Gore's Refutted Yet Again

As the reader of a hip, indie-rock, alt-lifestyle mag like this one, I'm guessing the whole "climate change crisis" thing just doesn't do it for you. Well, don't feel bad, because you're right:

Without baby boomers, there is no global warming. Not because boomers are uniquely gaseous, but because they are uniquely egotistical. The notion that, as Al Gore put it on my radio station last week, humans are "baking the planet to death" can only be swallowed whole by those whose appetite for self-importance has reached global proportions.

For boomers like Al Gore, nothing ever happened in the world until it happened to them. The first president ever assassinated was JFK; no war had ever been protested or opposed before Vietnam; government corruption was invented by Nixon and Bill Clinton proved the boomers could all still get laid.

And nobody knew how to read a thermometer until 1975. Oops, I better make that "1985," because in '75 baby boomers were still reading the Newsweek cover story about a coming ice age and how we would all freeze to death unless "political leaders … take positive action to compensate for climate change."

Fortunately for all concerned, the boomers weren't in power yet and we did not take drastic action. And, just in case Mr. Gore hasn't noticed, we also didn't freeze to death.

And now it's time to take drastic action to save us all from global warming because, well, because Al Gore and his "save the [insert favorite mammal here]" pals are going to save the planet, dammit! Whether we need it or not.

I could fill this column with statistics and studies from prominent scientific journals poking holes in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The world is not baking to death. Even the whack jobs pushing the Kyoto treaty are only talking about a global temperature increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. (We're doomed!) That will likely go up another degree or so in the next century, assuming we don't spend $400 billion a year implementing Kyoto. If we do spend the money, that increase goes down by a whopping 0.17 degrees. (We're saved!)

And Gore is wrong about the angry Earth Mother sending unusually powerful hurricanes to kill us in her anger over the 2000 election scandal. Hurricane experts Max Mayfield and Bill Grey continue to explain (and Al continues to ignore) that hurricane activity is related to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a steady pattern of warming and cooling waters in the Atlantic.

And no, the polar ice caps are not about to melt away and no, global flooding isn't about to turn Tennessee into beachfront property. In fact, most of the Antarctic ice sheet got colder from 1966 to 2000, and while both poles have been losing some ice in the past five years on their edges, their interior ice and snow masses have been increasing. The net result? According to a study published in the Journal of Glaciology last year, if current trends hold the oceans will rise 0.05 millimeters a year. That means 1,000 years from now, the seas will have risen þ two inches! Head for the hills!

Nobody is denying that the earth's temperature is changing. It's always changing. Why, the "Little Ice Age" drove humans out of parts of northern Europe in the 17th century. And if Al Gore had been around, he'd have no doubt roamed the land predicting global catastrophe if we didn't abandon our ox carts and stop burning charcoal.

What rational people reject isn't climate change, but rather the baby boomer fantasy that, this time, climate change is somehow different and special. That's the fantasy of someone who believes "we're the most powerful force in nature!"

Ponder that arrogance for a moment. We puny humans are, in Gore's imagination, more important to the Earth's ecosystem than volcanoes or tsunamis. We SUV drivers and backyard grillers are a greater force than the lunar tides or even gravity. Why, we're more powerful than the sun!

The most powerful force in nature? Tell earthquakes, volcanos, tornados and hurricanes that.

I am a boomer, but I'm going to say it: boomers have to be the most self-absorbed group of people in modern history. They protested the Vietnam War, but only until the draft ended. They preach the "virtues" of condoms, but only to avoid AIDS, not to avoid pregnancy. No species of plant or animal life ever became extinct until we came along and did something that caused said extinction. There have never been terrible hurricane seasons until now. It never dawns on these people that "hottest day/month/year on record" only goes back 100 years or so. Back in the 1300s, it was warm enough in England that they could grow wine grapes and produce their own wine. Did cow/sheep/horse methane cause that warming or the subsequent cooling?

Puh-leeze.

