By Alan
Caruba
Everything you need to know about how
perverse and dangerous the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
is summed up in its latest report. Released on November 2, it issued the same tired, old and untrue
claims of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems”
The IPCC wants the world to stop using
coal, oil and natural gas, saying that they must be “phased out almost entirely”
by the end of the century. The report reeks of their contempt for humanity.
Losing electricity, no matter where
you live, is losing every technology that enhances and preserves your life. You
lose the ability to cool or warm your home, apartment or workplace. You lose the
ability to keep food safe in your refrigerator and freezer. You most certainly
lose the lighting. You lose the ability to turn on your computer or television.
Indeed, to use everything you take for granted.
Since the discovery and generation of
energy with coal, oil and natural gas, generations have lived lives not only
different from all who preceded them, but better in so many ways, not the least
of which is extended life expectancy. Nations with energy are places where
people live longer, healthier lives. They are also wealthier nations where the
energy translates into industry, jobs, transportation, and all the other
attributes of modern life.
Although we usually don’t associate
energy with morality, Alex Epstein has. His book, “The Moral Case for Fossil
Fuels” ($27.95, Portfolio, an imprint of the Penguin Group) is the finest case
for the role coal, oil and natural gas has played in our lives and the positive,
emancipating impact they have had on humanity. Everyone should read
it.
“I hold human life as the standard of
value” says Epstein. “I think that our fossil fuel use so far has been a moral
choice because it has enabled billions of
people to live longer and more fulfilling lives, and I think the cuts
proposed by the environmentalists in the 1970s were wrong because of all the death and suffering they
would have inflicted on human beings.”
“Eighty-seven percent of the energy
mankind uses every second comes from burning one of the fossil fuels: coal, oil
or natural gas.” That has not stopped environmentalists from denouncing coal and
oil as “dirty” or because their use generates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
What they never tell you is how small those emissions are and that they play an
infinitesimal role to influence the Earth’s weather or climate. They never tell
you that the Earth has centuries more of untapped reserves. The modern world
could not exist without them.
“In the last eighty years, as CO2
emissions have most rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths
worldwide fell by an incredible rate
of 98 percent. That means the incidence of death from climate is fifty times lower than it was eighty
years ago.”
Epstein points to “the power of
fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization that is highly resilient
to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on” to demonstrate the
foolishness of those who oppose their use. Primary among them is the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As part of its 40th session, in early November the IPCC
adopted the final “synthesis” report of its Fifth Assessment Report; a
full-scale update calling for the reduction of energy worldwide. They base this
on the claim that “human influence on the climate system is clear.”
It is not clear. Despite the CO2
emissions, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the last nineteen years,
during the same time the IPCC’s “climate experts” and others were telling us the
Earth was going to become dangerously warm.
Epstein reminds us that “In 1972, the
international think tank, the Club of Rome, released a multimillion-copy-selling
book, “The Limits of Growth”, which declared that its state of the art computer
models had demonstrated that we would run out of oil by 1992 and natural gas by
1993 (and, for good measure, gold, mercury, silver, tin, zinc and lead by 1993
at the latest.)
It is essential to understand
that every one of the “global warming” predictions made in the 1980s and the
decades since then has been WRONG. Every one of the computer
models on which those predictions were based was WRONG.
A younger generation graduating from
high school this year has never spent a day when the overall temperature of the
Earth was warming. The Earth’s natural cooling cycle is based on a natural low
cycle of solar radiation. The Sun is generating less heat. Indeed, the Earth is
nearing the end of the Holocene cycle, one of warmth for the past ten thousand
or more years that has given rise to human civilization.
Epstein’s book is more than just
philosophical opinion. It is based on documented facts regarding fossil fuel
use. At one point he quotes Paul Ehrlich who, in his 1968 book, “The Population
Bomb”, declared that “the battle to feed humanity is over.” Epstein notes that in 1968 the world’s
population was 3.6 billion people. “Since then it has doubled, yet the average
person is better fed than he was in 1968. This seeming miracle was due to a
combination of the fossil fuel industry and genetic science…” Farming today is
mechanized and that requires fuel!
The claims that Epstein debunks are
accompanied by the fundamental truths about fossil fuel use and science. His
book, comprehensible to anyone whether they have any knowledge of science or
not, should be on everyone’s reading list.
At the heart of environmentalism and
its “save the Earth” agenda is the reduction, if not the elimination, of humans
from planet Earth.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment