By Andrea Widburg
Star Trek and Star Wars to the contrary, so far as we know, there are no other planets in the universe capable of supporting life as we know it on Earth. Earth has a unique combination of attributes that make life here possible, chief among which are the perfect amount of sunlight, accessible water, and CO2. Those three ingredients grow the plants that start every food chain. But caught up in climate change madness, leftists are determined to do away with all three.
We’ve long been aware of the war on CO2 because the leftists have decided that humans’ increased reliance on hydrocarbons, especially coal and petroleum products, is creating deadly “anthropogenic climate change.” Aside from the fact that our ability to harness hydrocarbons has improved human life in the last 150 years beyond all recognition (including making chattel slavery unnecessary and leaving us with a world in which obesity, not famine, is the greatest risk to human health), there’s other evidence that CO2 is unrelated to the climate.
The two most obvious are that the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is infinitesimally small and that the IPCC and others routinely ignore the sun’s role in the earth’s climate. I also like to note that the greatest known periods of global warming—the end of the Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, and the end of the Mini-Ice Age—all preceded increased human carbon dioxide output.
What we have here is an erroneous diagnosis of a normal phenomenon. It’s like saying that a black person’s dark skin is, in fact, a disease. And once you have wrongly defined normalcy as a disease, the proposed “treatments” can only make things much, much worse. In the case of that hypothetical black person, the quacks might recommend dangerous skin bleaching, skinning the person alive, starving them of all nutrients, or any other crackpot ideas to “cure” the “disease.”
The same thing happens in the case of a ludicrous consensus holding that the earth is sick because people are producing food, warming and cooling themselves, and otherwise engaging in improving the quality of their lives. It’s worth noting at this point that the more that people benefit from hydrocarbons, the more they have the excess wealth that allows them to limit pollutants, which do despoil our environment.
So far, in their drive to decrease CO2 (i.e., plant food), leftists have engaged in the now-familiar attacks on hydrocarbons, cows, and human reproduction. That, though, was thinking small. Now, they’re thinking big, with big names and big money.
Bill Gates and Harvard, for example, want to increase pollution to block the sun’s rays:
Microsoft’s billionaire founder Bill Gates is financially backing the development of sun-dimming technology that would potentially reflect sunlight out of Earth’s atmosphere, triggering a global cooling effect. The Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), launched by Harvard University scientists, aims to examine this solution by spraying non-toxic calcium carbonate (CaCO3) dust into the atmosphere — a sun-reflecting aerosol that may offset the effects of global warming.
Considering that the historic sun patterns show that we’re entering a grand solar minimum (“GSM”), this attempt to block whatever rays we can receive should terrify us. As Anony Mee has written in accessible detail, the GSM is a predictable phenomenon associated with extreme weather events, drought, and famine. Humans do not thrive during GSMs.
This isn’t the only big idea the climate changistas are spouting. The newest idea is to “dehydrate the stratosphere”:
Scientists have been pondering whether intentionally drying the Earth’s stratosphere could be a way to tackle the climate crisis (other than, y’know, stop burning ridiculous amounts of fossil fuels).
When people talk about greenhouse gases, you probably imagine carbon dioxide and methane, two of the most problematic emissions pumped out by human industrial activity. However, natural water vapor is actually the most abundant greenhouse gas and traps a huge amount of heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.
In a new study, scientists at the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory question whether it would be hypothetically possible to cool the Earth by dehydrating the stratosphere, the upper part of the atmosphere, to remove this heat-trapping water vapor.
The true aqua vitae (Latin for “water of life”) is not spirits. Instead, the water of life is, in fact, water. No water, no life. And these crazy people, during a time when the earth will be drier because the GSM locks more of the world’s water in ice, want to “dehydrate the stratosphere.”
And mind you, these aren’t just random lunatics: They work at the government nuthouse known as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which received $6.2 billion taxpayer dollars last year. Incidentally, Tony Heller likes to point out that NOAA repeatedly messes with old climate records to cool the past and warm the present.
The building blocks of life are sunlight, CO2, and water—and our government and the powerful and wealthy plan to do away with all of them. Humans have fallen prey to dangerous mass delusions before, and never more so than when they give themselves god-like powers. Still, it’s impossible to imagine one so dangerous and delusional that it risks destroying all life on Earth.