That is not to say that pollution and not taking care of God's creations are good things. They are not. But we are not to blame for last year's higher-than-usual level of hurricane activity any more than we are to blame for volcanic activity. These people are self-absorbed idiots. Plain and simple.

"We [humans] are the most powerful force in nature." - Al Gore

I haven't made it to the chapter on envionmentalism in Ann Coulter's new book about the religion of liberalism, but I think it will pretty much go hand in hand with what I've known about liberalism and the environment all along.

Liberals don't like the concepts of morality, religion, or God. Mostly because they fly in the face of their "if it feels good, do it" philosophy. They want to have the freedom to do whatever they so please while freeing themselves from the shackles of responsibility and owning up to their actions.

There are paths you eventually go down when you accept the belief that there is no God the creator. One of these is that man has no God-given rights, which is just fine by these people, since they pretty much embrace the idea of socialism over democracy any day of the week. This goes against the demonstrable natural tendency of human beings to want to be free, whether they were born and grew up in America or in a repressive regime like Iraq (I'm certain you all recall the blissful joy on the faces of the people when the US troops showed up in Baghdad and they knew they didn't have to fear Saddam Hussein any longer), but liberals are willing to ignore this in order to suit their purposes.

The other dark path has to do with the creation of Earth and the Universe. With no faith in a Creator, God, to explain things that scientifically may never be able to be explained, they try to come up with other theories to explain how we got here. "It all happened at random." "We evolved from a pile of goo on the ground." "There was a big bang, and stuff just started happening, man!" Einstein spent his whole life devoted to science, and the scientific explanation of God's Creation. In the end, even Einstein knew that there was a higher power at work in the grand design. The Earth was too perfect to simply have come about through some random process.

The dark path here is that if you believe that there is no God who created the Earth, you begin to overestimate the abilities of man in terms of what he can do to this planet. You see, no man has the ability to do what God can do. How, therefore, can man have the ability to destroy something God created? If you think the Earth came about randomly, this question doesn't enter your mind.

If our inalienable human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were granted to us by our Creator, they cannot be taken away. If there is no Creator, then these rights were given to us by man, or by government, a creation of man. They can therefore be taken away. If the Earth was created for us by God, we cannot destroy it, for we are not greater than God. If there is no God, then we are capable of destroying the Earth.

God created the Earth. There is unmistakable proof that the Earth does not want to die. God made it that way. A recent article in National Review covers the topic of polar ice melting and the rising of the ocean level in detail. First of all, the only ice capable of causing the level of the oceans to rise is the ice currently on land (Greenland and Antarctica). Polar Ice floating on top of water will not change the level of the oceans. Studies have shown that despite the ozone hole over Antarctica, the amount of ice on the continent has actually grown over the years.

Why? Because when the temperature rises and gets nearer to the freezing point of water, it snows. Ice does melt off the tip of Antarctica which is near the tip of South America. But it is cancelled out, and then some, by snow which gets added to the middle of the continent. You see, every time something bad potentially happens to the Earth, the Earth does something to show it won't give up. The Earth wants to live. God made it that way.

When holes show up in the ozone layer, people freak out. But then, these holes close up. People don't realize that the chemical reaction which causes oxygen (O2) to become ozone (O3) is an endothermic reaction. It requires heat. When the ozone layer goes away, and the temperature goes up, the heat is generated and ozone is created. It is a cycle. Then sun creates ozone. The Earth doesn't want to die. God created it that way.

Without the belief that God does exist, man becomes so arrogant that he believes that he is capable of destroying something which God created. It is simply not the case. Now, this is not an argument to go out and do whatever you want, because we cannot possibly destroy the Earth. Like all of God's gifts, we must treat the Earth with reverence and respect. And for the most part, this is done. Its like cleaning up your room. Your parents buy you all those nice toys, but if you don't put them away when you are done playing, there might be consequences. And as you get older, you realize, you don't like living in a messy room. Much like how you don't like living in a polluted area. Should we be responsible with God's gift? Yes. But we should take comfort in knowing that these environmentalists simply don't understand what they are talking about.

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