Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 07/26/2008 7:48:32 PM PDT by Libloather
They've got that global warming thing down cold
Posted on Wed, Jul. 23, 2008
By GLENN GARVIN
ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com
• Penn & Teller's Bull----!
10-10:30 p.m. Thursday, Showtime
I've seen lots of things on Penn & Teller's Bull----!, television's only investigative-journalism program run by comic magicians: Hidden-camera pranks where yuppie fools blather on about designer water that actually came from a garden hose. New Age health nuts allowing mollusks to crawl around on their faces to soak up the health benefits of slug slime. Naked people floating around in a zero-gravity chamber for a show on NASA. I don't actually know what that one was supposed to prove, but Penn & Teller share my first rule of journalism, that naked is always good.
But one thing I haven't seen is grim; the show is just too much fun for that. So when Thursday's episode on environmentalism opened with a morose-looking Penn Jillette waving a magazine as he recited one ecotastrophe after another -- drought in Africa, flooding in Pakistan and Japan, snowless winters in New England and Northern Europe -- I snapped to attention. ''It says right here in Time magazine -- the weather's gone nuts and we humans are to blame!'' Teller wailed. ``We have bleeped up the environment and now we're going to pay for it!''
Yeah, that global warming is pretty bad. You know, Al Gore says -- oops, never mind. Turns out Penn's not reading from the infamous Time cover story of 2006 on global warming, the one headlined BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. No, this Time is from 1974, and the headline is, ANOTHER ICE AGE? And all those violent paroxysms of nature are the pernicious work of global cooling.
Yes, back in the days of disco, the news media echoed with predictions of the world's imminent demise from ice rather than fire. Newsweek warned that temperatures had already dropped ''a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.'' By 1985, Life declared, ``air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the earth by one half.''
A MAJOR COOLING WIDELY ACCEPTED TO BE INEVITABLE, agreed The New York Times, adding in an editorial: ''Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.'' To be fair, this was nothing new at The Times. It had been predicting the world was on the verge of turning into a Popsicle since at least 1895 -- GEOLOGISTS THINK THE WORLD MAY BE FROZEN UP AGAIN, a headline said back then. Perhaps the editors figured that if they printed the story often enough, they were bound to get it right, if only because of the law of averages.
I sometimes find myself longing for the good old days of the Ice Age scare, because at least back then, dissent was possible. When Newsweek in 1975 proposed fighting off those inexorable glaciers by ''melting the arctic cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers,'' it had the grace to concede that some scientists worried just a teensy bit that these solutions ``might create problems far greater than they resolve.''
These days, deviating from the orthodoxy on global warming -- not just questioning whether it exists, but how much of it is due to human activity, or if the results might be a little less ruinous than the Climate Cassandras predict -- is almost enough to get you thrown in jail. And I mean that literally. James Hansen, the former Gore science advisor who's been one of the foremost doomsayers on global warming, recently said that oil company executives who argue against him ``should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.''
Consider it a certainty that the Climate Police will lock up Penn & Teller after Thursday's show. Not only does it feature interviews with some scientists who aren't totally sold on the idea that the Earth is toast, it whispers an even more inconvenient truth: A lot of the scariest global-warming tales are told by people who stand to make a buck by scaring you.
At one end of the scale is a Santa Fe therapist who treats patients for what she calls ''eco-anxiety'' by giving them what she calls ''river rocks'' -- actually, it's gravel picked up from her driveway -- to remind them that ''you do come from Earth and you are connected.'' (The most scandalous thing about this ''treatment'' is that it works: ''Whenever I'm by a rock, holding it, I feel grounded,'' explains one grateful patient.)
At the other is Al Gore, who's made a post-political career out of warning that we're on the brink of ''epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves.'' A couple of years ago, Gore suffered some minor embarrassment when a Tennessee think-tank revealed that his 20-room Nashville mansion uses 17 times the electricity of the average American home. Unabashed, Gore explained that he was ''offsetting'' his electric gluttony by buying carbon credits -- that it, putting money into green projects, would save as much energy as his home wasted.
Looking a little more closely into it, Bull----! points out that Gore was actually purchasing those carbon credits from . . . himself. He did it by investing money in his own company Generation Investment Management, which buys stocks in companies that make green technology -- technology that Gore is constantly lobbying governments to adopt or mandate. ''So Al makes money when people buy carbon credits through his company,'' says a Gore critic. It's not only good to be green, but profitable, too.
