Doomsday Stories
The human race is heading for ecological disaster because of its
increasing and all-pervasive assaults on our air, water, and
land. Pollution is everywhere. Our industrial civilization is
heading toward environmental collapse, and mankind's fate hangs
in the balance.
Does this scare you out of your wits? It's intended to do just
that. This scenario from a second-rate horror movie is passed
off as scientific fact by a new breed of doomsday prophet, the
radical environmentalist. Read and take heed--the end is near.
Here is an example of a typical environmentalist scare story:
"The present course of environmental degradation, if unchecked,
threatens the survival of civilized man. Yet the evidence is
overwhelming that the way in which we now live on the earth is
driving its thin, life-supporting skin, and ourselves with it,
to destruction." Environmentalists' doomsday predictions would
be comical, if it wasn't for the fact that these scare stories
have frightened local, state, and federal legislators into
creating a massive, poisonous layer of regulations.
Environmental regulations violate our property rights, restrict
our personal liberties, threaten our standard of living, and
throw thousands of Americans out of work.
Environmentalists concoct end-of-the-world scenarios all the
time. These predictions are calculated to scare us, and usually
turn out to be pure fantasy, exaggerations, or deliberate
distortions of the facts.
The mother of all doomsday stories, of course, is global
warming. For over thirty years, environmentalists have scared us
with this one. It seems that car exhausts, forest clearing,
power plants, and other industrial activities increase carbon
dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Increased carbon dioxide will
allegedly create a barrier in the atmosphere that traps the
Earth's heat, creating a "greenhouse effect" As a result, the
Earth's temperature will rise, causing glaciers to melt, seas to
rise, worldwide flooding, and calamity to the human race.
As expected, there are many reputable scientists who think this
theory is nonsense. Other scientists have their own theories
that totally contradict global warming.
"Kenneth E.F. Watt, professor of environmental studies at the
University of California at Davis, theorized that an excess of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to global cooling,
not warming. Watt argued that carbon dioxide will heat tropical
oceans, leading to additional evaporation. This will produce
denser and more widespread clouds at high elevations, which will
decrease the amount of sunlight that penetrates the atmosphere.
Some scientists believe that the Earth is warming, but attribute
the change to causes other than carbon dioxide production.
Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of
Sciences, suggested that solar activity may have caused global
warming, and Reid Bryson, director of the Institute of
Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
believes that dust and smoke are the primary causes of climate
change."
There are also many scientists who question whether the Earth
has gotten warmer over the last hundred years.
"Temperature measurements may be biased by the effects of
urbanization; weather stations are located in urban areas, where
heat-absorbing buildings and pavement can raise the readings one
to two degrees above the surrounding atmosphere. After
correcting for the "urban" effect, a study by the National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that
there was no statistically significant evidence of warming in
the United States [italics added]. Andrew R. Solow, a
statistician at Woods Hole, pointed out that because monitoring
stations tend to be located on land rather than oceans and more
are in the Northern than in the Southern Hemisphere, temperature
readouts are not really global at all. Ten years of weather
satellite data have also shown no evidence of global warming."
There's little valid evidence of global warming. Instead,
there's solid evidence that the Earth has not been warming.
Since 1978, a temperature-measuring satellite called Tiros II
has been orbiting the Earth 24-hours a day. Guess what? The
satellite's measurements showed no significant increase or
decrease in the Earth's temperature. Scientific temperature
measurements from Tiros II show no global warming trend in the
last fifteen years. In other words, global warming is a myth.
Many eminent scientists agree that global warming and other
environmental scare stories are just unproven theories. Prior to
the Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992,
scientists from around the world issued the Heidelberg Appeal.
In the Appeal, scientists asked government leaders at the summit
to be careful. They asked the leaders not to make serious
environmental decisions based on pseudoscientific arguments or
false and non-relevant data. More than 250 scientists, including
27 Nobel prize winners, issued the Appeal on June 1, 1992.
Today, 2,300 scientists from 79 countries, including 65 Nobel
prize winners, have signed the Appeal.
Former governor of Washington state and former chairwoman of the
Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, also thought that
global warming is nonsense. In her wonderful 1993 book,
"Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened To Common Sense?,"
she said that it was unlikely that carbon dioxide would cause
any significant changes in worldwide temperatures. Jeffrey
Salmon is executive director of the Washington-based George C.
Marshall Institute. In the July 1993 issue of Commentary, he
flatly stated that he found no valid scientific evidence to
prove that manmade gases are causing the Earth to warm from a
greenhouse effect.
In short, we are being conned. Government takes billions of tax
dollars out of our pocket to enforce massive environmental
regulations that, in most cases, protect you from nothing. I
could describe many other eco-scare stories, but I think I've
made my point. These doomsday prophesies are either distortions
or exaggerations of unproven facts. Unfortunately, radical
environmentalists and the liberal media spout this eco-nonsense
so often that we start to believe them. That's the problem and
the danger. Panicked, gullible Congressmen believe the scare
stories and then pass environmental regulations that strangle
our economy and destroy our property rights.
It is time that we see these environmental scare stories for
what they are -- a tactic by left-leaning environmental radicals
to destroy the thing they hate most. What they hate most is our
liberty, property rights, and the free-market that can make life
for human beings on this planet a joy instead of a brutal
struggle for existence.