I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change. I learned this:

• Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.
• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:

- Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
- Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
- Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
- Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
- In general embrace all environmental causes.

You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But there’s a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasn’t about Global Warming at all; it was instead about “The Coming of the New Ice Age,” and it isn’t exactly “new” — it was published in 1977.

The Solution Remains the Same

As many other pundits and analysts have pointed out, in the mid-to-late 1970s we endured a massive “climate change scare” that was the exact opposite of the one we’re enduring now. Back then, the media and activists trumpeted the arrival of a new ice age, with the specter of ice sheets and glaciers covering half the northern hemisphere, and brutal winters in the remaining ice-free zones.

The fact that the media and popular culture and academia have veered from one panic-inducing disaster scenario to another one which completely contradicts the first one is funny enough in its own right. But reading The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age opened my eyes to an even more significant aspect of this serial crisis-mongering:

The “solutions” prescribed to solve both Global Warming and the looming Ice Age are exactly the same.

In both cases, proponents of the theory-du-jour say that in order to stave off disaster, we must reverse the march of civilization, stop our profligate use of carbon-based fuels, cede power and money from the First World to the Third World, and wherever possible revert to a Luddite pre-industrial lifestyle.

I realized: The solution (commit civilizational suicide) always remains the same; all that differs are the wildly divergent purported “crises” proffered up to justify the imposition of the solution.

Seen from this angle, the entire Climate Change field should be more properly reframed thus:

In order to weaken and eventually destroy the existing industrialized nations, we must devise an ecological “crisis” so severe that only voluntary economic suicide can solve it; and if this first crisis doesn’t materialize as planned, then devise another, and another, even if they flatly contradict our previous claims.

I had long suspected that this is the most accurate characterization of Climate Changeology; but reading The New Ice Age clinched it for me. The true purpose of climate change disaster-mongering is to permanently cripple the First World, and to elevate the Third World, in order to create a planet with no economic inequality. The goal remains constant; the supposed imminent catastrophes justifying it come and go as needed.

Below, I’ll present scanned pages from the book so you can see for yourself.

The scenario we’re in reminds me of the classic Twilight Zone episode called “The Midnight Sun”: At first we see the characters sweltering in increasingly unbearable heat as the Earth, knocked out of its orbit, slowly plummets into the sun. Just as they are all about to burn to death, in typical Twilight Zone fashion, the lead character wakes up — she had in fact merely been having a fever dream about the world getting hotter; in reality, the Earth had been knocked away from the sun, and they’re all going to freeze to death. Ha ha — gotcha! Just as in the narratives spun by the climate change catastrophists, the Earth is doomed either way, even though the disaster scenario flips from one extreme to its exact opposite. Hot, cold, whatever; one way or the other, Mother Nature will wreak revenge on us for our hubris!

Ice Ages Are Making a Comeback

Turns out my choice of reading material (discovered recently at a rummage sale for 25¢, in case you’re curious) was fortuitous, as climate change — and ice ages — are suddenly back in the headlines this past week. And the news is not good for the crisis-mongers.

First we learned that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is actually helping us stave off the next inevitable ice age by a few years. Yes, you read that right: the “runaway global warming” scenario is now off the table; a new ice age is coming for sure, and whatever human warming effects there may be will only make our descent into the deep freeze a little more comfy.

Then, in a different breakthrough, leading scientists announced the discovery of a heretofore undetected type of molecule in the atmosphere which spurs cloud formation and negates global warming effects. Thanks to something called “Criegee biradicals,” the more we pollute, the more clouds form, and the cooler the planet becomes. Thus, the cumulative effect on the climate due to mankind’s activity: zilch. So for the second time in a week, the entire Anthropogenic Global Warming theory was fatally undermined.

But wait! We’re not done. Next up: A study out of Harvard proving that warming and cooling cycles are caused by orbital wobble and precession of the poles; and that the only reason the next ice age hasn’t arrived quite on schedule yet is due to our beneficial increase in carbon dioxide. Yes, that’s right: more data showing that another ice age is inevitable sooner or later.

A third nail in AGW’s coffin in less than a week? Why wasn’t this front page news?

But brace yourself — because those nails in the coffin were just the opening act. The next bit of news was the real blockbuster, a stake through AGW’s heart:

Now we learn that the world has not warmed at all for the last 15 years, and that the entire recent “global warming” hubbub was totally imaginary. Furthermore, the recent cooling is so significant that we may be headed for — you guessed it — a “mini ice age.”

Still not enough for you? The coup de grace came from our own USDA, which released a new “Plant Hardiness Zone Map” indicating that the mild global warming spike of a few years ago was actually good for plant growth and biodiversity. In other words: Even if we do experience warming, it makes the world a nicer place.

And that was just one week’s news. I wonder what next week will bring?

Now, you’d think that this devastating barrage of body blows would basically bring an end to the whole Global Warming “controversy.”

