Global Warming: Anatomy of a Worldwide Swindle Part 1

Years from now, college classes will look back at the rise of global warming as an issue that swept across the planet. They will examine how a frightening few developed a strategy to make an unproven issue into one of the biggest issues facing the world and became one of the most-costly mistakes in modern times.

Let's go back and examine just how this issue came to become gospel to many throughout the world.

Back in the late 1960's, it became evident that we had serious environmental problems. For decades, the world had not been good environmental stewards disposing of sewage, chemical waste and other byproducts of a burgeoning industrial age wherever was convenient at the time. Industrial effluent was discharged to the nearest body of water with no thought of what would happen downstream. We buried drums of hazardous waste in any available landfill or created them for just such a purpose. At Love Canal, NY, 27,000 tons of highly toxic, corrosive and flammable waste was buried in the remnants of the canal the town was named for. There existed no laws dictating what the proper disposal techniques should be.

The US took the initiative and passed the initial Federal Water Quality Control Act (amended as the Clean Water Act in 1977), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the Clean Air Act. Eventually the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (also known as Superfund) was passed and we started to get a handle on our hazardous waste disposal and emissions problems. Note that the majority of the legislation was signed by a Republican president.

The environment became a major focus of most Western governments as it should have but environmental awareness was long in coming in Eastern nations--especially those under the oppressive thumb of the Soviet Union. We worked to clean up the mess we had made and environmental awareness was at an all-time level. Corporations were fined for mishandling waste and people who broke the laws went to jail. Industry soon got the message that being a good environmental steward was the only option. We were at a point where we had a nice agreement between industry, government and consumers.

Enter the environmental coalitions who found themselves left out in the cold. They lost cache and were essentially ignored. That was unacceptable to them and they needed a new issue. At roughly the same time, a small uptick in global temperatures was recorded by weather scientists that could easily be explained as an anomaly or a cyclical increase when compared to historical data. But environmentalists looked at the data and misconstrued it. They started making noise about holes in the ozone layer and they paid scientists to write stories about impending doom if the issue was not rectified. Newspapers started reporting on the story and they were given gravitas way beyond what was warranted. They were relevant again and people stopped ignoring them.

But how to keep the public interested? How to maintain their position as the go-to people on environmental issues? How to keep their name in the papers? They had one choice; ratchet up the rhetoric and make the issue one in which everyone would made aware and become believers. It was a strategy that called for propaganda and that was easy with a compliant media. They belittled scientists who disagreed with their findings as frauds and worse, pawns of the political right. Grant money flowed to those who wrote studies showing catastrophic and irreversible damage to the planet within one, ten or fifty years. As every new report was released, the dire consequences of inaction were said to be so destructive as to inundate every major coastal city. Those who took a contrarian approach saw grant money dry up like the dust bowl during the early part of last century. Voices who were even remotely sceptical or who showed the flawed thinking for what it was, shoddy science, were quickly buried under an unstoppable torrent of bad press and were not given any credible press outside of the blossoming Internet.

Enter Al Gore. The former VP glommed onto the issue and to the world left and the press (but I'm redundant) they had a voice that would seal the deal. He made a video that was adamant that global warming was man-made, possibly unstoppable and could not be dispelled.

More later.