Doomsday Stories
By Joel Turtel (12/17/05)
The human race is heading for ecological disaster because of its increasing and all-pervasive assaults on our air, water, and land. Pollution is everywhere. Our industrial civilization is heading toward environmental collapse, and mankind's fate hangs in the balance.
Does this scare you out of your wits? It's intended to do just that. This scenario from a second-rate horror movie is passed off as scientific fact by a new breed of doomsday prophet, the radical environmentalist. Read and take heed-the end is near. Here is an example of a typical environmentalist scare story:
"The present course of environmental degradation, if unchecked, threatens the survival of civilized man. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the way in which we now live on the earth is driving its thin, life-supporting skin, and ourselves with it, to destruction."
Environmentalists' doomsday predictions would be comical, if it wasn't for the fact that these scare stories have frightened local, state, and federal legislators into creating a massive, poisonous layer of regulations. Environmental regulations violate our property rights, restrict our personal liberties, threaten our standard of living, and throw thousands of Americans out of work.
Environmentalists concoct end-of-the-world scenarios all the time. These predictions are calculated to scare us, and usually turn out to be pure fantasy, exaggerations, or deliberate distortions of the facts.
The mother of all doomsday stories, of course, is global warming. For over thirty years, environmentalists have scared us with this one. It seems that car exhausts, forest clearing, power plants, and other industrial activities increase carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Increased carbon dioxide will allegedly create a barrier in the atmosphere that traps the Earth's heat, creating a "greenhouse effect" As a result, the Earth's temperature will rise, causing glaciers to melt, seas to rise, worldwide flooding, and calamity to the human race.
As expected, there are many reputable scientists who think this theory is nonsense. Other scientists have their own theories that totally contradict global warming.
"Kenneth E.F. Watt, professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Davis, theorized that an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to global cooling, not warming. Watt argued that carbon dioxide will heat tropical oceans, leading to additional evaporation. This will produce denser and more widespread clouds at high elevations, which will decrease the amount of sunlight that penetrates the atmosphere. Some scientists believe that the Earth is warming, but attribute the change to causes other than carbon dioxide production. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, suggested that solar activity may have caused global warming, and Reid Bryson, director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that dust and smoke are the primary causes of climate change."
There are also many scientists who question whether the Earth has gotten warmer over the last hundred years.
"Temperature measurements may be biased by the effects of urbanization; weather stations are located in urban areas, where heat-absorbing buildings and pavement can raise the readings one to two degrees above the surrounding atmosphere. After correcting for the "urban" effect, a study by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that there was no statistically significant evidence of warming in the United States [italics added]. Andrew R. Solow, a statistician at Woods Hole, pointed out that because monitoring stations tend to be located on land rather than oceans and more are in the Northern than in the Southern Hemisphere, temperature readouts are not really global at all. Ten years of weather satellite data have also shown no evidence of global warming [italics added]."
There's little valid evidence of global warming. Instead, there's solid evidence that the Earth has not been warming. Since 1978, a temperature-measuring satellite called Tiros II has been orbiting the Earth 24-hours a day. Guess what? The satellite's measurements showed no significant increase or decrease in the Earth's temperature. Scientific temperature measurements from Tiros II show no global warming trend in the last fifteen years. In other words, global warming is a myth.
Many eminent scientists agree that global warming and other environmental scare stories are just unproven theories. Prior to the Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, scientists from around the world issued the Heidelberg Appeal. In the Appeal, scientists asked government leaders at the summit to be careful. They asked the leaders not to make serious environmental decisions based on pseudoscientific arguments or false and non-relevant data. More than 250 scientists, including 27 Nobel prize winners, issued the Appeal on June 1, 1992. Today, 2,300 scientists from 79 countries, including 65 Nobel prize winners, have signed the Appeal .
Former governor of Washington state and former chairwoman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, also thought that global warming is nonsense. In her wonderful 1993 book, "Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened To Common Sense?," she said that it was unlikely that carbon dioxide would cause any significant changes in worldwide temperatures. Jeffrey Salmon is executive director of the Washington-based George C. Marshall Institute. In the July 1993 issue of Commentary, he flatly stated that he found no valid scientific evidence to prove that manmade gases are causing the Earth to warm from a greenhouse effect.
In short, we are being conned. Government takes billions of tax dollars out of our pocket to enforce massive environmental regulations that, in most cases, protect you from nothing.
I could describe many other eco-scare stories, but I think I've made my point. These doomsday prophesies are either distortions or exaggerations of unproven facts. Unfortunately, radical environmentalists and the liberal media spout this eco-nonsense so often that we start to believe them. That's the problem and the danger. Panicked, short-sighted Congressmen believe the scare stories and then pass environmental regulations that strangle our economy and destroy our property rights.
It is time that we see these environmental scare stories for what they are - a tactic by left-leaning environmental radicals to destroy the thing they hate most. What they hate most is our liberty, property rights, and the free-market that can make life for human beings on this planet a joy instead of a brutal struggle for existence.
© 2005 Joel Turtel - All Rights Reserved
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