Nobel Laureate of Science Paul McCartney has spoken. The Arctic is melting, and the last forty years have wrought more destruction to the arctic Ice Shelf than the last 800,000 years. That is a rather childish statement, but what the hell, McCartney was writing for the Huffington Post’s readers.
McCartney fondly remembers the turmoil of the 60’s and the Apollo Astronauts’ pictures from the moon of the Earthrise as if it were yesterday:
1968. That was a hell of a year. The people were on the streets, revolution was in the air, we released the White Album, and perhaps the most influential photograph of all time was taken by an astronaut called William Anders.
It was Christmas Eve. Anders and his mission commander Frank Borman had just become the only living beings since the dawn of time to orbit the moon. Then, through the tiny window of their Apollo 8 spacecraft their eyes fell upon something nobody had seen before, something so familiar and yet so alien, something breathtaking in its beauty and fragility. “Oh my God!” Borman cried. “Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”
“You got a color film, Jim?” Anders snapped back. “Hand me that roll of color quick, will you…” For a minute or so, two human beings in a tin can nearly 400,000 kilometers from home scrambled furiously to fix a roll of Kodak into their camera. Then Anders lifted it to the window and clicked the shutter and captured our delicate home planet rising slowly over the horizon of the moon. Earthrise. That single image made such an impact on the human psyche that it’s credited with sparking the birth of the global environment movement — with changing the very way we think about ourselves.
McCartney continues, “By digging up fossil fuels and burning our ancient forests we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere that today’s astronauts are looking at a different planet.”
But what to do, Dr. Paul? What to do?
Why, join with Greenpeace to “create a legally protected sanctuary around the North Pole and a ban on oil drilling and industrial fishing in Arctic waters.” Then you’ll be able to place your name on a seabed four kilometers under the ice.
And if you’re really ambitious, you can join the Arctic Rising online movement. Dr. Paul writes breathlessly: “You can choose to be one of five animals — a polar bear, a snowy owl, an Arctic fox, a walrus or a narwhal. Once you’ve joined an animal clan you hunt in a pack for new supporters for the campaign and compete against the other animals to get new people involved.”
Dr. Paul playfully asks the readers to guess which animal he is. Then with a twinkle in his eye, he says, “Yeah, you’ve guessed it. I am the Walrus.”
He’s right – and he’s wrong. He’s right because walruses are known for having a very generous amount of blubber. That fits.
He’s wrong, because:
(1) There has been warming of 0.6 to 0.8 for the past 100 years, but that has been absolutely within the variations in temperature for the last 1,000 years;
(2) Carbon dioxide levels move only after the temperature moves, so instead of being the cause of global warming, they are the effect;
(3) In 1996, a UN report, pressured by leftists, deleted two statement from a report they had written vis-à-vis global warming: a) “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases” and b) “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man-made causes”;
(4) Glacier melting is caused by our civilization still feeling the effects of leaving the Little Ice Age; and
(5) Yes, the Western Arctic is getting warmer, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. Greenland and Antarctica’s ice masses are growing.
But to the proponents of Global Warming, it’s all a conspiracy to destroy the environment. They’re as bad as McCartney; as Dr. Paul would say,
“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.”
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