Paging Pope Albert. . .

American Thinker:

Wicked holiday travel mocks global warming
Nancy Thorner

Two days before Christmas the Obama administration moved unilaterally toward two go-it-along policies little noticed by the public and most likely timed to be missed by most Americans pre-occupied in preparing for Christmas Day: 1) Directives on greenhouse emissions and 2) the repeal of the Bush era's policy limiting wilderness protection.

It was EPA administrator Lisa Jackson who on December 23 issued a directive for new power plants and oil refinery emission standards over the next year to better cope with pollution contributing to climate change. Claims were made by Jackson that power plants and oil refineries were constituting about 40% of greenhouse gas pollution in this nation.

While the new EPA directive is of great concern and represents a back-hand approach to getting what the administration wants without Congressional approval, it was not at all surprising. in 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court gave the agency the authority to regulate heat-trapping gasses.

Frustrated that "cap and trade" was stalled in the Senate, President Obama two days after the midterm elections served notice that "Cap-and trade" was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way. I'm going to be looking for other means to address this problem."

What closely followed on November 10th were EPA state-directed guidelines which became the first-ever federal guidelines for reducing greenhouse emissions from industrial sources.

In light of the extremely cold weather during the Christmas holiday season in Europe and here in the U.S. that caused havoc with holiday travelers, it would seem reasonable for the Obama administration to reexamine its mad dash to limit greenhouse gas pollution for the purpose of curtailing global warming through the reduction of CO2. But will this nation do so?

This year Great Britain is experiencing its coldest winter and the heaviest snowfalls since seasonable records began. Despite the winter of 2008 registering as the coldest in a decade and 2009 topping 2008 as the coldest in 30 years, Meteorological Office scientists published a map predicting a 60% to 80% chance of a warmer-than-average winter on its 2010 website.

It has been suggested that the snow and cold blindness of the past three winters in Great Britain resulted from reliance of the Met Office on a $50 million supercomputer in which assumptions were fed in from suspect global-warming models.

What global warming modelers forget is that climatic data is of too short a duration (Actual record keeping has a very short history.) to rely on for determining future weather trends. Suspect also are methods used in the past for predicting earth's temperatures.

Notwithstanding, Great Britain is building an energy policy around a global warming policy which will bring more cold and darkness to the British people in order to save them from getting too warm.

If this nation goes down the British road with an equivalent carbon tax, likewise applied to transportation, it could result in raising the average household energy bills of the American people by about $2,200 a year.

Climate on Earth has changed in many ways, many times. In the last half million years vast expanses of glacier ice have grown on land and then melted away again four times. Instead of standing at attention, animals and plants have gone with the flow, moving along.

Lucian B. Platt, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Geology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, had this to say in a copy of a spiral-bound article he personally sent me titled "Climate Changes I Have Known And Loved" finished this year.

"Alarmists predict doom on the basis of a short curve of temperature on Earth. .
. Nevertheless, the facts about the past, available in abundance for years,
demonstrate big and small changes in climate repeatedly, even periodically.
Their recognized causes were not in Earth's atmosphere, and they will come again
without our help or hindrance."

On September 9,1999, Dr. Platt presented these common sense nuggets about global warming in an Emeritus paper presented at Bryn Mawr College:

"To summarize, the globe is warming. But unlike what the alarmists would tell
you, the warming has been going on for 180 centuries, not just the 180 years of
the industrial revolution. The changes have been fast and slow, some quite fast
indeed, but certainly not caused by us. And if the doomsters are right that
2°-3° temperature change causes irreversible damage, we have had constant
catastrophe for half a million years. We cannot go back to some idealized
yesteryear. Anyway, what year would you pick?"

It would be foolish to cripple this nation with Global Warming policies that would enrich a few financially while substantially reducing the standard of living of the American people.

2,500 years ago Confucius is reported to have said, "Study the past if you would define the future."

Global warming alarmists are leaving out the past with their doom and gloom predictions.