Karl Peterjohn
Peterjohn is the executive director of the Kansas Taxpayers Network and is a former California Department of Finance budget analyst and newspaper reporter.
An old joke goes, "Who do you believe, your lying eyes or me?" At the beginning of April a narrow five-judge majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ratified the Al Gore-inspired argument for global warming. This environmentally green judicial edict was produced just before a massive arctic cold front proceeded to sweep down from Canada and shatter the low temperature records from the Great Plains states to the Atlantic coast in April. While baseball players were pictured frolicking in the Cleveland snow as a whole series of games was snowed out along Lake Erie, the president's western White House home was pictured being pelted with snow. Snow appeared in April in Crawford, Texas! In parts of Kansas this spring snow was not a scattered flurry isolated to the northwest corner of the state but was measured in inches. In some places in central Kansas over six inches fell. Low temperature records were shattered by several degrees as farmers saw an excellent wheat crop placed in jeopardy by temperatures falling into the teens. Even in the People's Republic of Lawrence the low temperature record was stretched down to 20 from 23.
Don't worry, the five judges, or justices as they prefer to be called, or more accurately, five black-robed lawyers assured us that carbon dioxide emissions are pollution and we need to eliminate carbon dioxide pollution to stop man-made global warming. Mother Nature ignored this edict and let it snow on the roof of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington. Sadly, these five judges are joining in this pollution every time they exhale. That's true for all of the other mammals and a number of other life forms on this planet. The largest "polluters" creating atmospheric carbon dioxide are volcanoes and oceanic algae. If excessive carbon dioxide was truly a cause, the solution is as simple as planting more trees or bushes that consume CO2. Carbon dioxide is a key chemical needed for photosynthesis that is critical to creating and sustaining life on this planet. Now a flurry of record low temperatures does not guarantee global cooling either. Earth's climate has shown a history of fluctuations with warm periods and ice ages going back far beyond man's relatively recent industrial era. The highly-touted computer climate models still are unable to adequately factor into their temperature equations the impact of the wide variety of clouds perpetually covering large parts of our planet. The United Nations may issue another report that tries to validate the black-robed lawyers' recent carbon dioxide edict. The liberal mainstream news media is already breathlessly reporting this document as "news." The reality is that allegations of a "man-made" global warming will be viewed by 22nd century historians as the pseudo-scientific delusion of our age. Our descendants will laugh at us the way that we today can make fun of our ancestors who criticized Pasteur and his germ theory. *
"We love justice greatly, and just men but little." --Joseph Roux
