If Proposition 23 on the Nov. 2 ballot doesn’t pass, your lives, livelihoods and liberties will come inescapably under the thumb of the Administrative State.

Hyperbole, you say? Landsbaum’s off his rocker, you say? Read on.

Prop. 23 would merely delay – mind you, not repeal – implementation of the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, perhaps the most arrogantly misnamed law the California Legislature ever passed.

The Act, also known as Assembly Bill 32, set in motion an army of unelected, unaccountable Air Resources Board bureaucrats to write restrictive regulations and concoct an arbitrary cap-and-trade program to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, principally carbon dioxide. In effect, AB32 imposes a onerous energy tax to transfer wealth from innocent taxpayers and politically out-of-favor industries to endeavors that can’t pay for themselves without taxpayer subsidies, things like windmill farms.

For perspective, carbon dioxide is the stuff you exhale. It’s essential for plant growth, making it necessary for human existence. It’s also a byproduct of virtually every human commercial activity, from pouring concrete to driving a car to flipping the light switch. What CO2 isn’t, is a pollutant, even though the Supreme Court was persuaded to declare it one in 2007.

If government can regulate, tax and ration CO2, government can control just about everything. That’s not hype.

Prop. 23 would delay this army of bureaucrats from inflicting who-knows-what economy-killing policies yet to be drafted. That’s obviously prudent, considering unemployment in this state persistently hovers above 12 percent, and state government already is dysfunctional and out of control. The delay would prevent the state from rewarding friends and punishing enemies until unemployment drops to 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters, which has occurred three times in the past 40 years.

AB32 is wrong in at least two significant ways. It’s based on bad science and will result in bad economics.

The Science

The first thing to understand is that the only place manmade CO2 ever created catastrophe is in computer models. In fact, the presumed cause-and-effect relationship of CO2 and higher temperatures also exists only in theory.

If higher levels of CO2 were an absolute cause of hotter temperatures, we would have seen temperatures soar over the past dozen years because CO2 levels dramatically shot up. Instead, temperatures have been level or declining.

Then there’s the inconvenient truth that the Earth has been at least as warm, or even much warmer than it is today, long before man began spewing CO2 into the air anywhere near the rate we do now.

Some of the same climate alarmists who demand we implement Draconian controls like AB32 are the same people who insisted in the 1970s the Earth was headed into a new Ice Age that would kill millions and cripple civilization. That catastrophe didn’t happen, but we are to trust that this one will. Chicken Little comes to mind.

Not incidentally, the motive in the ’70s was the same as today: control. Whether we’re going to freeze or roast, the argument is that government must have greater control to save us.

Speaking of ice ages, the planet has been coming out of the most recent one for a few hundred years, quite a while before the uptick in industrial CO2 emissions of the past half century. One might reasonably surmise that we should be getting a tad warmer. If there’s any increased warming in the past century, it’s as likely a natural cycle as any other explanation.

Then there’s this: Even by alarmists’ calculations, temperatures over the past century increased less than 1 degree Celsius. If that sounds tiny, it’s because it is. Is it conceivable when dealing with literally a fraction of a degree that the margin of error in measuring temperatures might come into play? You decide.

After the Soviet Union fell, more than 100 surface climate-data stations in the eastern portion of the nation, including Siberia, stopped recording temperatures. Russians had more important things to do. About that time, the so-called average global temperature began increasing.

Measuring stations that record surface temperatures “are disappearing worldwide at an alarming rate,” says meteorologist Anthony Watts. Some have been closed, including many in Canada and Russia. Others simply disappeared. Those remaining can be problematic. Many once were located in placid pastoral settings but today are on heat-reflecting concrete and asphalt.

Watts’ SurfaceStations.org documented 1,003 of the 1,221 U.S. measuring stations and found many “located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas. In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements.”

Those measurements, probably a better yardstick for how hot concrete can get than atmosphere, are included when calculating the so-called global temperature.

“How do we know global warming is a problem if we can’t trust the U.S. temperature record?” Watts asks. By the way, the U.S. measuring stations are universally regarded to be far more reliable than the rest of the world’s.

When climate researchers’ e-mails were leaked last year, it was apparent that they consistently resisted challenges to their practices. One practice is “adjusting” temperature readings to align them with what “should” be expected – at least what is expected by researchers, whose grants hinge on defining global warming as a problem. A Russian think tank charged that measurements still being collected in that country were cherry-picked, discarding lower temperatures.

Let’s sum up: Incomplete, questionable, perhaps cherry-picked temperatures that are “adjusted.” Did we mention margin of error?

It is this hodgepodge of sporadic, questionable temperature data that’s fed into the touted computer models to project the future. Garbage in, garbage out?

One more point: climatologists on both sides agree that they haven’t a clue whether or how much clouds increase, decrease or do both to global temperatures. They generally agree, however, clouds have far greater influence than CO2.

The Economics

If AB32 isn’t stopped, by the time it is fully implemented it will have cost California about 1 million lost jobs, according to a Cal State Sacramento study. It also will increase costs for anything produced by energy. Electricity rates will go up as much as 60 percent, according to the Southern California Public Power Authority, and gasoline, diesel and natural gas prices will increase.

Opponents of Prop. 23 say the global warming law will offset this harm by creating “green” jobs. They promise these “clean-energy” jobs will sprout within renewable-energy industries, such as solar and wind power.

Next time you drive past windmill farms in the hinterlands, count how many “workers” you see toiling away. I’ve never see one. Ask yourself how many times you’ll need to hire a “green” installer to put that outdoor plumbing on your roof to rig your house with solar panels.

Well, there’s always the manufacturing jobs AB32 will create. In China.

To become windmill-reliant, whatever manufacturing jobs are created, there won’t be many in California because of its burdensome, costly regulations. China, which doesn’t have a cap-and-trade scheme that inhibits manufacturers, builds windmills for places like California, which we are told must have a cap-and-trade scheme. What’s wrong with this picture?

Christopher Horner, author of “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed,” notes that advocates for laws like AB32 say we must not let China win the windmill race. The fact is, the U.S. already has installed 33 percent more windmills than China, which apparently prefers selling them to saps like us. Incidentally, every three weeks China brings online a new, CO2-spewing, coal-fired power plant to meet its energy needs.

Let’s allow, for argument’s sake, that green jobs should be encouraged. Here’s the problem: They are economic losers. Ask Germany, the Netherlands or Spain. In Spain, where green jobs are heavily subsidized by taxes, for every green job created, two normal jobs were lost. Moreover, those thrown out of work required unemployment aid.

Does it make sense to create a new economic model based on a product, whether windmills, solar panels or biofuels, that must be subsidized by taxpayers? Even if we disregard the viable jobs and profitable industries destroyed by such a policy, what of the tax-subsidized new ones we create?

“The very presence of subsidies and targeted favors for a particular good means that the real value of the resources being used to create that good is greater than the value of the good itself,” William L. Anderson, associate professor of economics at Frostburg State University, writes in the Freeman. “No economy can grow under such circumstances. The reality is that ‘green energy’ actually causes the economy to contract.”

Contact the writer: mlandsbaum@ocregister.com or 714-796-5025