Ignoring the Obvious

There is little doubt that we have had a hotter than normal summer here in the United States. (Whereas the Earth’s southern hemisphere is experiencing a deep freeze.) And global warming enthusiasts are relishing the opportunity to regroup after the East Anglia e-mail-exposure debacle and again are trumpeting their crusade against carbon dioxide. However, there is another, less publicized event taking place: Our one and only sun has exited its solar flare minimum period (labeled a Maunder Minimum) that had been on the decline since 2000 and is now pushing out solar flares with a vengeance. See: Solar Flare.  Even our increasingly politicized NASA has recognized that sunspots (solar flares) are again on the wax … and can affect our Earth. See Sunspot Cycle.  (Interestingly enough, as the chart in this link shows, until earlier this year, the last decline in sunspot activity tracks to the year 2000 when global warming is thought by many to have last peaked.)

Which brings me to my main point … when our global climate goes through its myriad cycles … causing charlatans then to preach that the Earth’s is about to burn up or, once again, freeze over … why do we dance to their pipings? Clearly many things cause our orb’s climate to “change”-- altered ocean currents, the sun’s cycles, the Earth’s shifting orbital mechanics, the changing chemistry of our atmosphere (including among many things, carbon dioxide levels) and maybe even the Earth’s position in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, there is nothing that we mere mortals can do about most of these events. We are powerless to change sunspot activity … or alter the Earth’s tilt or its path around the sun … or change the flow of our mighty oceans. So what do we then do to assuage our angst about our human feebleness in dealing with such climate exigencies? We seize on carbon dioxide as the bete noire of the Earth’s climate’s fickleness. We see our society’s growing use of fossil fuels as an environmental evil and convince our fellow planet-mates that this is the one and only reason that our climate is getting warmer.

And, if the climate is not really getting warmer, what do we do? We falsify (fudge) data to prove that it is. We browbeat scientists into this orthodoxy about climate change through the use of giving or withholding of government grants … or the publishing or trashing of “scientific” papers in “scientific” journals. We brainwash left-leaning and scientifically-naive “journalist” into continuously echoing this orthodoxy and suppressing any dissent. We give Nobel prizes and Oscars and Pulitzer prizes and other awards and rewards to those willing to suspend their skepticism and don the emblazoned mantle of this new religion. We bury science and laud pseudo-science. All because we need to believe that man can control the climate in which we are forever captured … when it is abundantly clear that we are at the mercy of forces far greater than what we can ever dominate. But, like so many foolish times before, we once again strive to be our own God.