Though I’ve touched here and there on the duplicity of environmental activists as they promote their theory about global warming, this matter bears further exploration because it provides the missing piece of the puzzle to understand why opinion leaders on the Left act the way they do; denying the obvious and/or ignoring contradictory evidence to promote the fiction that man, and man alone, is primarily responsible for global warming. 

Three interrelated reasons explain why they do this:  power, prestige, and money.

Power:  As Defenders of the Environment, these individuals occupy a unique position of power and importance.  Their words shape the public debate, and through that debate they try to influence public policy.  The more their policies are put into practice, the more power they garner.  They don’t need to be an elected official, because if they are successful, elected officials will look to them for their policy direction. 

But the quest for power doesn’t automatically mean that an individual must lie (or to be more generous, refuse to put forward a completely honest view) in order to occupy this position of influence.  I will argue, however, that the unique nature of the global warming debate requires them to promote a singular world view regardless of the evidence to support it, and in spite of the growing evidence against it.  The decision tree looks something like this:

If global warming is only a theoretical concern, and not a concrete, existing problem, then there is no reason to make new policy and/or divert current resources to this crisis.  Thus, it must be an existing problem that is significant, and growing, or other competing problems will take center stage.

Moreover, the solution to this existing, significant, and growing problem must involve a restructuring or redirection of society’s resources.  If existing policies, processes and/or institutions can take care of the problem, there is no need for an outside entity to lead the effort or participate in any meaningful way.  Thus, the solution must, by definition, demand a “new way” of doing business, led by individuals who are closely attuned to the unique new dynamics surrounding that issue.  In short, their view must be that the very nature of the problem, as well as the unique features of its solution, requires individuals like them to play strong central roles.

If the facts at hand don’t conform to this scenario, then they must be massaged, distorted, or disregarded all together in order to preserve, protect, or expand their power.

Prestige:  Closely related to the quest for power is the importance of prestige.  It is certainly possible to define a problem and/or manufacture a solution that is entirely within the political mainstream.  Rather than supplant existing processes and institutions, a group or individual could seek to “reinvent” them in a more efficient form.  The goals and objectives might remain the same, but the manner in which they are pursued would be altered.  Or, the process and/or institution could remain unchanged, but the goals could be tweaked so that resources are divided differently among its constituent parts.  In either case the effort is designed to strengthen the existing system, not replace it.

For radical environmentalists, however, such an option would never be seriously considered.  In addition to seeking power, they are also part of a social fabric that views itself as separate and distinct from the individuals managing current institutions and processes.  Gaining the respect, approval, or admiration of these current leaders would alienate them from their peers and call their own motives into question.  If Big Oil, supported by mainstream Republicans and other ROWG’s (rich old white guys) embrace their ideas, then there is either something intrinsically wrong with their proposals — or worse, their peers will conclude that they’ve compromised their principles and joined the enemy.  Big Oil, Republicans, and ROWG are the problem.  Bringing them down as they save the environment will not only enhance these activists’ power, it will elevate their personal prestige within the only group that matters; their fellow Left-wing radicals, and the Hollywood groupies who hang on their every word.

Money:  Last, but certainly not least, is the issue of money.  Those without power don’t get the funding. That is the ultimate, self-reinforcing goal. 

It takes money to run a think tank, operate a website, travel around the country or pay one’s own personal bills.  Those with power can persuade (read: extort) elected officials to help subsidize their activities with federal funds, either in an attempt to buy off more aggressive opposition that could threaten these officials’ own power base, or as a way of stoking the flames if the party in power is sympathetic to their cause and wants to create political mischief for their opponents. 

Also, the more perceived power and prestige an organization has, the more likely it is to attract private donations from like-minded individuals or sympathetic foundations.  Either way, money is the fuel that keeps things going, and raising more money is always a primary concern of every social activist on either side of the political spectrum.

