Posted by
David A. Jared on Wednesday, December 09, 2009 12:16:00 PM
How much are you willing to pay the government "per breath?" The hackneyed joke about the government taxing everything but air is now, officially, passe. The Environmental Protection Agency, the formation of which is probably the WORST mistake of the Nixon administration, next to the abandonment of Vietnam, has decided that CO2, a product of respiration, is a "pollutant" and therefore subject to THEIR regulation. What that essentially means is that every time you exhale, you're putting out "pollution" into the atmosphere--a ridiculous concept, at best, but typical of petty liberal bureaucrats and their penchant for "control."
Worse yet, the whole concept is predicated on the now-discredited, pseudo-religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). I say "discredited" because of the leaked/hacked e-mails out of the principle "authority" on AGW recently made public in England. These e-mails confirm what many of us have suspected for years now--that proponents who insist that AGW is "settled science" have been skewing the data to fit their preconceived theories, actually lying about the issue and engaging in a concerted campaign to try to discredit and ridicule any real scientist whose research refutes their proclamations about AGW. As a consequence, AGW has taken on the trappings of a religion, the unschooled especially promoting the whole thing on the basis of faith alone.
AGW is, of course, as bogus as the Piltdown Man scandal decades ago--coincidentally also by British "scientists." Even in the face of the e-mail "scandal" there are those in our own government who are STILL touting the 9 years of this century, a "decade (sic) that's the warmest in history" when the actual temperatures worldwide have been in DECLINE since 1998. These bug-witted morons "explain" that by saying that temperatures in Canada and the U.S. have gone down slightly, but have gone UP in the rest of the world! What a bunch of BS! They are relying on Americans (and, presumably, Canadians) being ignorant of the actual data outside the western hemisphere.
The atmosphere is comprised of 70% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, 3% carbon dioxide, and the remaining 7% of minute parts of other gasses like hydrogen, argon, methane and others. The atmosphere also is comprised of combinations of these gasses, some of which are considered to be "greenhouse" gasses because they're supposed to "sequester" heat, especially in the lowest levels of the troposphere near the surface. By far, the most prevalent "greenhouse" gas is water vapor which comprises 97% of ALL "greenhouse" gasses in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide accounts for another 1.5%, with methane, CFC's and other gasses accounting for the remaining 1.5%. If "greenhouse gasses" were REALLY the problem they're touted to be, wouldn't it make more sense to attempt to reduce the 97% than the 1.5%? The potential for having a measurable effect on "greenhouse" gas would, logically, be much greater, wouldn't it? The truth is, carbon dioxide, water vapor, etc. do NOT produce a true "greenhouse effect" in the same sense as the air inside a real greenhouse does. That term was chosen intentionally because many people have experienced going into a real greenhouse and experienced the higher temperature and humidity inside. The analogy fails, because the atmosphere is NOT an enclosed space and solar heat can and does readily escape (or is reflected back into space without ever reaching the surface by cloud albedo) and isn't "trapped" at the surface--even with heavy cloud cover. Oh, there's a slight (and very temporary) sequestration of heat under clouds or in high humidity conditions. That's the reason Florida citrus growers pray for cloud cover at night when temperatures near freezing, for example. Without cloud cover, surface heat escapes into space much more readily and rapidly than with it--BUT in either case, the heat DOES escape into space eventually, hopefully (from the viewpoint of those citrus growers) not before sun up the next day, keeping their crops from freezing. The real "greenhouse effect" is also why deserts can become surprisingly cold at night sometimes, there being no water vapor to "hold" surface heat near the surface after dark and surface heat rapidly "escapes" into space. However, let's not forget that it's the SUN which is the controlling factor in heating the Earth (which, coincidentally, also makes Earth inhabitable.)
IF, carbon dioxide "pollution" was responsible for higher temperatures on Earth, why have the polar ice caps on Mars and upper-atmospheric temperatures on Saturn and Jupiter ALSO been rising over the past 50 years? There's absolutely NO evidence of Martians, Saturnians or Jupiterites increasing their use of SUV's or coal-burning power plants after all. The whole premise of AGW falls apart when you ask one of these "greenie" "scientists" to explain these measurable phonomena. In fact, instead of trying to answer such questions, they'll invariably change the subject.
Given the rapidly-emerging fact that carbon dioxide is NOT causing rising temperatures on this planet, even if CO2 levels ARE rising slightly, the Earth has very efficient carbon dioxide "sinks." They're called PLANTS. Green plants USE carbon dioxide as food and without it would die out, which would also kill off all animal life on the planet, by the way. The more carbon dioxide, the more plants. The more plants, the more oxygen (a by-product of photosynthesis) and the more food for animal life--including human beings. I'm not talking just about grass and trees here, folks. By far, the most numerous flora on the planet which use carbon dioxide are found in ocean PLANKTON. Yes, SOME plankton is animal in nature, but most of it is comprised of microscopic plants--which feed everything from the plankton fauna to blue whales.
Calling carbon dioxide a "pollutant" is maybe the stupidest proclamation ever to emerge from the bowels of the federal bureaucracies--the EPA, in particular. It's absolutely ESSENTIAL to allowing and maintaining life on this planet since all life here is carbon-based. Getting rid of this essential compound is, perhaps, the most moronic idea anyone has come up with yet and is ample proof that the REAL agenda at work here has nothing whatsoever to do with carbon dioxide "pollution" but is an excuse to further regulate our lives and reduce America's standard of living in socialism's never-ending quest to redistribute wealth to poorer nations at our expense. Let's hope Americans have the good sense to send these redistributionist morons packing come next November and return us to sensible government at long last.
UPDATE: Just today, it was reported that, when asked how damaging the e-mails out of East Anglia University, which were the source of confirmation of our suspicions, might be, Al Gore responded that, "The most recent of the e-mails are more than 10 years old, so are 'old hat' and meaningless to the issue." In fact, the most recent of those e-mails was dated November, 2009! The man would lie if the truth would serve him better. {Sigh}