Global Warming: A Lot of Hot Air

This past week we've seen a lot of hot air in the news, namely, prognostications of doom from global warming. Supposedly, we humans have artificially raised the temperature of the earth with our consumption of fossil fuels. The evidence for this is pretty weak, leading many to refer to the global warming scenario as "junk science."

I suspect that the real reason for advancing the "global warming" scare is to give government a good excuse to exert more control over business and the private sector. The Left couldn't do it with socialism or communism because the voters would never buy it, so now they look for back-door ways to accomplish the same thing.

The news on msn.com was that we are having our "hottest year in 400 years." However, that only means we are getting back to normal following abnormally cold years in the recent past.

In fact, there was a mini-ice age in the not so distant past. One website reports:

Western Europe experienced a general cooling of the climate between the years
1150 and 1460 and a very cold climate between 1560 and 1850 that brought dire
consequences to its peoples. The colder weather impacted agriculture, health,
economics, social strife, emigration, and even art and literature. Increased
glaciation and storms also had a devastating affect on those that lived near
glaciers and the sea.

And in the 1970's scientists reported a global COOLING phenomenon that was leading to a disasterous new ice age. As reported by Senator Inhofe in a speech on global warming:

Appell and Blix sound very much like those who warned us in the 1970s that
the planet was headed for a catastrophic global cooling. On April 28, 1975,
Newsweek printed an article titled, "The Cooling World," in which the magazine
warned: "There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to
change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food
production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on
earth."In a similar refrain, Time magazine for June 24, 1974 declared: "However
widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when
meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that
the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades."In
1974 the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science
Foundation, stated: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has
fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade." Two years
earlier, the board had observed: "Judging from the record of the past
interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an
end. . . leading into the next glacial age."

So don't be overly alarmed at this latest Leftist campaign to advance their big government schemes. Global warming is just a lot of hot air.