Commentary: The Climate-Change Hoax

A Narrative Designed to Deceive
#1367c
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 11-Mar-17; 14 minutes

President Donald Trump's pick for head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a man named Scott Pruitt, was once the attorney general of the state of Oklahoma. He's receiving quite a bit of pushback from Democrats and the media for his stalwart opposition to environmentalism. While he was attorney general in Oklahoma, Pruitt shut down the state's environmental protection unit (they did not even have a environmental protection agency there in Oklahoma, at least a state agency). He fought the EPA's pollution limits because he thought that was something that should be done by the states. He's very much a federalist, and—shocking—he questions—actually, no, he doubts; no, even further, he denies the so-called "scientific consensus" on "climate change."

To his environmentalist foes, of which there are many, he is the devil incarnate and he's now going to be our EPA chief. He did have to answer some questions in the hearing that he had to clear—it was the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee—but he did give answers that they could accept, and he is slated to be confirmed.

In a National Review opinion piece that he wrote last year, Pruitt wrote,

Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.

He's absolutely right. The science is far from settled. You have scientists on both sides...and especially the idea that the problems that are caused by climate change are extreme is not true at all. It's the idea that climate change is going to cause just terrible things all over the Earth immediately is just a strange idea. You've got to put that in the back of your mind about why they are saying that.

Of course, Trump himself and a fair number of other conservatives have come out swinging against environmentalists over the past few years. Trump himself called climate change a hoax during the campaign.

Now, it's important to understand what he (or they) mean by using that term—hoax. What is a hoax? Well, if you want a dictionary type definition, a hoax is a ploy or a narrative designed to deceive or defraud. He was not necessarily saying it was false (although that's implied), but he's saying that its purpose is to deceive us and defraud us. By saying that climate change is a hoax, these conservatives are saying that others are using climate change to perpetuate a deception or a fraud on the American people. They're using this idea to gain something for themselves. They are causing this hysteria—we call it "climate change hysteria"; their agenda—they're doing it for their game and what they want.

What they seek in this is money and political power. It's always one of the two of those things. What the scientists want is government grants. They want more money so that they can continue their research, whether it's true or not. They just want the money so the gravy train will keep on rolling. Politicians want political power, and the businesses that are have jumped on the bandwagon want the money that the government is going to give them for their environmental businesses, or for their environmental policies that they they do in their businesses.

There is one billionaire—you would probably know his name if I said it—who has been called "the government bankrolled billionaire." He has made his billions because of all the money that the government has shoveled his way, because he has come up with environmentally-friendly batteries, supposedly.

They've been at this climate change deception since the early '70s, if not before. Then it was "global cooling," if you remember, and the scare mongers were warning in tones of doom and gloom that another ice age was approaching. We could have it next Tuesday. And then it warmed up, and suddenly the seas were rising and coastlines would be devastated all over the world. Millionaires would lose their beachfront homes and condos—Florida, Hawaii, the coast in North Carolina, up in New York, etc.—and millions, of course, would be displaced. They'd have to find other places to live further inland—stuff like that.

We heard a lot about greenhouse gases, and we heard a lot about ozone layer. We heard a lot about radiation that was going to fry our skin, and we'd all die of skin cancer. Of course, the SPF [of sunscreen] is now up to 3592, or something like that. You're walking around pretty much covered with duct tape or something. They are trying to tell us that the sun is frying us.

The truth of the matter, though, is that a warming earth is a more productive earth, opening up arable land in places where glaciers once roamed. And then, what we find found out from about a dozen years or so ago, was that the warming has stopped. Now we are in a period of nothing happening, really. Global temperatures—not local temperatures—are pretty much remaining static over the last dozen years, and so we are back to global cooling again. Oh, excuse me—"climate change." We do not want to keep going back and forth, rubber-banding between global warming and global cooling, so we will just say it's "climate change." So they changed the wording on us.

