Renewable Farming

Paris: What the politicians are trying to control is you, not the climate

Here are three of the most curious contradictions of the climate conference opening in Paris this week:

1. Although “climate change” hardly registers as a concern of the average U.S. or E.U. citizen (for good reasons), Western politicians persist in promoting a UN pact as one of the greatest urgencies to save the planet. Britain has already veered its energy policy away from “green” wind and solar subsidies back to natural gas.

2. Evidence keeps mounting — of massive manipulation of historic climate data — in perpetual insistence on supporting “models” which haven’t accurately predicted temperatures the past 18 years. The only rising temperatures have been political fever over the need to tax carbon dioxide.

3. Carbon dioxide is the essential fuel for plant growth; thus the foundation for our nourishment. Yet, politicians have convinced the courts and regulators to legally declare it a “pollutant.” 

One of most comical aspects of the COP21 gala in Paris is that a small cadre of dedicated debunkers is opening a movie, Climate Hustle, at Cinéma du Panthéon, beside the Sorbonne, on Monday, December 7. We’ve followed the research of several scientists who will be presented in that film, such as Dr. Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. These are scientists of courage and intellect, not interested in feeding at the trough loaded with billions of taxpayer dollars doled out to promote the warmist ideology.

At the end of the conference, the most likely “achievement” will be a plan which encumbers wealthier nations to pay something on the order of $100 billion per year to developing nations, which will make no enforceable  pledges to reduce carbon emissions. This is the real goal of the conference: Another income transfer scheme overseen by the United Nations and a swarm of multinational agencies. This analysis by Oren Cass, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, offers a sound perspective.

We’ve been around long enough to recall (and write about) the previous climate frenzy, the great global cooling panic of the early 1970s.  Here’s a compilation of scary scenarios of those years. In that era, we visited with one of the most respected climatologists, Dr. Reid Bryson at the University of Wisconsin. His climate analysis was something like Bernard Baruch’s conclusion about the stock market:  “It fluctuates.”

The global political persistence about global warming (oops, climate change) is that it offers a political pretext for accumulation of central government (world government) taxation and thus concentration of political power.

Meanwhile there are genuine benefits for agriculture and humanity in higher carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. This website, CO2 Science, documents many of those facts.   Another solid scientific website, the Science and Public Policy Institute, has a lot more integrity than it has public funding, but does an excellent job countering the current climate-change ideology.

If you’re looking for a practical and more likely farming strategy to cope with the ups and downs of climate change, we’d suggest preparing for cooler growing seasons and more intense storm events for the next couple of decades. That calls for more crop diversity and a less “brittle” farming formula dependent on monoculture and chemicals.