I'm not surprised if you're surprised that Gore might have a financial interest in screaming about the end of the world. Reporters who fall asleep chanting the mantra follow the money have been heinously lax in practicing it on the global warming story.
Last November, when NBC insisted that every single program on the network that week would have a green theme, nobody seemed to notice that the network was in effect running a massive product-placement ad for its corporate parent General Electric. GE has invested massive amounts of money in solar panels, wind power and other so-called clean-energy technologies for which there will be virtually no consumer demand unless Congress passes laws requiring them.
But practically no reporters were interested in that story -- certainly not those at NBC News, which also participated in Green Week by inserting stories into its shows. When I asked network anchor Brian Williams if this wasn't corporate manipulation of his newscast, he shook his head vigorously. ''Not at all,'' he insisted. ''I've got no problems with it. It's not any different than The New York Times editorial board sitting down and saying the newspaper is going to do a series of stories on some particular subject.'' Maybe, if The New York Times were owned by, say, Halliburton, and the board of directors ordered up a series on, say, the need to invade Iraq. But I don't have time to argue about it right now. I'm pretty sure I hear the Climate Police at my door.
Climate — the change we have to believe in, because it’s 100 per cent natural 100 per cent of the time. :’)
thanks for posting this...
Glenn Beck mentioned this plan to reverse “global cooling”...
and said (in so many words) “good thing we didn’t listen to all the
‘experts’ back then or else ‘global warming’ would be REALLY bad now!”
Enviromentalism - Worst Religion Ever!
btt
I was in 1st and 2nd grade in 1977/78 I remeber being scared to death about the coming Ice Age. I also remember the acid rain scares.
...but shhhhh...it's heresy to admit that we have any impact on the environment!
But you cannot tell me (by the math) HOW MUCH each part of the change in CO2 is due to what cause! (Tell me how CO2 delta percent is due to “deforestation (but forest percents have risen in many places!), how much is due to warmer oceans; how much is taken up by greater plant growth due to higher CO2 levels (now as much as 23% greater!); and how much is due to burning.
But, CO2 is less than 1/3 of one hundredth of a percent of all CHG on earth. ANY assumption as to its supposed influence on net heat rates is an ASSUMPTION based on only ONE report used by the IPCC - and henceforth canonized by Hansen and his ilk.
Now, over a 12 year period from 1996 through 2008, tell me how CO2 has increased.
Now, tell me why (EXACTLY why - and show your math!) - temperatures have stayed the same over that same 12 year period.
If currents are to blame (El Nino and La Nina's) - tell me WHY ocean currents (depending on the sun's rays to heat ocean water, and the sun's rays to heat wind currents) - can manipulate the earth's TEMPERATURE, but the sun cannot affect the earth's temperature.
Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown
New!!: Dr. John Ray's
GREENIE WATCH
The Great Global Warming Swindle Video - back on the net!! (click here)
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
I don’t really want to get into carbonate chemistry and geochemistry, etc., for acid rain. The focus on NOx and SOx is not misplaced for the acidity inputs...though carbon is involved, too, that has more to do with the buffering capacity of surfacewater bodies, soils, etc.
BTW, I realize you must have misdirected your comments, as you’re writing about global warming, not my response about acid rain.
I’ve been living at the New Jersey seashore (Ocean City) every summer for the past 45 years. For the whole summer. Never has the ocean water temperature been this cold for so long as it has this summer. This summer is really strange. I mean real cold. Lately it’s usually been in the 50’s instead of the 70’s where it should be. Melting of the Arctic or a new global cooling?
PhD weighs in on Gore's oil plan
Global warming on Free Republic
Haven't you heard, acid rain has gone from villain to hero because it limits global warming!
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6231-acid-rain-limits-global-warming.html
Well, just more of my well educated sarcastic wit......
;-)
Interesting piece on the left-wing/environmentalist politics surrounding acid rain. Reason Magazine did an excellent article on all the acid rain BS way back when, but I can't find it at the moment. All the best--GGG
I believe it was the winter of 76-77. I was a Senior in High School, we went back 1 day after the Christmas break, and stayed home the rest of the month of January. Schools were closed due to a combination of snow, cold, natural gas shortage and a coal miners' strike (Thank you, Jimmy Carter!).
I finally graduated June 18th, 1977, and in August the same year, we set 21 record HIGH temperatures....
Go figure....
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