Some very inconvenient facts about climate change

“Lord what fools these mortals be” says Puck in Shakespeare's “A Midsummer-Night's Dream.”

Would that the Bard of Avon were around today. He surely would have looked at the global warming fiasco with the same amused view he had Puck express.

He wouldn't be alone. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and that being so, we inherit our sense of humor from the God who made us. Given that fact, it's almost a certainty that every time the acolytes of Mr. Gore plot to take nature into their own puny hands and alter its laws with some of their own, Divine laughter rocks Heaven.

How else could God react to the absurd notion that mankind can enact laws to override the immutable laws of nature, one of which proposed man-made laws would decree that carbon dioxide (CO2), a basic building bloc of all life that living beings exhale thousands of times every day, is, for heaven's sakes, a pollutant.

Atmospheric levels of CO2, we are assured, have steadily risen to a dangerous extent, threatening to overheat the planet, and mankind must therefore drastically reduce the amounts of this alleged greenhouse gas being thoughtless emitted by a thoughtless evil humanity.

This is where it gets hilarious. Courts have ruled that instead of being a natural element essential to all life on the planet, CO2 is a pollutant, putting it on the level of the gook that pours out of factory smokestacks and thickens the air we breathe with throat-choking emissions.

Having swallowed that absurdity, the global warming juggernaut rolls on towards the goal of legislating a reduction of CO2 levels to prevent future global warming at the very moment when the world is rapidly entering a period of sustained cooling.

Nobody bothers to consider the consequences of this absurdity. Should their plans succeed and CO2 levels be drastically reduced, a genuine global disaster would inevitably follow, because we need healthy levels of that essential gas just to survive. It feeds the plant life that feeds us.

As Lawrence Solomon, onetime global warming enthusiast and author of “The Deniers” wrote in his June 7 Financial Post article “In Praise of CO2,” scientists Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA found that “over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2 percent. About 25 percent of the Earth's vegetated landmass - almost 110 million square kilometres - enjoyed significant increases and only seven showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square meter of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.”

That study, Solomon notes, shows how CO2 is nature's fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants, he wrote, use the carbon from CO2 to “bulk themselves up,” explaining that carbon is the building block of life. Moreover, they release oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustains animal life.

“As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: ‘Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger, and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century.'”

All that is in jeopardy, thanks to the foolhardiness of the global warming fanatics who want to defy the laws of nature by robbing mankind of the benefits of CO2, a gas essential to our civilization.

What makes this even more hilarious is the fact that the period of global warming earth has experienced since the end of the Little Ice Age is coming to a sudden halt. Says Solomon “The oceans, which have been releasing their vast store of carbon dioxide as the planet has warmed - CO2 is released from oceans as they warm, and dissolves in them when they cool - will start to take the carbon dioxide back. With less heat and less carbon dioxide, the planet could become less hospitable and less green ...

“Doubling the jeopardy for Earth is man. Unlike the many scientists who welcome CO2 for its benefits, many other scientists and most governments believe carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant that must be removed from the atmosphere at all costs. Governments around the world are now enacting massive programs in an effort to remove as much as 80 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.”

That's not going green. It the browning of the earth, and with it the specter of mass famine.

That sound you hear above is not thunder. It's Divine laughter.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. Phil Brennan is a regular columnist for Ether Zone at www.etherzone.com.