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FROM-Joplin Globe

Public being duped about CO2

By John Cragin

Globe guest columnist

Disclaimer: The writer does not favor wasting limited resources or using inefficient machinery for unessential transportation, power production and labor-saving equipment. He loves plants (flora), including big trees, which benefit from rain, carbon dioxide and warmth. He favors moral, merciful, mindful well-mothered people and other fauna. He is opinionated, but does not harbor personal malice.

Some news media and TV talking-head “experts,” some “academic” publications and several non-governmental organizations with socialistic leanings have out-talked the scientific community. They’ve duped the public into the false belief that the United States is causing global warming because it emits carbon dioxide (CO2). They support their position by a correlation between elevated levels of temperature and the concentration of greenhouse gases, specifically CO2, ignoring other causes of a greenhouse effect. Is the choice of carbon dioxide as the culprit valid? Cause and effect? Not for sure.

It is a fact that a million years of data support that the temperatures rise about 50 percent of the time and go down about 50 percent of the time. It is sophomoric to say that we can stop the swings by reducing our CO2 emissions. By the way, the frequency of those swings is about 250,000 years.

There is an effort to frighten people that the Earth will become unbearably hot, melting ice caps and flooding low-lying areas because we emit CO2. It may happen anyway. I guess Buffalo Bill knew this instinctively. He killed vast numbers of bison, not to sell the skins nor to feed railway builders but to keep the vast herds of panting (CO2-emitting) and flatulent (methane emitting) animals from causing the inundation of the Mississippi River valley. Fact: Temperatures are rising. Fact: The level of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen. Does higher temperature cause higher concentration of CO2? Fact: Just wait. Temperatures will fall and so will the CO2 level. Other greenhouse agents besides buffaloes include volcanic gases and dusts, marsh gases and atmospheric water.

Fact: A reason temperatures are rising is that the sun is putting out energy at an elevated rate; the sun is not perfect but it stays pretty well within reasonable limits.

Fact: Mother Nature spins the Earth that we may have nights and days so that one side of the Earth is not always scorching while the opposite side is frigid.

Fact: There is some mechanism in the sun that serves a similar function over greater time spans; it makes the sun’s radiant heat variable. The why is beyond our knowledge; but there is nothing we can do about it, in any case.

What possible reason do these propagandists have for their great efforts to scare people? It is possible that they know there is a limited amount of land and, ultimately, land must be held in common and governed by liberal socialists (let’s call them elite — they’d like that), all in the interests of the teeming masses. There’s got to be more to it than that. Elite are not going to wait that long; they are going to eliminate private property as soon as possible; they are political animals.

Already, eastern Oregon farmers cannot farm their land because the elite have taken irrigation water away from them. Maybe that wing of misguided elite sees starvation as the ultimate solution to the population problem.

Here’s a take on motive and process of elite government efforts to cut carbon-dioxide production. They will be empowered to tax smokestack industries for the amount of carbon dioxide they emit, e.g. electric power companies. This tax will seriously increase the costs of generating electricity.

To cover their costs, utilities must charge every user of electricity — large or small, rich or poor — for those costs. It’s “charge” or get out of business. Those increases in the cost of their service, due to government action, will be blamed on the utilities. But those extra charges go directly to the government which has effectively included practically all citizens in a really big tax increase and passed the buck to the utility company — the unpaid tax collector.

John Cragin lives in Joplin.

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