For those who seek power and prestige but have not yet attained it, money becomes the driving force in shaping their message.  To illustrate this point by borrowing from the political arena, if a group arises in opposition to the policies of President Bush, it will not serve its own best interests by conceding major points in that debate even if the evidence is overwhelming.  The Bush tax cut policy has swelled the public coffers beyond even the most optimistic projections, just as the Administration said it would.  Organizations formed in opposition to Bush cannot concede this point, or they will alienate the red meat radicals who viscerally hate the president and will tolerate no praise for him whatsoever. Their funds will then go to another competing group that remains true to the message that everything Bush does is corrupt, incompetent, or stupid, and they’ll be left panhandling for dollars to pay the light bill.

Which brings us back to the issue of global warming.  To illustrate my point about the inherent dishonesty of the Left-wing activists who address this subject, I have to look no further than a document from the Natural Resources Defense Council that was last revised on January 9, 2006.²  As Defenders of the Environment, they had access to the same NASA, U.S. government, and other material I previously cited — and more. The information they convey on their website is, in their opinion, the most accurate and balanced view of the global warming issue presently available. 

Below is a sample of their work in the form of questions and answers they posed, accompanied by my observations.  The questions and answers are direct quotes from the NRDC; the observations and occasional “translations” are entirely mine.

Q: What causes global warming?

A: Carbon dioxide and other air pollution that is collecting in the atmosphere like a thickening blanket, trapping the sun's heat and causing the planet to warm up. Coal-burning power plants are the largest U.S. source of carbon dioxide pollution — they produce 2.5 billion tons every year. Automobiles, the second largest source, create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually.

Here's the good news: technologies exist today to make cars that run cleaner and burn less gas, modernize power plants and generate electricity from nonpolluting sources, and cut our electricity use through energy efficiency. The challenge is to be sure these solutions are put to use.

Observation: What causes global warming, according to the NRDC?  Not the sun.  Not the Earth as it moves through its natural cycles.  The only factor worth mentioning is coal burning power plants and cars.  But not just any power plants or cars — only those operated in the good old U.S. of A.  China, India, Western Europe, Latin America, Russia and the remainder of the world don’t rate a mention. One can only conclude that their power plants and cars must be cleaner and more efficient than the smokestack belching, gas guzzling monsters blighting our country, making them the model technology the NDRC challenges us to adopt.

Q: Is the earth really getting hotter?

A: Yes. Although local temperatures fluctuate naturally, over the past 50 years the average global temperature has increased at the fastest rate in recorded history. And experts think the trend is accelerating: the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990. Scientists say that unless we curb global warming emissions, average U.S. temperatures could be 3 to 9 degrees higher by the end of the century.

Observation: Not only is the data ignored showing that average temperatures have actually stabilized over the past few decades rather than increased, we are now threatened with the possibility of a 3 to 9 degree temperature increase by 2100.  If a one degree increase doesn’t get the public’s attention, make it 3-4 degrees.  If 3-4 degrees isn’t scary enough to foster the desired policy changes to curb global warming, suggest that 6.5 degrees is a real possibility.³  If a 6.5 degree temperature increase doesn’t do the job, toss out 9 degrees to get your point across. 

And, when you make this claim, don’t tell anybody where you got that number.  You’re the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Like the anchorman in Rome commenting on the crowds at Pope John Paul II’s funeral, if you say it’s 9 degrees, then I’m sure you must have a real good reason for making that statement.  Otherwise, you’d just be pulling a number out of the air.

This might be a good point to resurrect a July 18, 2004 article from Telegraph.co.uk⁴ that points out a tiny little fact that somehow has continued to elude the NDRC in the months and years that followed.  According to the article, “Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.”  The article continues by making note of the following:

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes. Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years."

. . .

The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sun-spots signalled a cold period – which could last up to 50 years – but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer . . . The research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist. "Global warming – at least the modern nightmare version – is a myth," he said. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policymakers are not. "Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide – the principal so-called greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock."

Continuing with the Q&A from the Natural Resources Defense Council, another question is asked and answered.

