Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth (20 page)

Obama’s purpose is to push alternative energy “solutions” that would compete with coal, oil, and natural gas. But there was something rather important that Obama and his climate comrades never bothered to find out. According to Prof. Larry Bell, renewable energy is not compatible with the existing power grid transmission and distribution system. It’s costing Germany nearly $100 billion just to adapt its current energy
delivery system in order to accommodate renewable energy, he says. The grid in the United States is hundreds of times larger and more complex than Germany’s, and even planning to convert it to adapt to renewable sources would likely cost more than $100 billion. The cost of the conversion itself is so astronomical, it’s not even raised in conversation.
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Guess what all of this time, energy, and money going into alternative sources has produced? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the electricity price index in the United States rose to a new record high in January 2014. It’s exactly what Chu claimed he wanted to happen. At the same time, Department of Energy data indicates that electricity production has declined since Barack Obama took office—it hit its peak in 2007 and has slid downward every year since. We’ve added 14 million people in the United States since then, and we’re producing nearly 5 percent less electricity than we did only a year ago to supply their needs. The Obama administration doesn’t even understand the law of supply and demand.
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Recently, Obama waved his executive-order wand and created what he calls climate hubs. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the creation of seven of these climate centers in January 2014. “Climate hubs are part of our broad commitment to developing the next generation of climate solutions,” he said. Although Vilsack refused to directly answer reporters’ questions on the cost of the hubs, estimates say that they will cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars. The hubs are supposed to help farmers and rural communities respond to the risks of climate change, including drought, invasive pests, fires, and floods. This type of information, as one strategist told Fox News, can also be found in the
Farmers’ Almanac
, which you can buy online for $6.79. The proposed
locations are at existing Agriculture Department facilities and/or at agricultural universities, most of which have the same capabilities as the proposed hubs.

It’s interesting to note that according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fires, specifically wildfires, are part of climate change. News to me. I thought wildfires were actually exacerbated by the federal government’s unwillingness to go into forests and clear out debris. When trees and other vegetation die, they are currently left on the forest floor. This is done in the name of letting nature take its course instead of managing nature responsibly. Countless birds, animals, and humans suffer when the dead vegetation fuels forest fires. They kill people and destroy wildlife habitat and humans’ homes. And then there is the amount of particulate matter that is spewed into the atmosphere as a result of these fires, matter that—if environmentalists are correct—exacerbates climate change. Even if they’re right, they’re wrong.

If the last decade’s temperature data are any indication, we may be entering into another ice age. According to many scientists, the sun is in a period of what is known as “solar lull,” which could predict a long period of global cooling. Dr. Richard Harrison, the head of space physics at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England, told the BBC he’s never seen anything like this. “If you want to go back to see when the sun was this inactive… you’ve got to go back about 100 years,” he said.
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So the problem isn’t rising oceans that threaten to submerge coastal areas around the world after the polar ice caps melt from global warming; it’s the onset of a new ice age. A similar phase of sunspot inactivity known as the Maunder Minimum occurred in the 1600s and triggered what has become known as the Little Ice Age. It lasted well into the nineteenth
century—we’ve been pulling out of it gradually over the last hundred years—and it killed about a quarter of the people in northern Europe.

My question is this: Are we facing another Maunder Minimum? “There is no scientist alive who has seen a solar cycle as weak as this one,” says Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Andrés Munoz-Jaramillo. Another solar observer, David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Marshall Space Flight Center, agrees: “I would say it is the weakest in 200 years.”
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They’re talking about the virtual disappearance of sunspots during the past year. Normally the number of sunspots rises and falls in eleven-year cycles, and we should currently be at the peak of the cycle, when the sun is producing the highest output of sunspots, a phenomenon that contributes to the earth’s warming. Instead, the sun has effectively gone to sleep at a time when it should be producing sunspots at its maximum levels.
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One of the effects of the weakness of the current solar cycle can be seen in our weather here on earth. The global climate has been cooling for more than a decade, and the past winter—which was one of the coldest on record for the northern, midwestern, and eastern states—may be the precursor of temperatures to come. The data confirms this. In November 2013 alone, nearly 1,000 record low-temperature records were set in the United States.
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At the same time, images from Europe’s Cryostat spacecraft showed that Arctic sea ice coverage had increased by some 50 percent, from 1,400 cubic miles to 2,100 cubic miles by the end of the melting season when compared with the same time last year.
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The Arctic, Antarctic,
and Great Lakes ice masses have increased so greatly over only the past winter that even if the spring and summer warming in the northern hemisphere is normal, there is the risk of waters rising. It’s not global warming but global cooling that is most likely to cause this to happen.

The climate statistics for 2013 were made public before NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had a chance to tamper with them. The statistics revealed that 2013 was one of the ten coldest years in the United States since 1985, and it saw the largest year-on-year decline in global temperatures ever seen. Before the numbers are officially released to the sympathetic press, these two organizations will rework them so that they reflect the official U.S. position on climate change.
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You can bet on that. When the
Akademik Shokalskiy
was frozen for weeks in the Antarctic, only Fox News mentioned the fact that the stranded climate crazies were out to demonstrate the existence of global warming.
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There is solid evidence that forces much larger than man’s ability to spew carbon into the air are at work to change the climate. One climate scientist, Benjamin Santer, blames volcanoes. When volcanoes erupt, they inject large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, where it forms sulfuric acid drops that reflect sunlight back away from the earth. The reduced amount of radiant energy causes the lower atmosphere and the earth’s surface to cool. There have been seventeen volcanic eruptions in the past fifteen years, and the mirror effect they create may be contributing to global cooling as well.
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Unfortunately, although Santer correctly identifies the effect of volcanoes as reducing atmospheric temperatures, he is still working under the misconception that human activity
significantly increases temperatures on our planet. Half right is better than nothing.

