RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the Senate’s ongoing confirmation hearings, knee-jerk liberals keep asking President Trump’s appointees – even though the question is totally irrelevant to the secretaries being questioned – about global warming (AGW, for anthropogenic global warming), aka global climate change.  Surprisingly, most of those appointees have affirmed their “belief” in climate change. In the light of the president’s deletion of all mentions of AGW and climate change from the White House website at high noon on January 20, those appointees might want to reconsider their stance.  In affirming the “reality” of AGW, these cabinet appointees buy into the two points that liberal climate fanatics seem to miss, but which President Trump seems to get.

First, when, for a decade, the globe’s temperatures refused to budge, those doctrinaire doomsayers who publicly “believe” in their patently corrupted “climate science” quietly tried to change the subject.  Without making a big deal out of what is, after all, a very big deal, those obsessive climate Gore-clones tried to move away from decrying global warming and toward viewing with alarm their new menace, global climate change.

Their reasoning is simple.  When the globe stopped getting hotter in the late 1990s, and since these facts slipped out despite all that “climate scientists” could do, the view-with-alarmists had to move to a more defensible position.  After all, the globe’s dynamic climate changes every day.  No two days are alike.  Never have been, never will be.  So they can actually tell the “truth” when they point to “climate change.”

These private-sector doomsayers were supported by Obama’s own climate  minions – bought and paid for “experts” working for NASA and NOAA, as well as those over at the Pentagon – and even in the CIA – who had been commanded to buy into the absurd fiction that climate change is America’s greatest threat.  With that “official” position about to change, President Trump’s go-along-to-get-along nominees might want to rethink their position.

The bigger issue these climate-waffling appointees need to address is one the doomsayers never admit to.  President Trump seems to grasp this bigger issue, if only because he has often referred to both AGW as a hoax.  His cabinet nominees should ponder this and pay close attention to the logical fallacy President Trump sees lurking behind the entire issue of climate change.

The only way AGW could possibly be important is if there were just one perfect, ideal global climate that benefits everyone and harms no one.  If you follow the climate fanatics’ flawed logic, that one ideal, perfect global climate was that unnamed benchmark year, sometime in the 1980s.  Those grant-addicted “climate scientists” can’t agree on a benchmark year, but climate fear-mongers act as if any variation from that perfect Year Zero benchmark climate must be a bad change.

The facts tell a different story, one that mocks the very notion of a benchmark climate that we must return to or see the world destroyed.  Instead of going along with out-of-context questions about climate change, President Trump’s appointees ought to present this logical fallacy instead of meekly agreeing with the Democrats’ most climate-focused senators.

Throughout human history, the globe’s climate has changed, often drastically.  Humanity has survived a half-dozen or more ice ages – which ended only when the globe once again grew warmer.  This natural cycle represents true global climate change.  Despite the horror stories offered by climate-changers, humanity has survived ice ages and heat waves, droughts and floods, tornados and hurricanes, typhoons and blizzards.

Humanity has survived – even prospered – while “enduring” climates significantly warmer than today’s.

Human history – when compared to various global climate changes, as shown by Greenland ice cores – shows that we have advanced far more during warming periods than during cool-downs.

The “why” of human progress during warming trends is fairly simple to figure out.  A warmer climate means a longer growing season, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.  Warmer temperatures push the frozen tundra northward, creating more arable land, producing extra food.  This, in turn, creates well fed people who have more free time to innovate.  The Renaissance was the product of a warming climate, while the fall of Roman civilization coincided with a sharp temperature decline.

If you advance the idea that – historically – warmer is better, climate change extremists will ignore civilization’s blessings, instead tying the advance of Western civilization to a variety of evils ranging from chattel slavery to the conquest of indigenous populations, from deforestation to industrial sweat shops.  Count on it.

Setting that kind of knee-jerk reaction aside, the real fallacy of any plan to address climate change is the unprovable assumption that Year Zero – a specific moment-in-time climate – is somehow ideal for all people, everywhere.  There is no such thing as a perfect climate – not for the globe, not even for any particular portion of the globe.  Regardless of climate, some people, cultures, and civilizations will do better because of it, while others will do less well.

For instance, a long-term drought might hurt crops and farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.  But that same drought might lead to forest fires in the nearby Sequoia forests, fires necessary to propagate the next generation of giant redwoods.  In such a warming-driven drought, farmers suffer, but tree-huggers triumph.  Those same warmer summers would help northern Canadian grain farmers by extending their growing season but would hurt Australian sheep ranchers by parching Australia’s already arid outback.

President Trump’s nominees should keep this in mind.  Winners and losers result from every shift of global climate.  If the climate were somehow, miraculously, to refuse to change, there would still be winners and losers from that climate stability.

Over the long history of humanity’s time on Earth, the then-current climate has always worked out well for some, while it didn’t work out so well for others.  Both climate advocates and cabinet nominees should keep this in mind.

Ned Barnett is owner of Las Vegas-based Barnett Marketing Communications.  He is the author of a dozen books on professional communications, which he has taught at several universities.  Primarily, he works with conservative causes and organizations, as well as with start-up businesses and high-tech and health care businesses.