Is it Safe?

I had just moved to a new neighborhood. I knew no one or anything really and was only eleven when I made a great discovery that changed my life. I was going nowhere with this paper route and thought my best days obviously were over – especially early in the morning, every weekend when the Sunday edition was so heavy. I just shook my head as I folded papers and wondered, “Why the hell do I do this while everyone else sleeps?”

About then a junk insert that fell out of the paper, inauspicious as it was, nearly went unnoticed. The crafty headline went something like this: Make money writing about anything or even nothing. With your very own all-purpose essay format even you can be a government expert!

That is when I learned that there is too much bullshit in the world. Are you worried about too much fat or meat or SALT or diet Coke in your diet or too many parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, etc.? I will prove it is all BS right here and now by using the article above about the reasons why the ‘Scientists can’t agree whether salt is killing us’ to expose below the reasons why global warming is nothing but a hoax (it is simply a Leftist scare tactic to take over the economy). And, proving it is BS is as simple as exchanging the word ‘salt’ in the article above with CO2 or global warming, to wit:

For years, the federal government has advised Americans that humanity must stop using fossil fuel, and that this consumption is warming the planet with disastrous consequences for the Earth and all living things on the Earth.

However, unknown to many consumers urged to buy electric cars and pay higher taxes to subsidize more expensive alternative fuels, this longstanding warning about too much warming has come under assault by scientists who say that a higher concentration of atmospheric CO2 is without risk.

Moreover, according to studies published in recent years by pillars of the academic community, the lower utilization of fossil fuel recommended by the government might actually be dangerous. “There is no longer any valid basis for the current warnings about releasing too much CO2,” said Wagathon, a blog contributor at ‘Climate Etc.’ and one of many non-government scientists involved in exposing the global warming hoax. “So why are we still scaring people about global warming?”

Nevertheless, the debate over CO2 is among the most contentious in the field of climate, and other scientists, including the leadership of Western academia and Western governments continue to support the decades-old warning about too much CO2 in the air. The result is that as the federal government prepares its influential EPA Guidelines and crafts new energy policies for the rest of us to live by, bureaucrats confront a quandary: They must either retract one of their oldest climate change commandments or overlook prominent new doubts about the global warming hypothesis.

The EPA Guidelines cover an array of power plant energy generation issues including the use of coal, oil, natural gas and ethanol. They have broad effects on the wellbeing of all Americans, shape the utilization of scarce resources in the economy, increase the costs of basic goods and services enjoyed by all, guide advertisers and serve as a touchstone for reams of global warming research.

Wagathon said that as a scientific skeptic who has been branded by the global warming establishment as a denier, he has been trying to stay neutral in what he considers the “hot buttonest” of topics.

“When you are making recommendations for 300 million people, you have to be concerned about any data that suggests harm,” Wagathon said. Climate change has become a Left versus right issue and some politicians on the right said that the federal guidelines would consider comments from the public and scientific skeptics who question the advice of government scientists. Unfortunately, known mostly for their general incompetence, modern-day politicians on both sides of every issue generally are expected only to reaffirm the status quo such as the current convenient belief in global warming, despite the obvious ideological biases that exist, if it serves their own personal agenda.

No matter what the government comes up with on global warming, however, Americans may be left confused. The scientific question remains: How much is too much?

There is one area of consensus: Both sides agree that too much fossil fuel, especially for people who are concerned about pollution, can be dangerous. The critical disagreement concerns how to define “too much.”

Under the current government guidelines, too much is more than 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 – the current amount of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. For people in the developed world and especially in US (the most prosperous nation on Earth), the current level of fossil-fuel use should be zero per day.

If the official government CO2 warnings are correct, Americans are indeed endangering themselves on a massive scale. Americans typically go way over the limit, meeting around 82 percent of US daily energy demands using fossil fuels.

If the skeptics are correct, on the other hand, most Americans are fine. In their view, a typical healthy economy requires more energy for continued wellbeing and to raise the general standard of living for everyone whereas using less energy is not without significantly raising health risks.

To understand how divided scientists are on global warming consider that even authorities within the UN-IPCC, one of the organizations promoting global warming alarmism worldwide and the use of more expensive alternative fuels, don’t agree.

“The totality of the evidence strongly suggests that Americans should be lowering their fossil fuel use,” say Leftist politicians and government scientists. “Everyone agrees that current fossil fuel use is too high.”

This is the long-established view. It is based on the observation that, for some people, reducing fossil fuel consumption can actually lower utility bills. Because high utility bills is common and raises the risk of being unable to afford the basic necessities, strict fossil fuel limits will benefit society, according to this view.

None of this is persuasive to people like Wagathon, a taxpayer who is being fleeced to underwrite expensive subsidies to pay for the alternative fuels that few of us use.

