The New Republic published an article by a man named Bill McKibben. He is a climate crusader, believes in Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming, started a website called 350.org, campaigned to stop the XL Pipeline, and was a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the Democrat Party Convention last month. Here's the title for his article. "We need to literally declare war on climate change." Literally. Not figuratively. Not like the War on Poverty or the War on Drugs, but something more like World War II is what he has in mind. I'm not exaggerating. He makes direct comparisons to World War II as the glowing example for how we need to reshape American life, government, and the world at large.
Here's a quote from the article.
“Carbon and methane now represent the deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying, scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization.”
He is asking Congress to literally declare war against inanimate molecules and then use their wartime powers to create a totalitarian state mobilization against the building blocks of life itself. And no, he's not kidding. He's serious. And, he's well connected enough that his arguments might convince a Hillary Clinton Administration to try to do just that.
Now, just to keep things in perspective, since McKibben literally wants us to declare war, we should accurately analyze the costs of war. In WWII, so many people died that we don't have an accurate count. We simply don't know. It might have been 60 million people. It might have been 80 million people. Hey, what's 20 million unrecognizable corpses among friends, right? This is what Bill McKibben says he wants to recreate in the name of Climate Change. Just to keep perspective, let's put those estimates into today's numbers. Somewhere around three to four percent of the total human population of Earth died in WWII. In today's numbers that would be somewhere between 215 million people and 285 million people. That's equivalent to killing every American outside of the state of California. That is literally what Bill McKibben says he wants to do to fight Climate Change. Murder the entire population of 49 states.
So, what is going on in our climate that it's worth spending 285 million lives to combat? What is so devastating that it's worth the carnage? Among the perils of climate change, McKibben notes that the Artic sea ice is melting at a very fast rate. What he doesn't mention is that it's summer and the Arctic sea ice is supposed to melt in summer and that this season isn't really any different from what we've seen in the Arctic for the past decade.
He notes that the Zika virus is spreading. Here's his exact statement.
“The Zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes has shrunk the heads of newborn babies across an entire continent.”
What he fails to mention is that there is no connection between Zika and Climate Change. None.
He warned about the massive wildfire in Canada that destroyed 2,400 building and forced the temporary evacuation of 90,000 people. So, what was the total human cost of the Arctic sea ice melt and the Zika virus and the Canadian wildfire? How many people died as a result of those three catastrophes? 11. Not 11 million, or 11 thousand or 11 hundred. 11. Total. 9 died from the Zika virus. Two were killed in a car wreck during the evacuation from the fire. McKibben wants to recreate WWII to avenge the deaths of 11 people?
Just how would we fight WWIII? With government, of course. What McKibben really admires about World War II isn't that American teenagers shed their blood across four continents to defeat totalitarianism and bring freedom and liberty to millions of human beings. No, what he admires is how government controlled private industry through executive fiat and deficit spending to create the factories that churned out the weapons of war.
“By war’s end, the government had a dominant position in everything from aircraft manufacturing to synthetic rubber production.”
McKibben admires the government monopolies which are hallmarks of the modern economic powerhouses of, say, Cuba and Venezuela.
He later complains that today, we are living in the economic world that, "flourished under Reagan." Not quite. The economy under Reagan that McKibben finds so lamentable grew at a rate of 7% per year. Under Obama, it's been less than 2% per year.
What are the weapons of this Climate Sharknado Apocalypse McKibben wants our government to build? Lithium batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines, of course. He not only wants to have the government force businesses to build 300 solar panel factories in the US, he wants another 300 wind turbine factories as well. He also wants government to force every homeowner to install solar panels on the roof of their homes. Of course, he doesn't mention the fact that if your house catches fire and you have solar panels on your roof, your local fire brigade will let that mother burn all the way to the ground. You see, even if they cut the power to the home, solar cells continue to create electricity. Firefighters are likely to be electrocuted if they were to try to fight that fire. Many firefighters don't believe your green energy plan is worth their lives. McKibben must think that's very unpatriotic of our first responders.
Several times in his call to arms, McKibben complains that there hasn't yet been a Pearl Harbor moment to get the public motivated to declare war. I have to assume McKibben isn't speaking metaphorically here since his title says we literally have to declare war. 2,403 Americans died during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Why would anyone want to see thousands of fellow human beings die just so that their political and social desires could be fulfilled?
It turns out, McKibben is not the only person to use this WWII analogy literally. The Democrat Party thinks it's a good idea as well. So much so, they put this in their official party platform.
“We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II.”
Now, that language shouldn't come as much surprise since McKibben himself helped craft the party climate change policy agenda. But, what may surprise you is that this war has already been going on; not against greenhouse gasses, but against the truth.
Sun Tsu, in his book the Art of War, said, "All warfare is based upon deception." Deception in the name of climate has already been going on. Let me give you just the latest example.
This week, an astrophysicist named Valentina Zharkova published the results of her study on the solar dynamo. She was studying the sun trying to understand the changes in the magnetic field put out by our nearest star. We know the sun goes through different cycles where it sometimes emits more energy and sometimes less and that these cycles are roughly 11 years long. What she was trying to understand was why.
Her team discovered that the magnetic changes we see on the surface and can track through sunspots are caused by two different electromagnetic dynamos inside the sun at two different depths. One is a little closer to the surface and another is a little closer to the center. As these waves interact with each other, they can increase or decrease the total energy output of the sun itself.
Ok. So what?
Well, like most good scientific research, this understanding leads to a series of predictions that can be tested to see if the idea is correct or not. In this case, the prediction is that those two dynamos will not interact with each other very much for the next 30 to 40 years. What Zharkova is predicting is that the sun will be in its less active phase for the next three solar cycles. The cycle we are currently seeing is the weakest in 100 years. But, if we follow this one with three more weak cycles, that will be something we haven't seen since the 1700s during a period known as the Maunder Minimum.
What does that have to do with the climate wars? Well, the Maunder Minimum was the coldest time on Earth in the past three hundred years. Rivers in Europe froze. They held fairs on the Thames in London in the winters. Zharkova is essentially saying that if the sun is the main driver of climate on earth, then instead of runaway global warming, we will see massive global cooling.
That didn't sit well with the climate crusaders. The Royal Astronomic Society, which was publishing Zharkova's research was approached by some of these climate fanatics who demanded the society withdraw the article. They were literally trying to silence science. That's the behavior of a spy during wartime, not of a scientist in pursuit of truth. In an interview with the Global Warming Policy Forum, Professor Zharkova described her efforts to work with these climateers.
“So how this is transformed into climate we do not produce; we can only assume it should be. So we’re happy to work with you, and add to your data our results. So don’t take the sunspots which you get, we can give you our curve. Work with our curve. So they didn’t want to.”
In the book, Don Quixote, the title character is a bit delusional. At one point he believes he is fighting a dragon. As it turns out, all he was doing in reality was attempting to stab a windmill. Bill McKibben thinks he's fighting dragons with windmills. In the end, he's just a delusional as Don Quixote. "All warfare is based upon deception," even if the only person you're deceiving is you.