Global warming — climate change — economic change

TOM BURGUM
Staff Columnist
burgum@lbknews.com

It is difficult today to pick up a newspaper without reading that a government -funded scientist at the Maud Frickert School of Global Warming and Storm Door Repair has predicted the earth is damned because of man-made climate change. It used to be global warming but the world’s stubborn resistance to live up to all the doomsday predictions has made the phrase “global warming” passé.

How all this came to be is instructive. Global warming nonsense really took off when scientists at East Anglia University in Norwich, England, along with Michael Mann of Penn State, developed the hockey stick theory. They told us the earth’s temperature stayed constant down through the eons of time until 1900 when it began to climb with no end in sight. It was, we were assured, caused by too much CO2  which in turn was mainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and as we later learned, cow farts.

Doom was upon us. The earth would become much hotter, species of animals and plants would disappear, glaciers would melt, oceans would rise unless mankind changed its ways and began to live their lives as ordered by Al Gore, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), and any number of amateur scientists doubling as Hollywood luminaries. To the uninformed, CO2 became the equivalent of chlorine or mustard gas.

All this could be reordered and the earth saved if we parked our SUVs and lived in sustainable communities − meaning we would all drive electric vehicles the size of golf carts and live in apartments about the approximate size of one of Al Gore’s walk-in closets.

The march to a fossil fuel tax, larger government and even world government was stymied by reports the temperature had stopped rising and almost all of the alarmist predictions had fallen flat. In fact, you might say that most past predictions of global warming causing world wide catastrophe were hot air. (Forgive me; the devil makes me do it.)

The United Nations is responsible for some real lulus. On June 30, 1989, UNEP warned, “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Not satisfied with that, UNEP told us at least 50 million climate refugees would have to flee the Caribbean and low lying Pacific islands, and costal areas, and all this would come to pass in five years. If you’ve been in the Caribbean recently you’ve probably noticed none of that came to pass.

The Artic ice caps have been given a lot of bad press recently. In 2008, Gore was working the German precincts when he told his audience that the ice cap would disappear in five years. “Five years,” Gore told the Germans, “is the period of time which it is now expected to disappear.” 2013 rolled around and the ice cap in question was 50 percent larger than in 2012.

The Arctic ice cap later proved it is not to be trifled with by the doom mongers. In 2013 a group of global warmists found it hard to believe that the prophet Gore was that far off so they set off to the North Pole to prove the ice was gone, or, at any rate, almost gone. They didn’t make it. En route they were frozen in place by sea ice so thick that our group of gallant, if somewhat deluded, adventurers had to be lifted out of danger by a helicopter. I like to think of it as another schadenfreude moment.

Paul Ehrlich, a notable doom monger, predicted England would not even exist in the year 2000. There are a good many Brits on Longboat Key and it must have been quite a shock when they learned England hasn’t existed since 2000.

Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, predicted in 2008 that within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is. Snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event.”  Rare today? Not so much. In New England this year, when talking about snow, exciting is not the word you would use. Bostonians are up to their tush in a record 108.6 inch snowfall.

Despite all the failed predictions, the fight against global warming or climate change charges forward at full tilt. There is a good deal at stake that doesn’t have anything to do with the environment. Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, inadvertently let the cat out of the bag: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the [world wide] economic development model, for the first time in human history.”

We were warned earlier that global warming wasn’t, and likely had never been, the real issue. German economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official, Ottmar Edenhofer, warned us in 2010: “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protections. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economic summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”

Face it, for the left and the U.N. it’s not about global warming, climate change or whatever, it’s about reordering the world wide economy in order to redistribute the wealth, all of which they hope to do under the banner of saving the polar bears.

Unelected U.N. bureaucrats, many from underdeveloped countries, reordering the world’s economic model: What could possibly go wrong?