HOT AIR

"Hot Air" is a recurring title here at Montag's World. Usually, it is applied to the subject of Global Warming. I want to stress that I am a big believer in Global Warming. I am also a big believer in Global Cooling. In fact, I am a big believer in Montag's Immutable Law of Nature No. 5: "The only thing about the climate and the weather that stays the same is that it just keeps changing."

Generally speaking, when one uses the phrase "Global Warming", we are not talking about an Indian summer or a heat wave. Nor are we talking about natural fluctuations in the Earth's average temperature. No, it has been drummed into our heads that "Global Warming" -- always capitalized, never lower case -- refers to Man-made Global Warming.

My problem is with that man-made part. You see, I just can't see how we are changing the environment to any great degree. Nor do I understand how Al Gore and Arnold Scharzeneggar can claim that any changes we make are all that bad. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that Modern Environmentalism has become the new home of the Marxist Left. Follow along with me here, folks! You'll understand as we go along.

Author's note: I receive no money from oil companies, nor am I in the pay of anyone funded by the oil companies. The conclusions of this column are totally and exclusively my own!

I decided this evening to write this column when I was going through my e-mail. My good friend, Bill, from Colorado sent me a link to a Global Warming Test. Well, I took the test, and guess what? I got every answer right. Now I don't agree with anything Al Gore has to say about the climate, other than that the Earth has gotten a little over half a degree warmer in the last 100 years. But I'll bet that Al Gore would have gotten only one or two of these questions right.

Why am I so skeptical about Man's part in climate change? Well, there are several reasons. First and foremost is a bit of humility. I'm not talking about personal humility, but humility about Man's place on this Earth. You see, I just don't think we're all that big enough to really harm our world. In fact, if we are making any changes at all, then we are no different than any other species that has ever evolved.

For example, there's a composite photo of the Earth floating around the Internet, that shows the Earth at night from the point of view of someone in space. The continents and the oceans are all marked out with the lights of Man's cities. But there's one thing that struck me: never mind the oceans, which cover 75% of the Earth's surface. most of the dry land is absolutely dark! That's right, the vast majority of the Earth's surface has no lights from human activities. So what does that mean? Well, usually, where there are no or very few people, there are no lights to be seen from space. What the Paul Erlich's of the world call over population is really just a matter of everybody wanting to live in just a few places.

It has been demonstrated mathematically that, if you really wanted, you could split the entire population of the Earth into groups of four people, give each group of four a house on a quarter acre of land, and then fit them all into the State of Texas, without going off the dry land area. Now, no one is suggesting that this would be a good idea, but it does put things a bit into perspective, doesn't it?

Get ready to shake the wrinkles out of your brain: Name one species that evolved on Earth that didn't change the environment, did not wipe out some other species, and did not make new homes for new species that evolved with the changes that weren't madeby that first species.

Try Google or some other search engine and get back to me. If you can't find the answer to this question, that's only because there hasn't been a species that appeared on Earth that didn't change the environment, didn't wipe out other species and didn't make new homes for new species. It is call evolution and it's happening all the time. Get used to it!

The point is, there is no difference between our hypothetical species and us. We've had some impact on our environment, we've wiped out some other species. But we've also made homes for other species. Take the common house fly. It first appeared in Africa, millions of years ago. But it never left Africa, until humans took it with them. Now, it thrives everywhere. That's just one example. You could find many, many others.

Is a warmer Globe all that bad? Well, let's look at history: 1000 years ago, the Vikings found a place that had plants growing all over it. In fact, it had so many plants that they named it Greenland. At this time, vineyards were growing all over England and Scotland, places that hadn't seen them before, and which don't have them today. But 1000 years ago, there were streets and towns named for these vineyards, names they still hold today. Historical documents from the time tell a story of relatively easy living, with little famine and much higher living standards.

By the way, the polar bears did just fine, thank you, during these warmer years. I know you'd be concerned.

Just a few hundred years later, we entered into what we today call the Little Ice Age. Suddenly, things got really tough for people. The Vikings lost their colonies on Greenland and Newfoundland, due to sea ice that didn't melt in the summer. In Europe, those who didn't learn to grow potatoes and other cold resistant crops simply starved. Beer and hard liquor replaced wine in northern areas, since grapes would only grow in Southern Europe. George Washington wintered at Valley Forge during the Little Ice Age, daring a frozen Delaware River to attack the Hussein troops on the other side.

The Little Ice Age didn't end until the early years of the 19th Century. Is it any wonder that the Earth's temperature is still rising? We haven't gotten back to the heights of the Greenland days.

What about all our greenhouse gases? Aren't they helping to warm the planet? In a word, no. One volcanic eruption spews out more greenhouse gases than all of human activity throughout the past. And just how many erputions occur each and every year? Once, I would have said twenty or thirty. But then I learned differently. Just visit Prof. Robert W. Felix's web site, Not By Fire But By Ice. This is just one of the places that, apparently, Al Gore has never heard of. For instance, did you know that snowfall in Antarctica has doubled over the last 150 years? Or that Global Warming is going on right now on Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Triton, Saturn, and Pluto? And what are we to make of the palm trees in China, right now, that are covered in snow? Oh, yeah! did you know that there are some 3 million active volcanoes on the ocean floor? Could that be, maybe, just maybe, what is warming the oceans?

Al Gore refuses to debate anyone who might take an opposing view towards Global Warming. "The science is settled," he says. "There is a clear consensus that Global Warming is happening and that it is man-made." Well, then, perhaps Al should take a look at the list of scientists Prof. Felix has compiled who beg to differ. I'm sure that not all of them are in the pay of Big Oil.

John Stossel, of ABC News did a report on the skeptics. The BBC did a full documentary entitled "The Great Global Warming Hoax. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find an extant copy of this piece online, however, the link will get you to the BBC's page about the film.

OK! So maybe the science isn't really all in on Global Warming, and maybe humans aren't the cause. But how do I make the link between Global Warming and Marxism? Well, let's look at the proposed solutions to the threat of Global Warming:

• Al Gore tells us -- from his private jets, huge mansions, and lengthy limosines -- to cut back on everything we use, most especially electricity and oil. He's so serious that he took mass transit to his Nobel Prize Award ceremony. Of course, his luggage went by limo, but it's a start.


• Bill Clinton: "We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren."


• The Herald Tribune headline: California Wants To Control Home Thermostats

Do I need to list more? This is only the beginning of a list of infamy. The politics of Global Warmism are all about control of you and I. The only way to get us to surrender our Liberty in such an atrocious fashion is to frighten us. We no longer believe the nonsense of the workers versus the capitalists, and we've seen the horrors of the Socialist Revolution, so they need something else, something a little more scientific, if you will. It's just too bad that many of the premier Global Warmists were known purveyors of the idea of the impending Ice Ages only thirty years ago!

Well, that's today's look at Hot Air. And that's enought hot air out of me. I'll revisit the topic from time to time.

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