The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 5 of 11)

Greenhouse Gasbaggery : /p>

For many years, my wife's cousin worked as a meteorologist at the regional weather center located in the Kansas City metro area until his retirement in the late 1990s. Much of his career occurred before the introduction of the sophisticated weather tracking equipment and satellite technology in use today. Meteorologists of his day relied heavily on historical data and experience to predict weather trends and severe storms. At family gatherings, he would regale us with many interesting and often humorous anecdotes about the wildly unpredictable world of weather forecasting. The thing he stressed over and over was his belief that certitude about global weather conditions and their consequences was a characteristic that people in his profession should disdain.

When I asked him about global warming his response was predictable. He scoffed at the notion that current climactic conditions warranted the panicked responses emanating from the media, academia, environmental extremists and political hacks like Al Gore. He cited similar weather conditions from the past, i.e., the Dust Bowl era of the '30s that demonstrate that weather patterns are cyclical in nature and that historical evidence supports their reoccurrence every 60 years or so.

p>It suddenly occurred to me why schools in this country don't teach logic anymore. If they did and took it seriously, much of what passes as science would need to undergo severe revision or be discarded entirely. In the '70s, I recall seeing Paul Ehrlich preaching gloom and doom on The Tonight Show , and calling for draconian remedies to thwart the plague of over-population. In his book, The Population Bomb , he made dire predictions about global starvation brought on by famines caused by too many people living on the planet. Of course, none of his prognostications came to fruition, but he remains unrepentant. After being completely discredited on that issue, he is back promoting a new wave of hysteria by jumping on the global warming bandwagon. Most of the folks promoting this madness begin with deeply flawed premises from which they derive equally flawed conclusions. How many times do quacks like Paul Ehrlich, radical environmentalists and their willing lackeys in the media have to be proven wrong before we tell them to do the rest of us a favor by assimilating themselves forever into the temporal cosmos they so fervently worship? br> -- Rick Arand br> Lee's Summit, Missouri /p> p>

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