Volcanoes were implicated in another study that used ice-penetrating radar to discover an active volcano under nearly a mile of Antarctic ice. “Eruptions at this site are unlikely to penetrate the 1.2–2-kilometer-thick overlying ice, but would generate large volumes of melt water that could significantly affect ice stream flow,” according to the study. The discovery explains why ice in the west Antarctic region is melting. But it also undercuts global warming frauds’ arguments about man-made causes of the ice melt. Aside from a small region of Antarctica, the rest of the polar cap is experience record-breaking gains in the amount of ice over the past two years.
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Nothing has changed in the left’s attitude toward climate change. Al Gore is still spouting the same tired rhetoric about the dangers of climate change. Like all climate change advocates, he ignores the fact that temperatures haven’t risen in fifteen years. The NASA and NOAA interpretations of the latest official report on global warming still maintain—against the evidence—that their climate models are accurate and that warming is still occurring. A top MIT climate scientist said otherwise when he found the report had “truly sunk to the level of hilarious incoherence.”
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That should tell you all you need to know about the administration’s climate policy.

One of the reasons the environmentalists have switched from using the term “global warming” to describe the earth’s weather to using “climate change” is that although the temperature decline of the past fifteen years effectively disproves that we’re in a warming period, it’s easier to defend when warming doesn’t happen. No matter what evidence crops up to the contrary, “climate change” is a one-size-fits-all term. Despite the
fact that the environmentalist movement’s computer models have been demonstrated to be unconnected with real-world activity, there’s no way they can be disproven as long as we’re just talking about a change in the weather.
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In spite of the administration’s energy policies, in states where oil and gas production by private companies has been allowed to proceed without unnecessary government intervention, economies are booming and unemployment is at lows that reflect how responsible energy policy could impact the entire country if the leftists in power would step aside. In Texas, for instance, the oil and gas sector is setting new records and exceeding even the wildest of expectations. Oil production in Texas has skyrocketed by more than 140 percent in the past five years. At the same time, because of Obama’s energy policy, the price of West Texas crude oil has increase by more than 150 percent. Even the corrupt International Energy Agency has had to take notice. Because of the dramatic increase in U.S. oil production, spearheaded by Texas and North Dakota, that organization has estimated that within the next year the United States will become the largest oil-producing country in the world.
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One of the reasons for the increase in oil and natural gas production in the United States is fracking. It’s a clean technology that enables energy companies to extract oil and natural gas from shale. States that allow fracking have seen their economies reap economic benefits; states like California that won’t even consider fracking or other technologically available methods of exploiting oil and natural gas reserves continue to risk teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

In the meantime, while developing economies such as those in India and China are radically increasing their CO
₂
output,
the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere has been reduced by 8 percent in the past two years alone. Not that it matters; carbon dioxide is such a small component of the earth’s atmosphere that doubling our output would have no effect whatsoever on the planet’s climate.

Another area in which fracking is proving to be an extraordinarily efficient technology is in the amount of water necessary to produce energy. One million BTUs of energy produced by fracking requires about three gallons of water, the lowest amount of any energy-producing source. Do you know how many gallons of water are required to produce one gallon of ethanol, the environmentalists’ energy source of choice? 15,800! It requires nearly sixteen thousand gallons of water to produce ethanol that will generate a million BTUs, where fracking requires three gallons of water to produce the same results.

Even former leftist EPA head Lisa Jackson had to admit the effectiveness of fracking. In testimony before Congress, Jackson admitted, “I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.” From efficiency in the use of land to reduced negative impact on wildlife, fracking is proving to be one of the most productive technologies ever in producing energy.
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Forced by the overwhelming body of fact, climate change activists have been forced to concede that the average surface temperature on our planet has not increased in a decade and a half. But they describe this as a “pause.” A fifteen-year pause! And during all of that time, so-called greenhouse gases have not stopped being emitted into the atmosphere, and in fact the amounts have increased over that time. The IPCC has known this for at least ten years, but that didn’t stop them from
beating the global warming drum. They still insist that those who actually look at real climate data are “denialists” and that the earth is still facing catastrophic consequences if we don’t stop our current energy production practices.
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The Obama administration’s climate change policy is actually endangering our national security. While China’s state media were releasing that country’s plans to conduct nuclear warfare on the United States, Barack Obama had more pressing concerns. He was issuing an executive order directing the government to prepare for the impact of global warming.

As our enemies become more and more emboldened by Obama’s reducing our military readiness and allowing himself to be pushed around by what amounts to no more than international schoolyard bullies, the president, because of his mistaken notion of what’s happening with our weather, has ordered federal agencies to “work with states to build ‘resilience’ against major storms and other weather extremes” that may be coming by reinforcing everything from bridges to buildings.
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Obama’s energy policy continues to target reducing America’s energy independence to as great a degree as possible. In my opinion, the president has demonstrated that he has no intention of lifting his shutdown of oil exploration and production on federal lands or of stopping his criminal delay of the building of the Keystone XL Pipeline, even as it becomes clear that if he had done so several years ago we would be in a stronger position to stop Vladimir Putin’s attempts to rebuild the Russian empire. In North Dakota, energy production is creating an economic boom that has resulted in a state budget surplus and reduced unemployment to barely measurable levels while increasing wages in even the most menial jobs to upward
of $20 an hour. Those working in the oil fields typically earn five times more than that.
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