Climate Change – Douglas Ernst Blog

Since Monday is my day off, my wife and I decided to take a trip down to Virginia Living Museum in Newport News Va., hoping to learn a few things. Mission complete.

After reading up on all sorts of wildlife that can be found in the beautiful “Old Dominion,” talking to sweet old ladies and the other kind staff who volunteer their time to care for the animals, I ran across the following placard:

“Since the end of the dinosaur age, eastern Virginia has been covered by ocean water many times. Beneath these seas, layers upon layers of shells, bones and teeth from abundant ocean life accumulated to form fossil-bearing sediments. Coastal river bluffs now display these ancient sediment layers, in particular, a 3.5-to-5 million-year-old fossil-rich band called Yorktown Formation,” (Virginia Living Museum).

You mean to tell me that long before the internal combustion engine was invented that the planet was in such constant flux that much of eastern Virginia was submerged underwater “many” times? Answer: Yes.

Douglas Ernst turtle 1 — Here is me and my buddy the Loggerhead Sea Turtle. These guys are the only sea turtles that still nest in Virginia.

The next time someone warns you that unless we hand over more power to politicians in Washington, D.C., that the eastern seaboard will be underwater in a decade or two, ask them the following question: Did dinosaurs literally drive themselves to extinction in really big gas-guzzling trucks made for reptilians with tiny arms?

There is no doubt that the climate “changes.” The question is: How big of a role does man play? Is it big enough to warrant the redistribution of wealth — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars — from the private sector to a bureaucratic Leviathan? Answer: No. Is shaving a few degrees off computer models that even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now admits are flawed worth the price in individual liberty? Of course not.

The IPCC is in full damage-control mode after it leaked advance copies of an upcoming Summary for Policymakers to what it assumed would be friendly journalists. The journalists, however, quickly realized the IPCC Summary for Policymakers contained several embarrassing walk-backs from alarmist statements in prior IPCC reports.

Two of the most embarrassing aspects of the Summary for Policymakers are (1) IPCC’s admission that global warming has occurred much slower than IPCC previously forecast and (2) IPCC is unable to explain the ongoing plateau in global temperatures. IPCC computer models have predicted twice as much warming as has occurred in the real world, and virtually none of the IPCC computer models can replicate or account for the recent lack of global warming.

These days, instead of admitting that they used fear mongering to try and consolidate power and enrich themselves, the Climate Change crusaders (formerly the Global Warming police) are doubling down: global warming is hiding … at the bottom of the ocean, but will return sometime in the future. How convenient.

If you're swimming in Virginia, be careful you don't get too close to the Stinging Sea Nettle Jellyfish. They've been around for 650 million years, and will likely be around long after humans abandon earth to explore the rest of the cosmos. — If you’re swimming in Virginia, be careful you don’t get too close to the Stinging Sea Nettle Jellyfish. They’ve been around for 650 million years, and will likely be around long after humans abandon earth to explore the rest of the cosmos.

Want to increase the probability of causing a climate change disciple to go into a fit of rage? Visit museums. Talk to the staff. Read the literature. Learn some science and write about it on your blog.

Do you remember the Volkswagen commercial with the cute kid in the Darth Vader costume? It turns out, he really is evil—according to Greenpeace. In a new ad by the liberal activist group, Kid Darth is confronted by Junior Jedi, a Child Chewie, your favorite Star Wars droids, and Kid Lando (with a mustache) due to Volkswagen’s adherence to the Dark Side (i.e., common sense). According to the admittedly slick spin off: “VW is threatening our planet by opposing cuts to CO2 emissions.”

Just as liberals consistently fail to define “the poor” or “the rich” when it comes to public policy debates, liberal environmentalists fail to define what they mean by “threatening our planet.” To most of us, CO2 (otherwise known as plant food), doesn’t seem like the catalyst for an Alderaan-type apocalypse for Mother Earth. The conservative realizes that the Volkswagen employee likes to drink clean water and breath clean air just as much as the Greenpeace activist. The conservative dislikes lung cancer just as much as the next guy. Oppose Greenpeace’s standard for what constitutes an environmentally friendly automobile? You’re the equivalent of a Coruscant drug dealer. As the “Rebel Manifesto” states:

Volkswagen has a history of lobbying against the strong European standards that we need to kick our oil addiction. As the biggest car company in Europe, with the biggest responsibility, VW must change and support strong standards from now on.

Humans don’t have an oil addiction; Greenpeace has technophobia, particularly anything that runs on an internal combustion engine. Bees build beehives and we build cities, but the liberal environmentalist fails to acknowledge our machines are, indeed, natural. The Star Wars analogy falls apart when viewers realize that liberals want us all to become clones to their progressive worldview…or die. Remember when British environmentalists thought it would be funny if kids who weren’t in favor of cutting CO2 emissions could be detonated with the push of a button? Yet somehow it’s Volkswagen that we’re supposed to believe would be behind the construction of a Death Star? Call me skeptical.

Jedi (or undercover Sith Lords) who continue to poke around the Greenpeace website are then treated to Volkswagen’s not-so-secret Secret Plans:

If Volkswagen made the most fuel-efficient cars it produces as standard, rather than offering efficiency technology as an expensive add-on, it would be able to reduce its feet emissions and oil consumption dramatically. If it rolled out its best technology across the fleet it would be transformational, not just to its own performance but to the European vehicle fleet as a whole.

It’s good to know that liberal environmentalists who don’t have eyes on Volkswagen’s internals know how to run a car company better than a men who have made cars their life’s work. Just as liberals call for minimum wage hikes (as if prices are arbitrarily decided upon numbers and sold to us with a Jedi mind trick), Greenpeace believes Volkswagen can snap its fingers and roll out “its best technology across the fleet.”

Perhaps a better analogy would lie with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Liberals believe we live in a “Make it so” world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. When it comes to public policy vision, they’re as blind as Han Solo coming out of Carbonite hibernation.