The article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal by former Secretaries Jim Baker and George Schultz proposing a carbon tax for reducing carbon emissions was exactly in keeping with 60 years of Republican political behavior. Democrats define a problem and Republicans propose a market-based solution in hopes that it will be cheaper.
Their solution misses the point of the global warming debate entirely. The warmists are less interested in the United States reducing our emissions of CO2 than they are in the United States paying for our past behavior. Until that money changes hands, this debate will not end.
Perhaps it is time to debate the problem rather than the solution.
Is the globe warming? Yes. It’s been warming since the last ice age ended 11,400 years ago. Does CO2 contribute to warming? Yes. Very modestly, while providing a necessary ingredient for life which is as important as oxygen. Breathing can only be accomplished if CO2 provides the food to feed the muscles to move the lungs. Do humans contribute to CO2? Yes. Of the 400 parts of CO2 per million parts of atmosphere, humans create about 10. (If you really want to reduce greenhouse gas talk to the termites.)
Is warming good or bad? Therein lies the debate. The warmists would have us believe that doubling the CO2 in the environment from the current 400 ppm would destroy the planet. We must do something!
James Baker, who met at the White House with other Republican business leaders on Wednesday, remains “somewhat of a skeptic about the extent to which man is responsible for climate change” but the “risks are too great to ignore.”
Really? What are the risks? If I told you that my computer model predicts that an earthquake will erupt under Athens, Georgia in the next 50 years and the “risks are too great to ignore” how much would you be willing to spend to “do something?”
That is all we have to scare us about warming. Computer models. The models have been telling us for 40 years that human created CO2 is going to cause dangerous warming and the risks are too great to ignore. For the 40 years prior to that the same models were instructing us that human created CO2 was going to cause dangerous global cooling and that the risks were too great to ignore.
In fact there has been no warming at all for 20 years as CO2 emissions globally have gone from about 380 ppm to 400 ppm. That pause is so alarming to the warmists that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration produced a bogus study refuting the pause in warming just in time to influence the UN Climate Conference in Paris in 2015.
NASA has participated in the fraud as well. They have altered temperature records to produce lower older year’s readings and higher current readings resulting in a warming trend.
If anthropogenic global warming is real, why do government scientists need to cheat?
Those who argue that a CO2 level of 800 ppm is a risk too great to ignore must ignore the era 542 million years ago known as the Cambrian period. In the blink of an eye – 0.17 percent of the lifespan of a 4.5 billion year old planet – all of complex multicellular life forms ever known to exist were deposited in the fossil evidence. The CO2 level was 7000 ppm.
While we’re spending about a billion dollars a day to prove that the globe is warming, perhaps we should spend a few bucks to determine if that is a good or bad thing. Virtually everyone admits that cooler weather decreases food production. Additionally, cold weather kills far more people than warm weather.
In the last two million years there have been about 18 ice ages. An ice age lasts about 100,000 years interrupted by warming periods lasting about 10,000 years. Trust me, the warming periods are better.
For approximately 1.6 billion of our planet’s most vulnerable their lives are short and brutal. To them the temperature is merely what they experience while they try to stave off starvation. They don’t need a lecture on the hypothetical dangers of CO2. They need more CO2 to grow a plant to eat.
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