Q. Are warmer temperatures causing bad things to happen?

A: Global warming is already causing damage in many parts of the United States. In 2002, Colorado, Arizona and Oregon endured their worst wildfire seasons ever. The same year, drought created severe dust storms in Montana, Colorado and Kansas, and floods caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in Texas, Montana and North Dakota. Since the early 1950s, snow accumulation has declined 60 percent and winter seasons have shortened in some areas of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington.

Of course, the impacts of global warming are not limited to the United States. In 2003, extreme heat waves caused more than 20,000 deaths in Europe and more than 1,500 deaths in India. And in what scientists regard as an alarming sign of events to come, the area of the Arctic's perennial polar ice cap is declining at the rate of 9 percent per decade. 

Observation:  It might come as a bit of a shock to the “Dust Bowl” survivors of the 1930s that droughts are a unique phenomenon associated with early 21st century global warming.  Traveling a little farther back in time, there are a number of Central and South American civilizations that completely collapsed in the face of prolonged, severe drought. I guess the Mayans brought it on themselves by building all those coal-burning factories to help build the SUVs they drove that put so much CO2 into the atmosphere it killed all the rainforests.

As for the non-melting melting ice caps, I’m reminded of Ted Danson’s predictions in the mid-1980s that the oceans would die within 10 years if we didn’t do something drastic — and do it now — to clean them up.  Well, we didn’t undertake a deep-water Manhattan Project, and 10 years later the ocean was still alive.  Just as it is today.

So what do you do, as a good liberal environmentalist concerned about man’s incessant ravaging of the planet when your ludicrous prediction is exposed for the fraud it really is?  Reevaluate your data?  (No. Who needs data when you speak from the heart?)  Rethink your position?  (What’s to re-think?  It’s how I feel, who I am, and I need to be true to myself.)  No, you simply make another one that’s virtually identical to the first, but just leave off the date-certain for the apocalyptic event so your enemies can’t pin you down.

Q: Is global warming making hurricanes worse?

A: Global warming doesn't create hurricanes, but it does make them stronger and more dangerous. Because the ocean is getting warmer, tropical storms can pick up more energy and become more powerful. So global warming could turn, say, a category 3 storm into a much more dangerous category 4 storm. In fact, scientists have found that the destructive potential of hurricanes has greatly increased along with ocean temperature over the past 35 years.

Observation: What scientists have also found is that a lot more people live along the coasts in 2006 than they did in 1971.  So when a hurricane struck the Gulf coast in 1971, there were fewer people and less property to kill or destroy.  ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN aren’t in the habit of sending reporters to a deserted beach to lament the toppling of a half-dozen trees, unless George Bush personally cut them down to make way for another Wal-Mart.  But put 20,000 people there 35 years later, and someone is likely to get killed, just as a lot of buildings will lose their roofs. Ergo, the storms of 2006 are “more destructive.”

Furthermore, the claim that the ocean is getting warmer (an affirmative statement) is based on the assumption that we have a thorough, multi-decade database⁵ upon which to make this comparison.  There is no such database detailed, accurate, and comprehensive enough to make this claim.  Nevertheless, having stated emphatically that the ocean is “getting warmer,” the NRDC dutifully lists the possibilities that maybe, might, and could perhaps happen because of this rock solid foundation upon which they base their judgment — all of which are dire and extreme.

There’s never been a hurricane as destructive as Katrina in 2006, except for the one that wiped out Galveston Texas in 1900, killing 6000 people, and a few dozen others here and there over the past several centuries. These freakish, abnormally powerful storms couldn’t be part of the natural cycle of sunspot and wind current activity.  No, that wouldn’t make any sense.  Global warming is responsible for it all, even the ones that happened before the Industrial Revolution. 

Q: What country is the largest source of global warming pollution?

