Pardon Me For Breathing

The EPA announced today that they want to regulate the so called "greenhouse gases", you know, the favorite bogey man of the envirosheeple. This shrill group believes if they are loud and obnoxious enough, that they'll scare people into giving them what they want, power, publicity, and above all, money. While of course there are many legitimate environmental organizations who have done tremendous good setting up recycling programs, providing education on efficient resource use and responsible land use, they have been overtaken by the alarmists whose primary motivation is making huge amounts of money. The only "green" they're interested in is what is in their wallets.

What a shock, people perpetuating a scam to make money. Climate change has happened before and will happen again. And again. The American Southwest, Sahara Desert, even Antarctica were once thriving subtropical environments. Likewise much of North America has been covered in deep ice many times in the past. Change happens, it always has, it always will. The earth is a dynamic system and doesn't sit still for anyone. Another example, Greenland didn't get its name because Erik the Red was so color blind he mistook its ice cap for forests. Nope. Around 1000 AD that part of the world had warmed to where Greenland's ice cap had retreated, allowing trees to grow on the coast. And the amazing thing is CO2, everyone's favorite whipping boy as the cause of climate change, wasn't the byproduct of any of the sources that emit it today.

There weren't any cars, no coal burning power plants, no nothing. So why was the earth warmer? Because there is only one source of heat for the earth, the sun, and back then it was getting a little frisky. The most visible and measurable sign of solar irradiation is sunspots. Enough data has been collected so it is possible to extrapolate backwards for many centuries sunspot activity. The more sunspots, the more energy emitted by the sun, thus the more heat received by the earth. CO2? Irrelevant. For a start, everytime we exhale we're giving off CO2. Green plants take this CO2, and convert it back to oxygen. It's called photosynthesis, something every high school student knows at least the bare rudiments of.

And the sun? Right now it is in a quiet period and has been for several years. But the alarmists won't acknowledge that. Instead they carefully pick out data that can be twisted to support their theories, and the scarier the theory, the more likely more people will be persuaded or coerced to giving them grants and donations. However, the earth is a very complicated collection of ecosystems. Temperatures fluctuate, some areas go through warming trends, others go through cooling trends. The same with precipitation, droughts such as what California is enduring are not a global trend. Just ask anyone who lives in Washington about the abundance of precipitation they've received this past winter.

Another example. Some are shrieking that climate change, (amazing how "global warming") is no longer the buzzword since so much evidence has debunked that idea), will lead to more frequent and intense hurricanes. In this past year, three hurricanes painted bullseyes on Texas. One of them. Dolly, was a Category 2 at it's peak while churning in the Gulf of Mexico, and while still destructive when it made landfall, it had weakend to a less dangerous Category 1. Gustav and Ike were Category 4 at their peak, but as bad as the were, Ike especially, they were down to Category 2's by the time they hit Texas. The reason? Hurricanes need warm water to feed on. The northern part of the Gulf of Mexico was several degrees cooler than in past years. In 2005, the year of Katrina and Rita, it was warmer, allowing those storms to retain more of their energy at landfall.

And just why had that part of the gulf cooled off? Who knows? Will it continue? Again, who knows? Can the climate be accurately predicted for 20, 30 or 50 years out? It can't even be predicted accurately for three days out.

However, it's looking more and more like there will be regulations on CO2. This is one of the ultimate fantasies of the government, regulations on your breathing. The more ambitious bureaucrats must already be dreaming of the ultimate, regulating the sun.

Now excuse me while I hold my breath so I don't get slapped with a violation and fine.