HOT AIR

Of course, I am sure, some of my friends on the political Left would say that hot air is exactly what I am full of. None the less, I will press on and give my two cents worth of hot air on the issue of global warming.

When you turn on the news, watch the nature shows on the Discovery Channel, or read any of the science magazines -- either for scientists or the lay public -- you would think that global warming, at least that made by mankind, was an established fact. Sort of the like the sky is blue, water is wet, gravity attracts, and Liberals like high taxes. You would think that our climate had never changed in five billion years, until, that is, evil mankind appeared on the scene to cook the planet and destroy all the good life.

The situation is so desperate that Koffi Anan took time out from coddling antisemitic dictators and blaming the United States for, well, everything to hold a summit in Nairobi, Kenya on the threat to planet from George "Dubya" Bush. Sorry, I got my summits mixed up. I meant to write, "global warming".

Unfortunately, AP reports, there was one scientist that wasn't exactly reading from the party line. This Nobel Laureate, Paul J. Crutzen from the Max Planc Institute of Chemistry, has the heretical idea that pollution might actually stave off global warming. He says that putting a layer of sulfur compounds high in the atmosphere can serve as a sort of global parasol, blocking the suns rays and preventing run away warming.

Now, I'm confused! Sulfur compounds are pollution. Pollution, we are told ad naseum, causes global warming. So if a little is no good, a lot is great? What about shutting down American industry and our mobile lifestyle? And does that mean we don't have to shut down all the hot air Al Gore has been spewing for the last decade?

Reality check, folks! Sure, the world probably is getting warmer. In fact, just 230 years ago, the world was emerging from what historians call the Little Ice Age. Major climate change doesn't happen all at once. And just because our Industrial Revolution began as the Little Ice Age ended, doesn't mean that we are the cause of that end.

Looking back into the past, we find that the earth has been warm and it has been cold. In fact, there were a couple of times that the entire world was frozen under a sheet of ice from pole to pole. The Sun itself goes through relatively warmer and cooler periods as well. NASA recently announce that the ice caps on Mars were shrinking. How did Halliburton get their polluting plants there? I'll bet Dick Cheney had something to do with that!

This is called Nature. And in Nature, everything keeps changing. It would not be stretch to say that the only thing about Nature that doesn't change is the fact that it keeps changing. Nature keeps changing whether or not mankind is there to blame itself for what Nature does naturally -- which is change.

Look, either the atheists are right and mankind and all life evolved or God created all and gave it to mankind to hold dominion over it. Personally, I fall somewhere between the two camps, but that is neither here nor there. Let's just take as a given that mankind is a product of Nature.

If humans were destroying the climate, then Nature made a very bad mistake. Left to its own devices, Nature could never come up with a species that is too stupid not to soil its own nest.

But if that were the case, then how did mankind get smart enough to destroy Nature? We cannot both be too stupid to clean up and too smart to avoid making the mess in the first place.

I defy anyone to show me anything that mankind makes or does that doesn't occur in Nature. Everything we do, we learned from Nature. And Nature does everything we do, only bigger, badder, and messier. And when Nature makes a mess, say with some crude oil leaking from the ocean floor, no one comes along to save the otters with Dawn dishwashing detergent and de-gum the feathers of waterfowl.

Mankind, on the other hand, does clean up its messes. We showed up with boron impregnated concrete to seal up Chernobyl after it blew up. We used steam jets to clean up after the Exxon Valdez, something a few researchers found actually delayed recovery from the oil spill.

There is another way to show that the Chicken Littles of Global Warming are full of hot air. Just look at their solutions: curtail American lifestyle, legislate what kind of car you can drive and how far, shut down American industry, etc. In other words, the solution is to take away your Liberty. If that were the right way to solve the "problem", than the old Soviet Union would have been the return of the Garden of Eden, rather than the environmental basket case it proved to be. China would be the exemplar of environmental stewardship to the world.

Do you see where I am going with this? Liberty is the answer, not a Nanny State. China and the Soviet Union both promised cradle-to-the-grave security for the masses. Unfortunately, the land became no one's responsibility.

Private property rights, not government intervention, will be the cure for our environmental woes. The Left understands this, of course. That is why they are crying global warming, using fear to get what reasoned discourse cannot. And those in charge of the purse strings for scientific research have been cutting the funding of the global warming apostates. Is it any wonder why there seems to be so little dissent among scientists?

If you think that can't be the explanation, let me remind you of a scientific theory that would save all mankind from disease, poverty, racism, idiocy, birth defects, and Republicans. Well, all but that last, anyway. All serious thinkers became proponents of this wonderful set of ideas. Anyone who diverged from the orthodoxy was scorned and defunded. The inventor of the transistor was a believer. So were the most important social scientists. H.G. Wells and major politicians around the world believe.

And then, one day, one guy actually put those ideas into practice.

Who was that visionary, that savior of mankind from itself? A fellow with a little mustache and delusions of grandeur, Adolph Hitler. He took the principles of a brave, new science, eugenics and sought to remake mankind for the better. And we all know how his story went, don't we?

The Left is constantly warning us poor benighted fools about the dangers of religious orthodoxy. What happened in the Holocaust was scientific orthodoxy run amok. I doubt Judeo-Christianity can hold a candle to that abattoir!

Nowadays, no one seriously believes in eugenics. Taken to its logical conclusion, it was one bloodbath too many for the Western World. Communism, on the other hand, tried a sort of economic eugenics, with even more disastrous results.

Today, though, we have folks like Al Gore trying to scare us into revoking as many of our Liberties as they can while silencing or defunding any dissenting voices. Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the Twentieth Century?

So, call me a skeptic, but I really don't buy all this global warming nonsense. In fact, I wish it were true!

No! Really! I just love summer. I'm a beach bum at heart. And I despise the cold. So global warming would be just fine by me!

What I want to know is, precisely which globe is warming and why can't we go there?

Copyright Nov. 17th, 2006