The Daily Plunge

The Little Ice Age was great for skiing, but not so great if you were a European farmer.

While the concept of the event is admirable, which is basically to raise awareness about conserving and protecting our natural resources, some of the event’s supporting organizations hold extreme views that bear scrutiny.

The main beneficiary of the event, the High Country Conservation Center, claims that climate change debate is irrelevant. In other words, if you disagree with the so-called scientific “consensus” shut up! This philosophy flies in the face of the scientific method, essentially stifling scientific inquiry.

While the High Country Conservation Center may claim consensus, there is none, unless you call consensus “everyone who agrees with us.” For more on this attitude among climate-change/global warming true believers and how the numbers are skewed to cause a false alarm about warming, go to the Watts Up With That? blog’s section on Climategate.

Yesterday, the University of California at Santa Barbara released the global climate change findings of one of its geologists: “[UCSB geologist Lorraine Lisiecki] concludes that the pattern of climate change over the past million years likely involves complicated interactions between different parts of the climate system, as well as three different orbital systems. The first two orbital systems are the orbit’s eccentricity, and tilt. The third is ‘precession,’ or a change in the orientation of the rotation axis.”

So there is consensus that the earth’s climate changes; it has been for billions of years. The disparity in opinion is about its cause and relative severity. Some believe it’s a complicated interaction of events directly related to the earth’s orbit and the changing intensity of the sun. The sun, by the way, is a medium sized star which accounts for 99.86 percent of the solar system’s entire mass.

However, according to those who hold the human-caused view of climate change/global warming/global cooling or whatever it is based on current weather patterns, the sun is really a non-factor despite its ubiquitous presence here and its impact on the surrounding planets.

On the Climate Change page at its website, the High Country Conservation Center further states: “Even if you disagree with the consensus of the scientific community, there is something called the Precautionary Principle that dictates that action even without 100% certainty is prudent.”

One wonders if the High Country Conservation Center applies the Precautionary Principle equally to all matters of science, including climate change. The Precautionary Principle cuts both ways, and should not be used as an argument unless the person or organization making it is prepared to be 100 percent consistent in applying it.

Another participating group, called Protect Our Winters, goes a step further. It claims that climate change can be reversed! If climate change were reversed wouldn’t that also be climate change? If we had the power to set the earth’s thermostat, so to speak, who gets to decide what the ideal climate is? The ski areas? The beach resorts? Icelanders? At what point in history do we hit the reset button? 1980? 1985? 1654? 5 million B.C.?

The fact is that if one were able to create the ideal climate in North America (whatever that is), it would affect the climate negatively somewhere else. The system itself is far too complicated to simply “reverse” it and revel in the successful reversal without having to apologize to someone in Asia or Europe about the extra cold weather they can now expect. Thanks for nothing, those who know what’s best for everyone else in the world!

Protect Our Winters also advocates on behalf of the climate policy bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives, but was stalled in the Senate. Most Americans are opposed to the bill, also known as Cap and Trade or Cap and Tax to its more vocal opponents, because it regulates individual consumption and will force energy costs through the roof in favor of inefficient and unproven alternative energy sources.

Most fair-minded people are in favor of conservation and want to protect the environment as much as possible. What irks them is the intervention of a massive centralized and uncaring bureaucracy that is increasingly infringing on their individual liberties while funneling a greater portion of their income into pointless programs and governmental agencies.

Ironically, while the ski resorts support such groups, the policies pursued by those groups will ensure that fewer people have the discretionary income available to ski as they pay more for energy and the ski resorts jack up prices to pay for their increased costs. But that’s how it works in socialist societies; the gap between the haves and have-nots increases until all that’s left is a rich and powerful minority.

For more information, please peruse a history book. I also recommend Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or any of the writings by America’s founders, including The Constitution of the United States of America and The Federalist Papers.