Will California Make Breathing Illegal?
July 24, 2002
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Governor Gray Davis of California has just signed a new state law that makes breathing illegal. Well, not quite. But California’s governor has just legally declared carbon dioxide—the air we humans exhale—a “dangerous pollutant.”
The target of the new law is not human breathing—yet.
Its immediate target is the automobile, California’s favorite love-hate object. The new law directs California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) to achieve “maximum, feasible and cost-effective reductions” of CO2 from automobiles, beginning with the 2009 model year. The real goal is to force Americans to drive tiny, tinny little four-cylinder econoboxes like the Yugo.
No more lumbering Chevy Suburbans or range-roving Range Rover V-8s. We must also get rid of those gas-guzzling status symbols like Mercedes, Jaguars, and Cadillacs. To the crushers with any car that doesn’t get 80 miles per gallon!
Pick-up trucks will be radicalized downward too. Will I have to downsize my quarter-horse (to a nickel-horse?) so my tinier pick-up can still tow a horse-trailer?
The hysterical thing about this latest California foolishness is that it’s declared as a way to stop the global warming trend! What global warming trend? The eco-folk keep telling us, “The world has warmed half a degree Centigrade in the last century.” It has. But how much has it warmed in the last 50 years, while suddenly popular SUVs were spewing more CO2 and Chinese coal-powered factories were fouling the air in unprecedented fashion? Virtually not at all. What does that say about the global warming theory?
The high-altitude weather balloons and satellite readings—for the upper atmosphere where the warming is theorized to hit first—say the temperature is no higher today than it was 60 years ago. More important, the temperatures today are cooler than during the Medieval Climate Optimum of the 11th and 12th centuries. (When people rode in ox carts instead of SUVs.).
Last year, researchers announced their analysis of three deep-seabed cores from the floor of the North Atlantic that go down through history 12,000 years. They were looking for iceberg debris, bits of rock ground from the coasts of Canada and Greenland by glaciers and floated out to sea as icebergs break free.
The analysts found the iceberg debris from nine Little Ice Ages—alternating with nine moderate global warmings. The cycles moved erratically, averaging 1340 years—and coinciding almost exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. How many of us would really be surprised to find that the earth’s temperature is governed by that fiery star, 300,000 times our size, around which the earth orbits?
Based on the iceberg debris, we’re about 200 years into another moderate global warming that will give us better crops, less frostbite, and no melting of the polar ice caps. Unfortunately, another Little Ice Age, starting about 3100, will follow it. (Should we start stockpiling insulation and woolen caps now?)
In science, one observed anomaly is supposed to invalidate a theory. Burning fossil fuels couldn’t have caused the Medieval Warming; that’s one anomaly. Neither could the so-called Roman warming that preceded the Medieval one. That’s two anomalies, observed and therefore much more significant than theories. Now the iceberg debris gives us nine anomalies, and a probable basis for a new theory.
Even the eco-folk admit that if the Kyoto Treaty triples our gasoline and electrical prices, it would make virtually no difference in the theoretical rate of global warming. We might need to make electricity ten times more expensive to suppress its use effectively. Must we trash our toasters too?
The same people who tout global warming told us the human population was spiraling out of control. Instead, it is rapidly stabilizing and will head downward after 2050. They told us the Pacific Northwest salmon were going extinct—but now the salmon catches are cycling upward too. The eco-folk said harvesting trees was bad—but now they just burn (with eco blessings) in bigger, hotter forest fires. They told California it couldn’t build new power plants—until the rolling blackouts produced public licenses for a whole new set of power plants.
Global warming is the eco-folk’s biggest ploy, intended to replace technological abundance for billions with “mud hut” scarcity for a few.
Isn’t it wonderful to have California as a laboratory to test bad ideas for the real world?
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and the Director of the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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