Even those who believe that emissions of carbon dioxide are causing unacceptable warming of the earth — and frankly the evidence for that is thus far less than convincing — should be ashamed of President Obama’s demagogic arguments for action.
The fact sheet on the president’s speech this week said carbon “pollution” is “contributing to higher rates of asthma attacks and more frequent and severe floods and heat waves.” His measures would “protect the health of our children.”
“For the children” usually means the orator has run out of good arguments.
It’s the first assertion we’ve seen that carbon dioxide produces or worsens asthma. The Environmental Protection Agency has never asserted that. The only way a child could be hurt by carbon dioxide, essential for plant life and produced in human breath, would be by being hit in the head with a block of dry ice — frozen carbon dioxide.
In a second badly misnamed “fact sheet” — this one specifically for Massachusetts — the White House seeks to blame “climate change” for tropical storm Irene, emergency room visits due to heat stress in 2009 (it did not include “facts” on whether that was up or down from previous years or even since 2009) and 2,380 cases of Lyme disease.
Yes to hear the Obama administration tell it, we are indeed simply doomed.
However, most international and national agencies have found no increase in storm activity. Warming? The alarmist British Meteorological Office finds no warming since 1998 while the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by 7.4 percent.
Doomsday scenarios depend largely on unreliable computer models whose builders have no explanation for such conflicts.
Professor John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, a skeptic, calculates that a 50 percent reduction in annual U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050 — a far greater reduction than Obama seeks — would, according to current models, produce in 2100 a reduction in average temperature of 0.13 degree Fahrenheit.
Without believable computer models, it’s senseless to follow Obama down the road of economic self-mutilation.
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