Just last week, the temperatures in Middle Georgia, where I write, were over 100 degrees. This week, they are struggling to get to 90. But, as say climate change advocates, that is called weather, not climate. Of course, this is the second year in a row Georgia has experienced a milder than normal summer.
The data shows, rather inconveniently, that there has not been a warming trend in 17 years. Climate change alarmists say that is wrong. Just a few months ago, the alarmists claimed the world is still warming. The Pacific Ocean, they claimed, is acting as a heat sink.
Last week, another group of scientists decided it is not the Pacific Ocean, but the Atlantic Ocean, that is pulling all the heat away from us. They know the world is still warming. They just cannot agree on where all the heat is going. But trust them.
In 1962, Rachel Carson helped kick off the rise of a new religion, environmentalism, and with it, the deaths of many in the Third World with her book "Silent Spring." In the book, Carson deplored the use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Public and academic outrage led to world governments banning DDT. Since then, millions of Africans have been wiped out by malaria while western governments pat themselves on the back for banning DDT. Billionaire Americans now console themselves by buying mosquito nets for the Third World instead of pesticide.
Paul Ehrlich continued the trend with his 1968 book "Population Bomb," that warned of mass starvation and an Earth unable to support so many people. In the 1970s, the world was on the verge of a new ice age. By the early 80s, it was peak oil, save the whales and global warming. By the 90s, environmental researchers knew they could obtain grants and subsist off taxpayers worldwide if they kept the "global warming" fears alive.
Soon, because polling and focus grouping suggested "global warming" was not working, the name changed to "climate change." No one really opposes the new term. Every person who has ever lived agrees the climate changes. We have had ice ages and warm-ups before. Now, however, the environmental movement has decided mankind is to blame, suggesting the dinosaurs were to blame for the last heat-up.
This past week, the annual public relations campaign on climate change geared up again. It does every year when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change trots out new data showing 97 percent of scientists agree. That figure, by the way, is often cited. Not only is it wrong but it was contrived in the public relations effort to silence dissent on the issue.
An email from Al Gore demanding action on climate change arrived in my inbox last Tuesday afternoon. By 11 o'clock that night, Matt Drudge's website had a New York Times story about President Obama taking unilateral action on climate change. The New York Times' own coverage of the IPCC report had enough overwrought hysteria to make some suicidal. Though the United States has done an excellent job lowering pollutants, the nation must behave even more saintly because Third World countries continue to pollute.
In the United States today, more and more publications refuse letters to the editor from skeptics of global warming. As the world stays in this plateau of no warming, which we have been in for 17 years, the left works harder to silence dissent.
In A.D. 325, Emperor Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea to establish the parameters of Christian doctrine. St. Nicholas, before passing out presents to children, attacked Arius, an Egyptian cleric who embraced heresies in the Council.
Two thousand years later, the secularists have convened their own Council of Nicaea under the rubric of the IPCC to set the parameters of their secular religion. But instead of Santa Claus attacking heretics, the left has journalists attacking a skeptical public as "holocaust deniers" for daring to be skeptical of moralistic crusaders who have caused the deaths of many and been wrong so often in their environmental and scientific prognostications. But trust them this time.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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