Teddy James
AFA Journal staff writer
February 2010 – “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Chicken Little spread fear and hysteria with that line from the ancient fable. But obviously the sky wasn’t falling. In today’s debate about global warming, has Chicken Little returned to sow chaos and fear over claims about climate change?
Is there a real danger that the planet will burn up due to carbon dioxide or is this to be lumped with the coming ice age proposed in the 1970s or the mad cow hysteria in Europe that allegedly had the potential to kill 10,000 people but only killed 200? According to the mainstream media, Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change that met in Copenhagen in December, the science is settled and there is no need for debate: Climate change is happening now and will transform our planet within a decade.
Outside the periphery of these alarming scientists, politicians and journalists, credible climate scientists believe there is no danger in climate change but that it is a naturally occurring phenomenon. To give a voice to those who have been muted, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney co-produced and co-directed the documentary Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria.
The scientific costs
The first question that must be tackled is: Is climate change a real, direct danger to the planet and the human race? According to the documentary, “Until recently, those who believed in man-made global warming couldn’t explain the internationally accepted data which proved the earth had cooled and warmed significantly in the last millennium, regardless of the level of fossil fuel use. This climate data showed there was a significant increased temperature in what is known as the ‘Medieval Warm Period.’” This warming is proved by historical records stating that, unlike today, the climate was warm enough for wine to be exported from England, and Vikings settled in what is now ice covered Greenland. This warm period was followed by a “mini ice age.”
Since history proves our planet has a cyclical climate, meaning it goes through cooling and warming cycles, is the climate now simply in another warm period? Several years ago, NASA released a study identifying the five warmest years worldwide since the 1880s. They ranked in descending order: 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2006. Other studies showed that 1998 was the warmest year on record. In 2007, NASA was forced to recall this study. Through independent scientists, it was revealed that 1934 is the hottest year on record. In fact, the 1930s are the hottest decade on record. Yet a 2008 climate study released by NASA stated, “The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008.”
The EPA recently decided that carbon dioxide, CO2, is one of the major components of climate change. The belief is that CO2 is increasing due to extensive fossil fuel usage and is a danger to public health and national security.
Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace, an international activist organization that works for the protection of the environment and endangered species, says, “We are told CO2 is toxic, and a pollutant, or a toxic pollutant, even better. It’s so ironic because anyone who knows anything about biology knows that CO2 is the most important nutrient for all of life. It is the currency of life.”
The film that catapulted global warming to public enemy number one stature was Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, for which Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize. This film is currently being shown to children in many school in the U.S., but is also being shown in all the schools of the United Kingdom. A U.K. father, along with a lawyer skeptical of global warming, went to court over his children being forced to watch the film. During the 2007 trial, Judge Michael Burton found nine significant errors in An Inconvenient Truth. A complete listing of these can be found at www.telegraph.co.uk.
Some of these errors were slight and inconsequential. However, according to Burton, some were “alarmist,” and he ruled it a “political film.” While he did allow for the documentary to continue being shown in schools, he also required that it be shown with guidance. Teachers are required to point out the errors and statements meant to create hysteria.
Arguably one of the greatest errors in the documentary is that the theory of global warming is consistently presented as an undisputed fact. Perhaps the greatest scientific cost of global warming is that, prior to Not Evil Just Wrong, those who spoke against global warming were silenced. Now those who used the peer review method and pointed out flaws in the data of other scientists are finally given a voice and are being heard.
The human cost
Aside from the scientific costs of completely decapitating the scientific process, there is also a human cost to the global warming hysteria. For example, according to www.sourcewatch.org there are 174,000 blue-collar, full-time permanent jobs in the U. S. coal business. Those include mining and transportation of coal and power plant employees. Although this is much lower than the coal employment of the early 20th century, it is still 174,000 families who rely on coal for their livelihoods. Aside from directly relying on coal, other jobs are indirectly related to coal and will be lost if America goes completely “green.”
Not Evil Just Wrong looks in depth at Vevay, Indiana, a town which has everything to lose. The majority of the town works at a local coal-fed power plant just across the state line in Kentucky. The documentary shows several people stating that if coal was cut, the town would die. It would be emptier that the ghost towns left after the gold rush.
With an unstable economy and unemployment already at 10%, would it be wise to immediately cut 174,000 jobs without a new resource in place?
Should America follow the desires of those wishing to stop all use of coal, unemployment is not the only thing that will rise. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle during the presidential campaign, then candidate Barack Obama said, “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” Unmentioned by Obama, the production and cost of goods, the operating cost of business and the cost of sanitation would also rise. The natural result is that the cost of living across the country would “necessarily skyrocket” across the board.
The cap-and-trade system is, in its simplest form, a new tax placed first on facilities that produce greenhouse gases. In this system, the government would set a cap on how many greenhouse units, which the government will define, a facility can produce. If it goes over that cap, the facility must pay the government a set amount of money for every unit it is over for the year. It can also trade greenhouse units with smaller facilities for money or other goods. In either case, the consumer will ultimately pay for the restrictions. This has led some to call the legislation “cap-and-tax.”
Under the banner of reaching a “green economy,” America may look similar to how it did during the Great Depression. However, there will be several differences. In the Great Depression, many families were larger, and thus more self-sufficient. A belief that a large human population is one of the planet’s more dangerous problems runs throughout the climate change mentality.
Diane Francis, writer for the Canadian national paper Financial Post, said in an article, “The ‘inconvenient truth’ overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world. A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.” Francis goes on to say that humans could cut our global population in half by 2075.
She idealizes China’s one-child policy that has resulted in a massive gender imbalance and a policy of forced abortions. Could this happen in America? President Obama recently appointed a science advisor named John Holdren who co-authored a 1977 college textbook which discusses in a positive light the placement of sterilants in drinking water to reduce the American population. Under Holdren’s plan, each couple would be forced to go to the government and apply for the antidote to the sterilant.
The government has already shown it is willing to sacrifice lives on the green altar. Malaria was a killer disease in America before the ’50s. Throughout the 1940s, the U.S. government used a drug called DDT to kill disease-carrying mosquitos. Then, in the ’50s, a woman named Rachel Carson claimed that DDT caused birth defects and breast cancer. Scientists later discredited this claim through rigorous experiments. Carson then alleged that it was a danger to many bird populations. This began a movement that resulted in the 1972 ban of DDT in America, and forcing the World Health Organization to ban it across the globe. Tragically, 137 children in Uganda have died daily from malaria since that time.
Africa has recently begun using DDT again. Since then, deaths from malaria have plummeted. With climate change “science” being challenged every day and scientific discoveries from years ago being debunked, why are we still hearing echos of Chicken Little: “The sky is warming! The sky is warming!” The moral of the story is still the same: Don’t believe everything you hear. 
Not Evil Just Wrong is available at Amazon.com.