A:  The United States. Though Americans make up just 4 percent of the world's population, we produce 25 percent of the carbon dioxide pollution from fossil-fuel burning — by far the largest share of any country. In fact, the United States emits more carbon dioxide than China, India and Japan, combined. Clearly America ought to take a leadership role in solving the problem. And as the world's top developer of new technologies, we are well positioned to do so — we already have the know-how.

Translation:  In case you missed the point in our opening question, the U.S. is to blame for all the bad things that are maybe going to possibly happen. We could solve the problem tomorrow if we wanted to, but Dick Cheney and his oil buddies don’t want you to drive cleaner cars.  And, as far as our assertion that “the United States emits more carbon dioxide than China, India and Japan, combined,” please don’t look too closely at our methodology in making this statement.  China has been a backwards, largely agrarian society for the past 60 years.  A few years ago it began to undertake a massive industrialization effort that has already driven up the worldwide price of oil to feed its voracious energy appetite, and this trend is going to continue — and accelerate — in the decades to come.  They aren’t building state-of-the-art, emission-reducing factories, so their growth will be accompanied by significant increases in the same nasty pollution that U.S. factories routinely clean through sophisticated scrubber technology. 

Since China’s industrialization will add significantly to worldwide, global-warming pollution, let’s force the U.S. to cut back on their use of these same natural resources, since our 25% gluttony is only benefiting 4% of the world’s population. (We’ll conveniently ignore the fact that not everything produced in the U.S. stays in the U.S., and is in fact sent as aid or trade to the rest of the world).  Besides, it isn’t fair for the U.S. and the greedy capitalists who run it to be so powerful. 

Even though Marxism has failed every time it’s been tried, China deserves a chance to make its Marxist government work. And it would work just fine if the U.S. didn’t hog all the world’s resources. (Again, we’ll ignore the other possible explanation that its inherently-repressive, socialist centralized government stifles their ability to compete with the American capitalist system).  So, in keeping with the spirit of the Kyoto Treaty that exempts China and other third world countries from the same restrictions it seeks to impose on the U.S., we’ll reinforce, once again, the belief that the U.S. is to blame for global warming, so the draconian prescriptions we offer to solve the “problem” will seem reasonable and fair.

I think that about sums it up, except to reiterate that George Bush wants you all to die, and you would too if it wasn’t for Bill Clinton and the NRDC.  While noting that the Bush Administration has supported some environmental initiatives, in the eyes of the NRDC they continue to fall short in a number of key areas.  As one illustration, the NRDC says that, “Stricter efficiency requirements for electric appliances will also help reduce pollution. One example is the 30 percent tighter standard now in place for home central air conditioners and heat pumps, a Clinton-era achievement that will prevent the emission of 51 million metric tons of carbon — the equivalent of taking 34 million cars off the road for one year. The new rule survived a Bush administration effort to weaken it when, in January 2004, a federal court sided with an NRDC-led coalition and reversed the administration's rollback.”⁶

Which brings the NRDC to the main thrust of its public education efforts.  Having established that man is the principal agent of global warming, and that the U.S. in particular is the principal culprit, and that the Bush Administration and Big Business are the chief obstacles to sensible environmental policy, the NRDC tackles the ultimate question:  

Q: What can I do to help fight global warming?

A: There are many simple steps you can take right now to cut global warming pollution. Make conserving energy a part of your daily routine. Each time you choose a compact fluorescent light bulb over an incandescent bulb, for example, you'll lower your energy bill and keep nearly 700 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air over the bulb's lifetime. By opting for a refrigerator with the Energy Star label — indicating it uses at least 15 percent less energy than the federal requirement — over a less energy-efficient model, you can reduce carbon dioxide pollution by nearly a ton in total.

But most of all, the Natural Resources Defense Council pointed out that you can “join NRDC in our campaign against global warming.”

Translation: give us money, and add to our numbers to enhance our power, and we’ll keep fighting the fight for responsible environmental policy that ignores a solid, scientific basis for believing that anything other than U.S. citizens are chiefly to blame for warming the planet anywhere from 1 to 9 degrees.