But no. Because, you see, true believers are nearly impervious to facts. In the midst of all this, the AGW activists and bullies continued their relentless quest to reshape the world’s economic landscape, as if they still had the upper hand. They even launched a witch hunt against “denier” weathermen, threatening to get any TV meteorologists fired unless they present global warming propaganda during their forecasts. Meanwhile, Al Gore continued on his decade-long tirade, declaring that “civilization is at risk” if the presidential candidates don’t cave into his demands immediately. And if you check the Web sites of any number of climate change nonprofits and organizations, they’re all still in hysterical crisis mode about the coming calamity. To them, you see, news stories like the ones we saw this week may come and go, but Global Warming is forever!

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Earlier this week President Obama articulated how he understands the concept of employment, explaining that, in his view of the universe, bureaucratic regulations are a good way to create jobs:

Obama Says ‘EPA regulations create jobs’
“When we put in place new common-sense rules to reduce air pollution, we create new jobs building and installing all sorts of pollution-control technology.”

Yes, seriously, he said that. The President of the United States said it.

Obama’s fundamental misapprehension of employment economics reminds me of an intriguing paradox I observed first-hand just a few months ago when I visited a relative who lived in a suburban tract:

Twice a week, my relative hired a “gardener” to clean up the front yard. I put “gardener” in quotes because this young hardworking immigrant didn’t actually know anything about plants or gardens; basically his only task was to get rid of the leaves that fell from the trees in front of the house. He achieved this very quickly and efficiently by using a gas-powered leaf-blower. Perhaps when he was first hired his technique was to blow all the leaves into a big pile which he would then load into his truck for removal. A few may have gone into the neighbors’ yards, but hey, they were out of my relative’s yard, so problem solved. I imagine that over time, as he got hired by more and more people in the tract due to his low rates, he worked quicker and quicker and sloppier and sloppier, until the day I observed him, when he no longer even made a pretense of gathering the leaves into a pile; instead, he just blew them all into the neighbors’ yards, and then hopped into his truck and drove off to his next client. At three or four yards per hour, he was (metaphorically at least) raking it in.

But here’s where the paradox begins. The neighbors would come back from their jobs at the end of the day, and see all the leaves on their lawns, and they’d call up their own gardeners who would proceed to do the exact same thing in reverse — blow all the same leaves back into my relative’s and adjacent neighbors’ yards. This cycle would go on across the entire tract, because the same leaf-shedding trees had been planted along every street: everyone would hire gardeners to blow the leaves back and forth from yard to yard. At the end of each week, exactly nothing had been achieved: all the leaves were back where they started. And then the cycle would begin again.

A normal person would look at this situation and say, “What a monumental waste of effort. So much human labor for no purpose whatsoever; after all those man-hours, nothing has changed. All the leaves are back in their original positions.”

Obama would look at this same situation and say, “How can you claim that nothing was achieved? Forty-seven gardeners are now fully employed!”

But I look at it and see what the radical theorists see: It’s not true at all that nothing has changed. Maybe the leaves are all in their original positions, but a great deal of money has been transferred from the middle-class homeowners to the immigrant gardeners.

If you think that “economic redistribution” from the middle-class to the “working poor” is desirable, then you see the Leaf-Blower Paradox not as a paradox at all but as a neat mechanism for extracting money from the more-well-off and giving it to the less-well-off.

But then the question arises: Why bother with the leaves at all? A simpler way to achieve the same thing would be for the “gardeners” to just drive very slowly through the neighborhood and each homeowner would toss $20 bills in the backs of their pickups trucks. The end result would be exactly the same.

Yet even this ludicrous scenario is not satisfactory for the true radicals. Why even bother with the pickup trucks? The Obamas of this world can (and do) produce the same result by instituting a tax — let’s call it the “Unemployed Gardener Tax” — and utilize the government as a middleman to transfer money from the employed to the unemployed. The gardeners can just sit at home watching TV all day, while the IRS collects extra taxes from the middle-class workers and doles it out as benefits to the would-be gardeners.

In fact, we can just drop the “Unemployed Gardener” part and just call it “Taxes” and — voilà! — we have Obama’s understanding of economics. In his view, the role of government is to transfer funds from the wealthy to the poor. And don’t imagine that this is just for the purpose of helping the poor; rather, the main purpose is to punish the wealthy, for the crime of, well, being wealthy.

Some mainstream economists have in the past argued in favor of the Leaf-Blower Paradox as a valid way to stimulate the economy. FDR and his advisors famously created millions of low-level government-financed manual labor jobs in the mid-1930s as a way to “put America back to work” during the Depression; while these “Civilian Conservation Corps” and similar jobs weren’t quite as useless as blowing leaves in circles, they were a sort of inefficient busywork whose main goal was not to get anything essential done but rather to get food in the belly of millions of unemployed Americans, and to get the money flowing in the economy again.

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