The dam is about to break By Dennis T. Avery When a dam is about to break, the first sign of collapse is a little trickle of water over its top. Recently Geoffrey Lean of London's Telegraph scooped a little trickle of water over the top of the man-made warming dam—which has been holding back human hopes for decades. Lean has been an environmental correspondent for 40 years, and no one had more loudly demanded lowered CO2 emissions "to protect the planet." On April 5, Lean admitted "recent research suggests that climate change might not be as catastrophic as the gloomiest predictions suggest." Not that he'd been wrong, of course; the man-made warming will still be "extreme." It's not much of a back-off, but the continuing pressure of the non-warming will soon crumble the whole rotten blockage into the valley—sweeping terrified Green true believers willy-nilly across the landscape. Lean's statement follows the March 30 issue of the Economist, which admitted that the earth might not be as sensitive to additional CO2 as the climate models had told us. Months earlier, the big German magazine Der Spiegel had "adopted" Fritz Vahrenholt, and his best-selling book, The Cold Sun. That book documented the natural and moderate 1,500-year climate cycle that gave us the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, the Dark Ages, and similar cycles back into prehistory. Did the natural climate cycle also give us our Modern Warming? This is the trillion-dollar question that the media and the EPA refuse to address. They'd counted on not having to address it. After all, they had all the first-world nations standing on the edge of the energy cliff and promising to jump on the count of three. Then it stopped warming. Now the ultimate irony: The public is waiting for the same mainstream media that declared the false emergency to tell us when it's over! Naturally, the "journalists" are waiting as long as possible before admitting their culpability, hoping we will forget or they will retire. The true believers still represent perhaps one-third of our public. The IPCC will unveil its 5th assessment this year, just as thought somebody still cares. The Environmental Protection Agency stands ready to tax cost-effective coal out of American power plants. For what valid purpose? Even so, the game is over. We are the losers, especially the poor. The less skilled in America cannot find jobs. The Third World's even-poorer people cannot get a little kerosene to save their women and children from indoor wood fires and lung cancer. The winners didn't win much beyond those plane tickets to Bali and the chance to preen in front of their "less-sustainable" neighbors. Will there ultimately be penalties against the scammers? What to do about the "scientists" who parlayed computer-modeled "evidence" into a global scare while garnering billions of dollars in grants for themselves? They knew that a Modern Warming must follow the Little Ice Age. Worse were the First-Amendment "journalists" who were charged with protecting us from such trickery. And how about all those well-educated people who told us CO2 warming was too complicated to explain—either because they hadn't bothered to understand it or because they wanted higher taxes for income re-distribution. We can't blame our government, however. Any government will cheerfully accept any excuse to increase its own power and taxing authority. It doesn't matter much whether that government is led by Hugo Chavez, Barack Obama, or Mother Theresa. The late great H.L. Mencken warned us "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." This is a line to remember.
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