It’s easy to conclude that the only reason the NRDC — and other equally myopic self-proclaimed environmentalist groups — hold tight to their apocalyptic vision that global warming essentially arises from coal burning factories and automobile emissions, is that without these scares, they’d have to leave their think tank and go find a real job.

After all, who’s going to give them money to fight a problem that may not exist, and if it does, is the result of natural processes beyond our control?

Endnotes

1. If you Google this topic you’ll find plenty of references to what might happen if sea levels rise, but few analyses of how much the oceans have actually risen since the late 1800s.  In fact, if you read the Wikipedia article on this subject in its entirety, you discover that it’s not clear whether any rise (or fall) in sea level has occurred to any significant degree, and equally important, whether any changes are outside the range of normal climatic variation.

2. http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/f101.asp#1 

3. “… climatologists estimate a range of global warming possibilities … from 2 degrees Fahrenheit to 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100 …” (Craig Ander-son, PhD and Brad Bushman, PhD, February 1998 issue of the American Psychological Association); “… most researchers expect greenhouse gases to warm the planet by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 100 years.” (Associated Press as reported in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal 9/27/97 http://www.lubbock online.com/news/092897/study.htm); “A hundred years from now, we may have caused a three- or four-degree Fahrenheit rise in average temperatures.” (Environ-Minute Climate Script, produced in cooperation with the National Safety Council and made possible by the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, broadcast 11/28/97
http://www.nsc.org/ehc/MINUTE/em971128.htm)

4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/ixnewstop.html Telegraph.co.uk “The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame” By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah  Filed: 18/07/2004

5. Which should actually be “multi-century” to discern any real trends, but since we don’t have any real data that precedes the latter half of the 19^th century, man will simply announce by fiat that history begins in the late 1800s and use that as the basis for reaching definite conclusions.  One final note.  Don’t let anyone tell you that we can drill core samples in polar ice and get an accurate record going back thousands of years.  Core samples can tell us a lot of extremely useful information about the environment, but they can’t tell us that the average worldwide temperature in the year 907 was 78.2 instead of 77.65 degrees.

6. The reasoning behind the Bush Administration’s “effort to weaken” the law was a bit more complicated than the NRDC’s facile analysis suggests, as reported by the Energy Information Administration: Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/eff/aircond.html). Rather than a cut-and-dry battle between big business profits and the little guy’s welfare, they state “In evaluating the effectiveness of any energy policy on future energy market trends, there exist uncertainties that can greatly impact the conclusions derived from the analysis. Future macroeconomic growth, energy crises, and rate of technological advances can significantly alter the conclusions of any analysis of energy policy. Other energy policies can also have a big impact on the results presented from this analysis. If, for example, a policy aimed at incorporating the social costs of energy and the impacts on the environment were introduced simultaneously to those presented here, the results could change dramatically. When comparing the analyses provided in this report with other analyses performed on the same subject matter, it is important to keep in mind that different input assumptions and future growth patterns can significantly affect the projected results of the policy in question. In evaluating the air conditioner and heat pump standards, for example, input assumptions, economic growth forecasts, and modeling techniques all contribute to the variability in estimates of policy effectiveness across different analyses. In the NEMS residential energy demand module, factors such as increasing square footage in new construction and increasing saturation of central air conditioning over the forecast horizon both contribute to increasing demand for electricity for space heating and cooling. Variations in these factors, as well as changes in energy prices, can have a significant impact on the amount of energy demanded in the future.”   But of course, little details like ‘does the policy actually make sense?’, or ‘will these regulations actually produce the desired outcome?’, shouldn’t interfere with one’s good intention to save the environment.  Besides, the Supreme Court agreed with the NRDC, and this shows that the Bush Administration was wrong.  Everyone knows that the Supreme Court is the final, unbiased, arbiter of the truth—except when they acted in a highly partisan way to steal the 2000 election from its rightful winner, Al Gore.