The Final Act in the Global Warming Theater

I’m trying to decide if I should rattle the cage of the crazies at the beginning or the end of the blog, but I’m on my second scotch tonight and am feeling feisty, so I’m starting with the tasty red meat.  I look forward to reading your e-mails. 

From 1947 to 1957, in the midst of post World War II Communist paranoia, the halls of Congress were darkened by an alcoholic, unstable, miserable excuse for a man, Joseph R. McCarthy.  The intellectually stunted McCarthy, truly an example of mediocrity made manifest, performed in a predictably lackluster way until he decided to become the leading tout for anti-Communistic jingoism.

            McCarthy used a nascent fear of the, “Red Menace” to acquire the one thing he could never garner through talent or intelligence—power.  Suddenly one of life’s perennial, “also ran’s” was the center of attention.  People who used to treat McCarthy as the occasional electoral mistake deferred to him in the halls of the Senate seeking out his support and good favor.  The toady had become the toad. 

            The start of McCarthy’s reign of misinformed terror began with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in February of 1950.  With evidence later proved to be inaccurate—if not deliberately manufactured—he alleged that the State Department had been infiltrated by Communists.  When a Senate investigating committee exonerated the State Department, McCarthy took his campaign to the air waves.   When he was asked to produce evidence of the charges against the State Department he not only refused, but, instead, made new accusations.  The media, always more interested in selling copy than ascertaining the truth, did nothing to challenge McCarthy’s baseless accusations.  Finally, one preeminent reporter, Edward R. Murrow, took him on, but this was only after McCarthy was allowed to ruin lives and affect the direction of the nation for four years. 

Where was the due diligence?  Where was the skeptical oversight?  Why were the voices of moderation ignored, attacked, silenced or implicated?  I ask this because the same thing is happening in this country today apropos the discussion of global warming. 

As I pointed out in yesterday’s blog, global warming is occurring.  What distresses me is the rampant use of this natural phenomenon by political entities trying to control both money and power.  There are also intense ad hominem attacks on those who question the dramatized reports of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. 

In the latest issue of Sky and Telescope a featured article spoke of 320 solar physicists gathered for a conference in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  At the meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division, four scientists affiliated with the National Solar Observatory, posted three papers showing separate evidence that the solar cycle may be about to flatten right out (See Monday’s blog, “Global Warming and Sun Spots).  These scientists now believe that the same phenomenon that produced the Little Ice Age from 1647-1715 is about the reproduce itself.  This period, known as the Maunder Minimum, has been well known to scientists and historians.  What we didn’t know until lately is that these sun spot cycles influence weather on this planet. 

This science is pertinent and compelling, yet none of this has made the national news.  A natural phenomenon which may produce serious cooling on this planet is not news because it does not fit with the, “settled” salesmanship of global warming.  What is more, it reinforces what many scientists have tried to say, that there are many reasons not tied to the acts of man that cause global climatic change. 

I am not saying that greenhouse gases are good things.  Sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides are bad actors and I believe that microns of smoke stack emissions should equal mils of revenue paid by the polluters.  But the fanatic efforts of some factions to use global warming as a means to dubious political ends is nothing short of eco-McCarthyism.  There is a hidden agenda here, and it reeks.