The Chill Factor Versus Al Gore's Global Warming Talk-a-Thon

While Al Gore engages in a 24-hour talk-a-thon to convince Americans that "global warming" is real and a big threat that demands "green" energy, "alternative" energy, "conservation", et cetera, national weather services provide a different look, an accurate picture, of the chill factor that is the reality for September 15-16 in the USA.

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A Weather Newsgasm

By Alan Caruba

What major weather events and especially earthquakes tell us is that we live on planet Earth on its terms, not ours. Put another way, we don’t “control” the weather or climate and, despite decades of global warming lies, compared to the sun and oceans, we don’t even influence it.

The best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It will do whatever it wants to do.

By Friday on Fox News and other television news outlets, it was non-stop coverage of Hurricane Irene even though it was barely beginning to touch the North Carolina coast. If there is one thing the news media loves it is a really big potential disaster.

By Saturday afternoon as Irene passed over North Carolina, Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and commentator on WattsUpWithThat.com, was reporting, “What we have here at this point appears to be a tropical storm. By the time it reaches New York, it may very well just be a tropical depression on par with a Nor’easter in intensity.” But not a hurricane.

At one point late Saturday, I clicked the remote on every local channel and on every cable news channel. Every single one was reporting on the hurricane. According to my blogger pal, Texas Fred, that’s a “newsgasm”.

By Sunday morning, the drenching rain, but no high winds, was already moving north out of New York City and northern New Jersey where I live.

The incessant “news” coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts. So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) became an acronym for incompetence. Presumably lessons have been learned and the agency will perform more effectively if needed.

Americans have been taught that the federal government will always come to their rescue and it rarely does with any efficiency and usually with a great waste of money and resources. Local first responders are usually the best and most reliable.

In a society that is utterly and completely dependent on electricity to function, it is always a sobering experience for many to discover how useless every single appliance in their home or apartment becomes without it.

I am sure I am boring people to death by repeatedly pointing to the way government at the federal and state level, along with many environmental organizations are deliberately making it difficult, if not impossible, to build coal-burning or nuclear utilities. As for transportation, the same forces are allied against any oil exploration and extraction. There hasn’t been a single new oil refinery built since the 1970s. That’s insane.

Now they are gearing up to deter natural gas extraction using “fracking” even though this technology has been in safe use for fifty years. The discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas should be greeted as welcome news by everyone. Only the luddites want us to return to mythical “simpler” times that never existed. It is still easier and a whole lot faster to take the train from New York to Washington, D.C. than to ride a horse.

If a foreign invader had imposed the same limits on our ability to access and use our own vast national reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, we would be in the streets with metaphorical pitchforks.

Returning to the theme of hurricanes, does anyone remember how Al Gore and other global warming liars were predicting that global warming would cause more hurricanes? Well, the East Coast has been through a period of some five years without one making landfall. Since there never was any dramatic global warming, there never was a connection between the two.

It’s worth remembering the previous decades since the late 1980s that were filled with reports from the full panoply of the print and broadcast media. They assured us that global warming was going to transform all life on earth unless we stopped producing carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., “greenhouse gas” emissions. It was a scam to sell bogus “carbon credits.”

This is the same bull we keep hearing about “renewable” energy, wind and solar power, along with ethanol and biofuels. The latter wastes food—corn—and the former wastes open space along with taxpayer’s and consumer’s hard earned money.

We are constantly assailed with extremely dubious, if not outright lies that involve something “scientific”, but science has been corrupted with too much environmental claptrap, political correctness, and devious chicanery. There are good sources of information, but the government and the media are not among them.

Trust your common sense. It is usually a good guide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Making Predictions for 2011

By Alan Caruba

In ancient times a soothsayer could make a good living divining the meaning of chicken bones and shiny pebbles. The modern version is usually some journalist who, looking back over his shoulder, decides he can predict the future. These are often the same people who fail to predict the outcome of elections, sports team rankings, and, of course, the weather.

Who, for example, could have predicted that, in November 2009, the world would be treated to thousands of emails between a handful of utterly deceitful “climate scientists” who were rigging the data in computer models to ensure that everyone remained scared to death of “global warming”?

The result was the breakdown of the 2009 United Nations Conference of Parties 15 climate conference in Copenhagen. This year a COP 16 in Cancun tossed out any pretence about “global warming” and went straight for a scheme to get wealthy nations to transfer trillions to mostly corrupt ones.

History frequently turns on unanticipated events. The attack on Pearl Harbor is a classic example. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is another. For the present generation of Americans, the decade began with 9/11 and is ending with the collapse of the housing mortgage market that began in late 2008, They have marked this first decade of the new millennium as having altered everything that came before it.

One result was the election of a totally unknown and undistinguished junior Senator from Illinois named Barack Hussein Obama. What also followed was the one-party control by the Democratic Party of both houses of Congress with its failed “stimulus” bills, Obamacare, and efforts to extend amnesty to illegal immigrants. The result was the most massive transfer of political power since the late 1940s to the Republican Party.

The President “owns” the unemployment problem in America. He “owns” the outcome of a war in Afghanistan that has been going on since 2001. He “owns” a Democrat Congress that was held in utter contempt by the majority of Americans. He promised change and got it. His political party and its policies are once again in decline.

So, what I am saying is that anyone who says they can predict what will happen in 2011 is just blowing smoke. Get out the chicken bones and shiny pebbles.

What do we know as we anticipate the beginning of 2011? We know that this winter, which began well before the solstice on December 21st, has been brutal thus far just about everywhere in the northern hemisphere. This winter and future ones are going to be longer and far more harsh than anyone living today has ever witnessed. Europe is experiencing the coldest winter in a hundred years. We will likely see records broken throughout the U.S.

The Earth is well into a Maunder Minimum, a dramatic diminution of solar output. When the Sun grows quiet, the Earth gets cold. It did this between 1300 and 1850. We could be looking at hundreds of years in which crops will be affected, reducing food for more than six billion people with whom we share the planet. That’s a recipe for riots and wars.

There is no way of knowing how long the Islamic Revolution will last. With a history based entirely on conquest and domination, the present fever and fervor may take quite a while to sink back into a dank resentment of everything modern, everything that has to do with individual freedom. When your whole understanding of the world is contained in a single “holy” book deemed the word of Allah, there are few options for reform.

We cannot know how long it will take America to work its way out of its economic problems, mostly based on literally insane spending, borrowing, and the over-regulation of everything.

The world is beginning to make plans for a failed America. Our credit rating may drop. How long we can just print money to buy our own debt is anyone’s guess. It’s like moving one’s debt between credit cards. The debt, however, does not go away and the spending (and the waste) never stops.

The Russians and Chinese are already using their own currencies to finance their trade deals, not the U.S. dollar. Meanwhile, in Europe, nations including Great Britain, Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal, are on the razor’s edge of financial collapse. Too much socialism. Too little realism.

A former British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was asked what he feared most. “Events”, he said, “events.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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