You remember, over the past 20-25 years or so, we had the infamous "hockey stick" graph that somehow proved that dramatic change would happen once temperatures reached a certain point. And then, all bets would be off. We were going to have not only global warming, but suddenly, just like that, we were going to have ice ages—ice and snow that came down all the way to the 20^th parallel or so. That was the plot, of course, of The Day after Tomorrow, if you saw that movie. This was shown to be utter bunk. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth has more holes than Swiss cheese.

More recently, it was discovered that environmentalist university researchers, both here and in Britain, were fudging their temperature data in the climate models that were being used by the U. N. and the U. S. and many other places, to align those models with what they believed would happen, making things a lot hotter than they actually were. What happened was that they were making governments around the world fork over billions of dollars to environmental NGOs and to other environmental causes, as well as to put into effect laws that cost billions of dollars to implement. But you found out when you read the fine print that it was only going to bring temperature down by 0.6%. It was almost nothing for all this money that was being shoveled into these particular political actions.

I think hoax might be the right word after all. Everybody—everybody that is smart; everybody that has his head somewhere in the atmosphere rather than down a hole—knows that weather and climate are two very different things. Weather, of course, is always fluctuating. It's changing day to day. Climate, though, is long range. Climate happens over hundreds or even thousands of years of time. But I should admit that even though it happens over these long periods, it still changes—but slowly. That's why we have things like Ice Ages, and we also have warm periods, and they follow each other, like playing leapfrog down through the centuries, down through the ages. Right now, we are going through a very nice period. I like living in this period, because it's neither hot nor cold. It's like Goldilocks, at least here in Charlotte. It's great.

Even so, unless there is a massive volcano like the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, things are likely not going to change on a dime. And even in the case of Krakatoa, the year after that, they had "the the year of no summer" (or whatever it was called) in various places, where temperatures were very low throughout even the summer months. The climate returned to normal pretty much the next year. It only took a couple of years of the ash being in the sky for everything to clear up, and things go back to normal.

So, in the case of today and tomorrow, when we have a fairly nice day, it's in the mid-50s here in Charlotte. But tonight we are supposed to get snow. Here it is, March the 11^th, and we are supposed to get snow in Charlotte, which is almost unheard of—except that about eight years ago we got like fifteen inches on March the 10^th, I believe it was, or something right around there. This happens all the time—well, not all the time; it happens every once in a while. I should put it that way. But we will get a snow into March. That's just the way the weather works. We'll get some humid air coming up from the south, and a cold front will come in from the north, and they meet together and they have snow. And we have snow. That's just the way it works.

But that's not climate change. Two or three weeks worth of beautiful days, being followed by a day or two of snow fall—that's weather. That's not climate change. Ask the people in Chicago how quickly things can change. Or, ask the people in Kansas City how quickly their weather can change, and then a few hours later, it's back to the way it was. Some front will come through and give them wind and rain, or whatever it is, and then it's right back to the way it was. Cold fronts from the Arctic and warm fronts from the south are not climate. These are normal weather patterns. We deal with them.

So we have to ask, as we close this: Why are so many people on the left side of the political spectrum trying to make us afraid? If fear tactics must be used, it's likely that they are trying to get us to do something—to hand over money, to hand over political power, to them. Something that we wouldn't do if we were thinking with a clear head. That's a pretty good sign of a hoax.

Don't get me wrong. Great future atmospheric disturbances are prophesied in Scripture, but they are not man-made, and they are certainly not hoaxes. They are part of the seven trumpet plagues, which you'll find in Revelation 8, and they are part of the bowl judgments, or what we used to call "the vials of God's wrath," in Revelation 16. They're things that God brings as punishment to man, not something that necessarily we concoct for ourselves. That's that's actually giving ourselves a whole lot more credit than we are due. So my little bit of advice as I close this is, as God's people, we need to be firmly based in reality in making our decisions, not in deception.

RTR/aws/dcg