Members of the U.S. Senate will do well to take the time to read "Influence of
the Southern Oscillation on Tropospheric Temperature." Sounds like a real
page-turner, no? It certainly should be for senators and anybody else who
cares about whether Congress approves the Obama-Waxman-Markey anti-global
warming energy bill ("cap-and-trade") that recently passed the House and is
now before the Senate. The principal evidence underlying cap-and-trade is
contained in the UN's annual Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
report, which asserts that the Earth's atmosphere is warming due to man-made
activities, chiefly the burning of carbon-based fuels like oil and coal; the
consequences, not surprisingly are described as catastrophic. Cap-and-trade
imposes a host of draconian measures masquerading as a "market-based approach"
designed to phase out carbon fuels, which would be replaced by the
alternatives encouraged by tax breaks and government subsidies. If the measure
becomes law, it will double or triple monthly utility bills, make the price of
gasoline skyrocket, and cost millions of jobs.
Quite simply, the "Influence"
study demolishes the claims of the IPCC. Conducted by two scientists from
Australia and one from New Zealand, the peer-reviewed paper assessed the
influence of the Southern Oscillation Index, (which manifests north of the
Equator as El Nino), on global temperature variation. At least 81 percent of
the variance in global temperatures is explained by the Southern Oscillation
Index, according to the study. The study findings were recently published in
the Journal of Geophysical Research. In view of these findings, the Senate
should, at the very least, put cap-and-trade on hold, pending congressional
hearings in September at which the Influence study authors and IPCC proponents
can argue their cases. Then senators should be better able to make defensible
decisions on whether it makes sense to impose radical new controls on the
production and consumption of the energy that is the lifeblood of the U.S.
economy.
This is the sensible approach because, as Buzz Aldrin, the former NASA
astronaut who famously walked on the Moon, recently told the London Telegraph:
"I think the climate has been changing for billions of years. If it's warming
now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favor of just taking short-term
isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the
way it is today." Put another way, it's time to make global warming decisions
on the basis of credible evidence and logical analysis, rather than alarmism
fueled by the media.