SOS Forests

Thinking Freely About Global Warming

A guest essay by Joe Bourbon

I really don’t care who disagrees with me on this. So before I begin, get over yourself.

Global Warming, Climate Change, Ice Age- each of these things occur, they are called weather, and people have to deal with the weather… all life has to deal with the weather. People do not control the weather, and people do not influence the weather.

Now, if you are someone who is big on science, you will know a couple of things that don’t fit your silly political argument about global warming, so you moved your argument over to climate change so your argument could adapt to the weather. Kind of like humans do. I know it bugs you that one way humans adapted to weather is by constructing power plants that heat our homes.

You may find it interesting, or you may not, that man’s rise to dominance on this planet has occurred largely since the last major ice age. Now to someone who hasn’t fenced themselves in to the global warming/climate change small intellectual yard, this information comes as no surprise.

It’s real damn hard to come to prominence when there’s a mile high glacier breathing down your neck in North Texas.

The global warming/climate change crowd conveniently leave out the sun when they point to the so-called “evidence” that the earth is warming and warming at an alarming rate. I personally look forward to the summer of 2013 when they say all the ice in the arctic will melt away. Now, I know when there is still ice up there in the summer of 2013, there will be no stories about how they were wrong, yet again, but I can hope. It seems to be the word of the month.

Another small problem with the global warming/climate change crowd is they don’t have the historical data, they ignore a warm period that led the western civilization out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance (a French word).

Moving on, we’ve got an axis-of-spin North Pole and we have a magnetic North Pole, and Santa lives at the North Pole with those fuzzy, adorable mankiller polar bears who enjoy Coca-Cola. Also some vodka drinking Ruskies who may or may not know they are now free to live near the magnetic pole. Now I’m going to leave this point alone. Extrapolate what you wish from it. Because I’ve yet to say anything here.

Global warming/climate changers don’t readily factor in geologic factors that affect weather patterns. You know when a volcano decides to provide some shade for the globe.

I remember the hysteria of the coming new Ice Age in the 1970s, and that faded away only to be replaced by global warming, which was quite fun for about 10 years when everybody joked about it on any excessively cold or snowy day.

I remember a huge outcry over holes in the ozone layer and how everyone was going to die of skin cancer within my lifetime. Today, I hear nothing about the ozone layer. Apparently, skin cancer doesn’t scare a nation full of people who enjoy the tanning bed as much as they enjoy hot dogs, which if you read the studies will give you leukemia and probably some STDs, depending on the weiner.

Moving on, the point and it is irrefutable, the weather is the weather, and people must as all life must deal with the weather and people have no control over the weather, nor can we accidentally affect it, unless we decided to detonate every single nuke we have on the planet, which probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Though Dubya’s still got almost a full year left to pull it off and Cheney’s still the Veep so cross your fingers, it may still happen.

I only know a few things that are facts. The only time I have ever had a carbon footprint has been when I used a very white pair of sneakers to put out a campfire. I left a carbon footprint, actually a few of them leading from the campsite back to the truck.

Another fact I know is, as soon as scientists start “agreeing there is a consensus” on global warming/climate change then those former scientists need to get a new profession, because consensus is not a scientific term, it is a political term. Scientists, if they are doing their jobs correctly, should be challenging each other’s work. But there is supposedly a large number that have formed a consensus. I haven’t seen this consensus. I’ve seen more scientists that are pretty unsure about global warming/climate change in the ways those two political buzzwords are popularly defined.

As a matter of fact, climate change happens daily. No day is the same as the other, weather is constantly changing. No year is the same as another. No decade resembles another, and no century resembles another. There are just too many factors for weather to get its act straight.

Global warming. Well, logic dictates that if you believe the earth has experienced ice ages, which many do, then we are obviously warmer now than we were then (barring some strange physics change in the properties of water’s freezing point).

Weather is cyclical, and there is no boogey man driving an SUV, cranking up a coal fired power plant, while smoking a cigar, who’s got any influence whatsoever over weather. That cold front whipping down from Canada that freezes your citrus fruit trees you planted in the wrong climate zone because you bought into a lot of political hooey designed to get you to agree to more government control in your life (because we all know that government control has led to some incredibly great solutions that have bettered our lives) that cold front is just weather doing what it does.

Moving on, can someone please stop this stupid pendulum of political crap somewhere in the middle as it pertains to weather, where we don’t have hysterical people crying about the demise of their planet due to SUVs on one side and people writing tongue-in-cheek articles about the next ice age, that some hysterical, yet well-read, leftist explains away as climate change and perfectly in sync with the two trillion bogus studies paid for by unwitting taxpayers and rich people and rich non-profits who’ve found a comical way to redistribute wealth via the “scientific” community provided their studies point out the necessity of more government control over those simpleton Westerners and their dastardly evil plot to live a civilized life using energy they found on the planet? (Sure it’s a long question, but get over it.)

It’s the weather. If we could change the weather, we wouldn’t need forecasts…

Think about that. And if you want to argue that last point, you should think about it a little more, because I don’t think you’ve grasped the point, yet. You keep thinking, though, it’ll come to you, I’m sure. It isn’t a point that you need to check with your commissar, you can do this one on your own. But watch out, thinking for yourself can really make you challenge a lot of the stuff you allowed to freely pass through your filters earlier in life.