Let's Have Serious Global Warming Debate

Most of the nation just emerged from a remarkably cold, wet, snowy winter. Blizzard after blizzard hit the eastern half of the country. The shivering was felt all the way down to Atlanta.

In fact, the weather was so cold that the price of natural gas, the most widely used fuel to heat homes, offices, and factories, skyrocketed.

This despite immense fresh supplies coming on line due to the new technique of hydro-fracturing, which has made the United States the world’s largest producer of natural gas. In some instances, demand for natural gas has risen so suddenly and so abruptly that where the concerns a couple of months ago were where to store the immense surplus of natural has being extracted, now there are fears of shortages.

And, as noted, these fears are reflected in the prices of natural gas, which reached multiyear highs in February.

As was reported in many newspapers, especially in The Wall Street Journal, the major commodities speculators are hiring the world’s top meteorologists to give them special insights about where weather — and presumably prices — are going.

Now, here’s the amazing part: Didn’t the world’s top meteorologists recently tell us that we were in for a gigantic period of global warming? Didn’t the secretary of state of the United States government, John Kerry, tell us that global warming was going to raise the level of the oceans so much that it would wipe out many of the islands of the earth?

That is was the ultimate weapon of mass destruction?

Didn’t the world’s leading experts on climate change say that the evidence of man-made global warming was so overwhelming that only fools and knaves could believe that global warming would ever stop without a major worldwide effort to clamp down on industry, commerce, and travel and spend trillions — tens of trillions — revamping the energy and industrial landscape?

Now, the people who have real money on the line — commodities speculators — are saying, Hold on. Maybe we had better look at this again.

That is, the people who had the top world experts on weather telling them how to speculate have recently learned that those experts were wrong, and that the weather may not be as predictable as had been thought.

So, where does this leave the huge mass of climate experts who said they were infallible and their forecasts could not be wrong? Where does this leave the supposedly “peer reviewed” studies of climate change that said we were doomed to perish of heat? (By the way, “peer reviewed” just means data was mailed or emailed to experts. It does not mean that they studied the data or checked on it or even responded.)

It leaves them out on a cold limb and like wounded animals, they are more dangerous than ever.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the earth. And I cannot believe it is good for us humans or our pets to be breathing in the ashes and contaminants created by burning millions of tons of coal and oil each day. I have always been for the cleanest possible ways of creating power and movement. I still am.

But I also have been for free and open debate. I have seen the pro-global warming people scream that while anything else may be freely discussed in a free society, global warming is so clearly established that it cannot even be questioned. And to even question it can mean academic dismissal and even lawsuits.

Now we know that the people with the big dollars — the ones who have a stake in the truth about climate change — are indeed questioning what was supposed to be unquestionable.

And the big name, big bucks weather scientists are also questioning global warming.

This is a very good thing. Free speech, especially about as big an issue as global warming and climate change, cannot possibly be anything but good for those who want truth. But free scientific inquiry is extremely dangerous for those who want to use the Armageddon of global warming to control us, to take away our freedoms, to pasturalize an industrial America.

Something extremely questionable has happened under the guise of “protecting” us from global warming: the attempt to shut down debate. It may be that the winter’s chill has brought us to our senses.

Probably not, though. When men and women are determined to control other men and women and take away freedom of speech and action, it takes more than facts to slow them down.

Soviet Bolshevism persisted for 70 years despite clear evidence that it led to mass murder, famine, dictatorship, and poverty. That was all in the name of protecting the working masses (who, of course, were the main victims). How much more powerful a club is “saving the earth”?