects of man-made global warming.

This ruling is the first step in regulating the very gas that makes life on Earth possible. If that sounds odd to you, it should. A lot of what is going on here has little, if anything, to do with public health.

The EPA’s “endangerment finding” classified CO2 under the Clean Air Act as a pollutant. EPA administrator Sheila Jackson said, “Greenhouse-gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations.” Her opinion of course!

There are a multitude of scientists who would disagree. The agency’s findings came at a time when the science surrounding man-made global warming is more hotly debated, and the “man-made” part more questionable than ever.

For starters, there are good reasons to doubt whether, in fact, the Earth is getting warmer. The data, as opposed to computer models, is telling us that the globe has been cooling for the better part of a decade. This inconvenient fact may be why the preferred expression has gone from “global warming” to “climate change” as fear mongers try to achieve a switch in wording while preventing a switch in support.

Real history teaches us that climate is always changing. So the question becomes: What causes climate change? Again, a great many leading climate scientists insist, with ample evidence to back it up, that the warming that occurred during the 20th century has resulted from natural causes and cycles.

Those like the Danish researcher Bjorn Lomborg who insist that even if human activity is contributing to a warming trend, then trying to regulate CO2 is the wrong approach. Lomborg says that “cutting CO2 simply doesn’t matter much for most of the world’s important issues.” Lomborg says the goal should be “to do better for people and the environment.”

Thus, we should emphasize developing technologies and alternative energy sources putting people first, and then the environment. The global warming crowd wants to change where we live, what we drive, and even what we eat. Where some things need to change we need to remember that CO2 isn’t the demon it has been made out to be.

Britain’s Hadley Center, itself a proponent of man-made global warming, calls some of the warning messages “misleading . . . apocalyptic rhetoric.” Rhetoric, such as Congressman Harry Waxman, telling NPR that the North Pole was in danger of evaporating. Evaporating!!!? … too much time with Al Gore.

Sadly, the biggest victims of this misleading rhetoric will be the world’s poor. As Lomborg points out, “Carbon remains the only way for developing countries to work their way out of poverty. … No green energy source is inexpensive enough to replace coal now.” Morally sound approaches to the environment must consider the plight of the poor.

Calling CO2, a part of the natural ecosystem, a “threat” to public health brushes aside these concerns and lets the would-be social engineers get to work – work that will create serious problems now, and for future generations … if forced at the current oratory now in progress by the Obama administration.