Ice age threat should freeze EPA global warming regs
By:Shannon Goessling | OpEd Contributor | 07/26/11 8:05 PM.
Rather than spiraling into a global warming meltdown, we may be heading into the next ice age. The U.S. National Solar Observatory, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and astrophysicists across the planet report that the nearly all-time low sunspot activity may result in a sustained cooling period on Earth.
The news has sent global warming theory advocates scrambling to discount and explain away the impact on global temperatures. However, the "news" is not really that new.
Many reputable scientists have been warning for decades that we are nearing the end of the 11,500-year average period between ice ages. And the last similar crash in sunspot activity coincided with the so-called "Little Ice Age" in the 1600s that lasted nearly a century.
Despite increasing evidence that "global warming" climate change is not the unified scientific theory it has been promoted to be, vested interests continue to push for stringent limits on carbon dioxide emissions.
Certain investment banks and trading houses that stand to make billions on so-called "carbon credits," and the environmental sociologists who have as a stated purpose to change our way of life, are a powerful bloc.
In the Obama administration, this cabal has a willing "big stick" in the form the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has enacted draconian measures that will, by President Obama's admission, make energy costs "skyrocket."
The subject of intense litigation, the EPA regulations were enacted this year without congressional approval as required by the Clean Air Act and other laws. Estimates put the economic damage of these regulations at $1 trillion over the next 20 years, with a loss of between four and 10 million jobs.
Ironically, the current rush by global warming advocates to uncouple mounting evidence of global cooling from the global warming regime is not the first time they've backpedaled.
As referenced in ongoing litigation, the EPA admitted that generally applicable regulations would lead to "absurd" results, leading the agency to create a so-called "Tailoring Rule."
For example, global warming alarmists admit by their own calculations that reducing carbon emissions among a sample of large U.S. "emitters" to EPA-required levels might reduce the surface temperature by .00071 degree Celsius -- or 70 times lower than what is detectable.
Annual emission reductions sought would be replaced in 13 days by industrial growth in China. "Absurd" is understatement. So how do we handle "global cooling?"
In the 1970s and '80s, climatologists and astrophysicists were setting off alarms about pending global cooling and "the new ice age." Headlines in major weekly news magazines warned of a cooling catastrophe, with experts like famed astronomer Carl Sagan calling on industrialized countries to produce more carbon dioxide to offset the pending disaster.
High-level scientific proposals were advanced to redirect Arctic rivers, clear out swaths of high-density forests to release carbon dioxide, and even salt the Greenland ice caps with black carbon to attract sun melting in a global effort to stave off the impending ice age.
What happens during a "Little Ice Age?" Food-producing land becomes scarcer, food-growing seasons become shorter, and the world becomes a much more arid and less hospitable place. Think food shortages and the social unrest that follows.
The forces at work behind the global warming regulatory regime have, at worst, covered up, ignored and manipulated climate evidence to make the case that humans cause global warming and therefore humans should be punished.
At best, the mainstream scientific community is continuing to weigh the climate data as it becomes available. Caught in the flux are millions of Americans suffering under an economic tsunami that is anything but a theory.
The textbook definition of moving forward with global warming regulations is truly "absurd."
