Global Warming Cult Changes Direction – Again
Commentary by Harold Hough 

            Well, the cute drowning polar bear ploy didn’t work.  You remember that one?  Manmade global warming was melting icebergs and forcing polar bears to swim for their lives.  Therefore, everybody but Al Gore had to forgo cars, planes, and air conditioners to save these cute, cuddly critters.
            Unfortunately, there is now serious evidence that the scientist who came up with that theory faked the data.  Just add that to the reams of falsified data that the manmade global warming community has been feeding us for the last couple of decades.
            But, that hasn’t stopped them.  Since polar bears haven’t galvanized us enough, they are going for the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” tactic – flood, famine, plague, and war.  Okay, they have tried these already, but there are new versions that they are ready to peddle to gullible people.
            Recently New York Mayor Bloomberg decided to give the Sierra Club $50 million to help shut down coal plants, saying, “Coal is a self inflicted public health risk.”  Of course, this is the same mayor who thinks trans-fat, smoking, carbonated drinks, guns, and Twinkies are also major threats to the world’s health. 
            So, who is a major mover in this anti-coal campaign?  The American Lung Association, who, along with their affiliates, received a $28.1 million in grants from the EPA.  They maintain that airborne coal particulates, which have actually declined in recent decades, are causing a major increase in lung disease like asthma.  To ramp up the emotional factor, their advertising uses babies instead of polar bears. 
            Interestingly enough scientists are now considering that the increase in asthma cases and other related lung problems may in fact be caused by too clean an environment.  Two Australian scientists recently wrote, “"The hygiene hypothesis is now the prevailing explanation for the increase in asthma and atopic disorders in Western countries. It suggests that excess cleanliness in the environment has led to a decrease in the number of infectious stimuli needed for proper development of the immune system."
            If plague and sickness isn’t enough to scare you away from your lifestyle, consider war.  The magazine Nature recently published an article that correlated El Nino with civil war in tropical nations since 1950.  The researcher noted that one in five tropical conflicts occurred during El Nino.  The theory was that the warmer, drier climate brought on by El Nino reduced crop production, made people irritable and caused them to shoot each other.  One of the researchers concludes, “"If these smaller, shorter-lasting and, by and large, less serious kinds of changes associated with El Niño have this effect, it is hard to imagine that the more pervasive changes that come with anthropogenic climate change are not also going to have negative effects on civil conflict.”
            Of course, the researchers don’t comment much on the fact that four out of five civil wars occur when the climate is relatively wetter and colder.  And, anyone ever experiencing “cabin fever” during a camping trip knows that cold, wet, miserable weather can cause more civil wars amongst friends and family than warm weather.
Nor do the researchers dwell on the fact that El Nino is a cyclic pattern that occurs every 3 to 7 years, which means that on average El Nino occurs about every five years.  That means that if one if five civil wars take place during El Nino, there is absolutely no correlation.
If the four horsemen of the apocalypse approach is too religious for you, the global warming crowd has a scenario for the atheist, X-Files watching demographic – aliens will invade Earth and kill us to stop our destruction of the planet.  Shawn Domagal-Goldman of NASA's Planetary Science Division and his colleagues at Penn State compiled a list of plausible outcomes with extraterrestrials.  They postulated that extraterrestrials might decide to destroy those polluting humans rather than allow them to throw their litter around the universe.
            In a report that must make every congressman wonder why we fund NASA, the authors state, “A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions.”
            So, how do we keep ET from pulling the trigger rather than calling home?  You guessed it.  The report concludes, “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets.”
            To give credit to our global warming adversaries, they have managed to stay in the game with extraordinary mental agility.  If you can’t prove that cooling is proof of global warming, then threaten humans with a war of the worlds.