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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 2, 2008
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Snow fell on London this last week, a beautiful blanket of snow -- the first to fall in the month of October since the year of grace 1922 -- while the Mother of Parliaments gave third reading to an extraordinary piece of legislation, which will put a huge new bureaucracy in place to monitor and fight global warming, sucking taxes from a shrinking British economy.This is an example of what is now called, in urban parlance, the "Gore effect," after the Nobel-prize-winner and former U.S. vice-president. It is defined as, "The phenomenon that leads to record cold temperatures wherever Al Gore goes to deliver an important statement on global warming, or by extension, to sharp temperature drops wherever a major discussion of global warming takes place." The phenomenon was first noticed on Jan. 15, 2004, when Mr. Gore railed in New York against the Bush administration's indifference to his railing. The city that day experienced one of its coldest days on record. It was noted in Australia, in November 2006, when Mr. Gore arrived in the late antipodean spring, together with a remarkable cold front and a late-season boon for the ski resorts. It was noticed again last May, during an international conference on global warming in Lima. For the duration of the conference, Peru experienced a cold spell. Pure coincidence, I'm sure, although the general worldwide trend to cooler temperatures, and accompanying cold weather patterns, has a perfectly obvious explanation: "It's the sunspot cycle, stupid." The earth's climate has, for some time, been observed to track only a little behind solar magnetic field trends. We did indeed have global warming for the duration of the last solar "max," peaking in 1998. We have now plunged into the succeeding "min," in which sunspots haven't been showing at all (for the first time in almost a century). For all the souls who live down here below, on the same earth that has survived so many election cycles, this is rather bad news. It should be obvious, to the sane, that increasing temperatures are a net blessing, up to some reasonable point, for life requires heat, just as plant life requires carbon dioxide. (A quick comparison of tropical rainforest with arctic tundra will help to confirm that generalization, though perhaps water supply should be mentioned in passing.) Decreasing temperatures mean decreasing crop yields, and the sudden need for thicker clothing and heating fuels. In the main, global warmings are a boon, global coolings are a bust. Humans with the means generally vote with their feet: travelling towards warm, and away from cold, as Canadians perhaps understand better than most. Even the Greenland Eskimo would have migrated south, according to the first modern European explorers who made contact with them. They didn't, however, because apparently some Inuit-speaking Al Gore had arisen among them. This hypothetical soi-disant genius had convinced them that in summer it must get colder the farther you go south. It was "settled science." The proof? As everyone could see, all the ice flows south in the summer. Imagine how cold it must be down there! Life is hard enough -- and will become hard enough through the coming cold if the sun does not renew its spots -- without all the soi-disant geniuses of our political order, building their bureaucratic castles in the sand, their castellated igloos in the snow, with our tax money. They offer "change," "hope," and any number of plausible-sounding arguments for the continued expansion of the vast machinery to equip us against the various threats that afflicted us yesterday -- each of which leaves us less well equipped to confront the challenges of tomorrow. It is our own fault when they succeed. For we are stupid, and we fall for mere words, and arguments that are pure rhetorical blather. The British Parliament is on the verge of an act of ruinous stupidity with its global warming legislation. The United States is on the verge of electing a man whose sweet promises include an end to rising sea levels, and the change you can believe in. Should he win, and should his party form the supermajority in the U.S. Congress that is currently predicted in the polls, we can be assured of at least four years of American self-destruction -- probably on a scale beyond that of the Carter presidency -- with consequences to the entire free world. Look at all the souls who gather in the mass rallies for this eloquent demagogue! We have seen this kind of thing so many times before in history. People believe because they want to believe. But when their faith is transferred from God, to politicians; and when their rational judgment is suspended, from the illusion of hope -- well. My own earthly prayer is a simple one, that Truman will somehow defeat Dewey, in this instance, letting us return to our real problems, with whatever our wallets still contain. Hear us, O Lord, in heaven thy dwelling place. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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