TOM BURGUM

Staff Columnist

burgum@lbknews.com

It was a belief in some ancient cultures temperature could be altered, draughts ended, the rise of oceans halted, merely by throwing a couple luckless virgins into a volcano. Some would think this makes the Incas and Mayans appear misogynistic but, it’s much more likely they didn’t think the gods were much interested in young boys. As I said, it was an ancient culture.

Before you smirk in condescension because these illiterate savages were not conversant with such natural phenomena as the Pacific decadal oscillation, you might look at today’s human folly where we in the United States propose to sacrifice a good bit of our economy in hopes of appeasing the global warming gods. Oh yes, there is not much difference in the religious fervor of the global warming, climate change or weather disruption crowd today and the Inca priests who thought their pathetic and cruel activities could influence the climate.

You have to look no further than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new proposed rules which will, according to the United States Chamber of Commerce, cost the American economy $51 billion, as well as 224,000 jobs, every year through 2030. The EPA has much lower estimates but the Government Accountability Office found that the EPA was using a study outdated by 20 years and even when new only took into account four industrial sectors.

According to a study by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), “The United States is already facing the loss of 60 gigawatts of power over the next three years, the result of older coal plants being forced to shut down because they cannot comply with the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxic Standards enacted in 2012.”

At the onset of those rules the EPA, with its usual distain for accuracy, claimed that only four gigawatts of capacity would be lost because of the regulations. Now, even EPA admits, 60 gigawatts of coal-generated electricity will be lost and that is even before the new regulations kick in. The real problem here is that ninety percent of plants slated to close by the new draconian regulations were needed to provide power during the periods of severe weather last winter. Too bad EPA can’t just throw a few virgins down a volcano to hold off the threat of another cold winter.

Forget all that, you say. Our sacrifice will stymie global warming, or whatever it’s called now. Not really. Chip Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato’s Center for the Study of Science, using the EPA developed climate-model emulator, “found that the EPA regulations would barley affect the climate — by eighteen-thousandths of a degree Celsius by 2100.” This is such a small number it cannot even be discussed in practical terms. EPA, of course, didn’t publish that information on their misnamed fact sheet and it’s easy to understand why: It’s hard to get people to agree to seriously damage their economy for no apparent reason.

There now is credible evidence developed by HadCRUT that the earth is not warming. The HadCRUT data on earth’s temperature is the authoritative data set used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The temperature is determined by combining the sea surface temperature records compiled by the Hadley Centre of the United Kingdom Met Office and the land surface air temperature records compiled by the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia.

The latest figures from HadCRUT show that over the last 15 years the globe has cooled with a -0.24C per century trend, not warmed as predicted. Then, earlier this month the IPCC’s own data showed that the global mean temperature has dropped an unprecedented 1 degree C since 1990. Significantly, the vaunted computer models that predicted a hot Armageddon unless we stopped burning coal have been proven wrong.

So much for settled science.

Meanwhile, there are those who believe the earth is headed for a cooling period. Physicist Henrik Svensmark, a professor in the Division of Solar System Physics at the Danish National Space Institute, declared, “global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Enjoy global warming while it lasts.”

Habibullo Abdussamatov is a Russian astrophysicist and supervisor of the Astrometrial project of the Russian section of the International Space Station: He heads the Space research laboratory at the Saint Petersburg-based Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has a question: “Has the Obama administration, the EPA or anyone that can read a chart actually looked at what global temperatures are now doing?”

Prominent geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook warns “global cooling is a slam dunk” for up to 30 years or more” While the Australian Astronomical Society warns of global cooling as the sun’s activity significantly diminishes.

The high priests of global warming ignore all evidence to the contrary and continue to insist on reducing our capacity to produce electric energy. Even though the draconian regulations will not even have a measurable affect on climate they will have a very measurable effect on our economy. The cost can be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars and the hundreds of thousands of jobs with higher electric rates that will impact the manufacturing sector, the poor and middle class. It also poses a real threat to the stability of the electric grid itself.

It is a pretty depressing story overall but, at least we are no longer sacrificing virgins. I guess that is progress of a sort.

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