For one thing, the lower utility bills that come from abstaining from fossil fuel-produced energy are relatively small on average, because individuals vary widely in their desire to place solar cells made in China on their Mexican-made roof tiles or buying shares in a windmill on a hill in the desert for a tax write-off.

Moreover, while a person could reduce his or her fossil fuel use by driving a battery-powered Tesla as the US government recommends and thereby see a drop in gasoline expenses, that also means he or she also will pay nothing toward maintaining the roads they’re driving on, which are paid for by gas taxes. He or she also will be using electricity generated from legacy facilities like dams on rivers and coal-fired power plants which were built to provide taxpayers with light, heat, clean water to their homes, and to treat sewage and provide energy to their employers. This legacy energy was not built and priced with the intention of enabling millionaires to drive expensive tax-subsidized electric cars to the golf course while workers wait in gas lines.

“The current EPA guidelines are based on almost nothing,” said Wagathon. “Some people really want to hang onto this belief system about global warming. But they are ignoring the evidence.”

How could something as simple as CO2 stymie scientists for so long? The answer is that, despite the global warming claims and hazards of too much CO2, actually substantiating how increased atmospheric CO2 influences global temperatures is notoriously difficult.

While the energy use of test animals are easily controlled, humans and their whims introduce an array of murky variables, making people less-than-ideal subjects for what scientists call randomized controlled trials, their preferred form of research. This is especially true when these experiments go on for years, as global warming research often does.

In the absence of such experiments, scientists are forced to consider lesser types of evidence. And in recent years, the debate appears to have tilted in the skeptics’ favor.

Based on our most accurate data, collected by satellites, there has been no global warming for nearly 2 decades. There is no evidence connecting CO2 and higher average global temperatures. There has always been insufficient proof that heeding UN-IPCC recommended limits on fossil fuel use improved health outcomes.

It does not require published results from a massive research effort to know what is going on. Accurate findings do not take much study: people who have less energy actually have poor health outcomes.

To explain this finding, researchers need only point to Third World and developing nations. Their experiences suggests that lower energy use may have harmful effects on health and survival and increasing access to low-cost energy creates more health, wealth and wellbeing.

While many studies are often financed by interested industries, Western government funds global warming alarmism studies. Politics and science have become intertwined and a lot more tribal!

From the beginning, global warming alarmism has drawn criticism. Some of the earliest notions that Americans were using too much fossil fuel arose from international comparisons and mostly were based on envy.

It turned out that some cultures, especially Europe, consumed less energy and had lower economic growth and a lower standard of living as a result.

In one influential paper, researchers learned that based on GDP European countries would rank among the 5 lowest states in the US if they were states instead of envious sovereign nations full of envious, holier-than-thou, secular, socialist bigots. It is certain that averring to the lifestyles of different populations, whether they are African Bushmen, the Chimbu of New Guinea, the Caraja of Brazil or Eskimos, all of whom consume exceptionally low levels of fossil fuel, is irrelevant as those remote peoples are too different from modern populations to make sound comparisons.

Moreover, none of the well-recognized global warming alarmists – like Al Gore and all of the corn-fed lifetime-tenured professors of doom in America– has the slightest desire to adapt to a lower standard of living than is afforded by life in a modern society.

Looking at the example of life in the Western world, it is better to be poor in a rich country than poor in a poor country. People used much less energy in prehistoric times and they had shorter lifespans than is now available to us.

In a free country, people should have the option to live a simpler life if they wish. “I have ‘green’ friends who will only ride a bicycle and won’t ever drive a car,” Wagathon said. “I do not tell them they’re foolish.” However, are Americans driving too much? That is a matter of dispute. Like delivering heavy newspapers on a Sunday morning while others sleep, many people drive to work where they toil to provide the goods and services others take for granted and out of these workers’ wages the government takes a share in taxes that it uses to enable others to live their ‘green’ lifestyles in relative comfort and security.

“There is no doubt that unfettered use of fossil fuel can produce pollution in specific populations. The problem is demonstrating the efficacy of lowering energy use in a fun-loving, American free-living population,” says Wagathon. “In America, we have the technology to combat pollution and we use it but that takes more not less energy. It is poor countries that lack energy that pollute the most.”

Despite the uncertainty, no matter what the West claims everyone else should do, people living in the Third World and developing countries want to live more like us. They do not appreciate being told that they must live poorer than we do. Western academia’s restrictive energy use recommendations will not last long there.

The global warming alarmists set a poor example. Their argument for restrictions on energy use fails when no one on that side of the argument will declare victory when more people live more poorly and die sooner due to the adoption of their recommendations.

The carbon footprint of Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio – both strong activists/advocates for fossil fuel reductions – apparently have colossally large personal carbon footprints. Their hypocrisy is not lost on the public.

Climate scientists, with their much more modest life styles, can’t match Gore and DiCaprio in the carbon footprint department, but nevertheless their carbon footprints are much greater than the average middle class individual owing to their colossal amount of air travel. ~Judith Curry, Walking the climate talk