How many cars are there on Mars?

By Victor Sharpe

When President elect, Barack Obama, was choosing the new members of his administration he selected Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner to lead a White House council on energy and climate. Ms. Browner had headed the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration. Mr. Chu was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.

Carol Browner was described in an earlier article by Michelle Malkin, "The Trouble with Obama's Energy Czar," as a "neon-green radical." With both Chu and Browner still at the energy helm, we are in a world of trouble.

Currently in the exotic luxury of Cancun, Mexico, hundreds of environmental gurus are enjoying sun, tequila and whatever else takes their fancy — all provided courtesy of the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Concerned as they are at "excessive carbon footprints," nevertheless many of the attendees arrived in their own private aircraft. Not a little hypocrisy, it seems, surrounds this junket.

With Obama's notorious Cap in Trade policy currently dead in Congress — but, like Lazarus, may yet rise from its deathbed — the threat of higher taxes and further job losses to Americans is on hold. But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is represented at Cancun and is pushing hard for onerous taxes upon gasoline and other raw materials in the U.S. in order to redistribute America's wealth to the developing nations. December 2nd, 2010 happens to be the 40th anniversary of the creation of the EPA and, like the unelected bureaucracy that permeates Obama's regime — czars and all — they are making no bones about their draconian plans to alter for the worse America's way of life and standard of living.

It is no coincidence that Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is calling for the U.S. to donate $100 billion of U.S. taxpayer's money through the United Nations to developing countries. This while the United States is reeling from a $1.3 trillion deficit, courtesy of much of the Obama regime's economic policies.

A great deal of the present lunacy began when Al Gore, ushered in his revelation that the world is in peril from Man Made Global Warming, now also called Climate Change. He took his theory and created a veritable new secular religion replete with its own priesthood and acolytes in abundance. It is now venerated by multitudes of adoring and unquestioning faithful. But his secular version of Holy Writ, known as 'An Inconvenient Truth,' may yet be a title destined to come back to haunt him.

Like so many other beliefs, which labor under original and fundamental error, its believers arrogantly ridicule and treat all doubters as heretics not worthy of consideration. So far there has not been an actual auto da fé (a burning of perceived heretics) but, like the inquisitors who meted them out in the not too distant past, the faith of global warming may yet exact cruel and unusual punishment upon all who refuse to accept its doctrine as infallible.

Paul Johnson, a British historian who never fails to pierce the veil of deception cloaking so much of our understanding of human foibles, once remarked to a friend who had become a recent convert to the belief in man-made global warming that, in fact, August, 2008 in England had been remarkably cold and miserable with "... torrential rain, a hailstorm, or two, cold, bitter winds and mists."

His friend agreed that, "... the weather was unprecedented and that England has never had such an August before." But then, true to all new and fanatical converts, his friend opined with righteous and unassailable conviction that it was "man-made global warming, of course." Now in early December, 2010, the same England is experiencing an unprecedented cold winter and uncharacteristic heavy falls of snow.

For the believer, the knee jerk reply to questions as to why there is too much sun, or too little sun, or drought, or floods, or freezing cold, is that it is all because of, yes you guessed it, man-made global warming. So there you have it; a ready-made and unshakable dogma that encompasses and explains away all weather patterns and natural disasters.

An industry has now grown up to support this new religion. Its congregants include the media, the weather channels on TV, politicians from the President down, and last but not least, the pseudo-scientists who, as Paul Johnson points out, are like those 19th century gurus, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

Marx attempted to create a theory of scientific materialism but the ideas were vague and not based upon empirical evidence. History has shown us that when they were applied by communist regimes they proved a costly failure.

The same applied to Freud's theories, which today we understand have no basis in biology. Sir Peter Medawar, the eminent scientist put it thus: "Freud's psychoanalysis is akin to mesmerism and phrenology; it contains isolated nuggets of truth, but the general theory as a whole is false."

So now we have another theory and the priests and bishops of what is fast becoming the new secular religion of man-made global warming are the Greens. They vociferously intervene in man's affairs and brook no disagreement with their creed. They impose decrees, which force governments to implement all manner of policies that further the propagation of the new faith.

But like the theories of Marx, for example, the Greens' global warming doctrine contains little scientific fact but demands much political action and abject compliance with its rules.

Farmers are now paid by governments to grow bio-fuels — a terribly expensive form of energy — which creates hunger and starvation in the Third World because it results in a lack of food. Instead of food going to humans it now goes into cars.

Perhaps as many as 30 million people in the Third World are now enduring famine as a consequence of the loony tunes theories of the Greens. Visit a supermarket near you and you cannot but be dismayed at how expensive the cost of bread and staples have become. Thank you Greens!

But the Greenies are not swayed any more than the medieval priesthoods were willing to accept that their rigid belief in a flat world was wrong or that the earth actually went around the sun and not the other way round.

Windmills are now resurrected and dot the landscape. They may not be as picturesque as the old European mills and time will tell whether we will be tilting at them with equal frustration as Don Quixote did in his time.

Paul Johnson suggests that they are a grotesquely expensive and inefficient form of energy and adds that, "... the new windmills are hideous things, ruining the landscape." But don't tell that to the Greens as they promulgate the man-made global warming message and proselytize all who flock to their new faith.

There is an immense peril lurking beneath the words of the Greens; those faithful believers of the new religion. They target the United States and coerce its gullible politicians and the more than favorably inclined Obama administration. They repeat, ad nauseum, that these are extreme times that require extreme measures. America may thus be driven to accept disabling restraints on its economy.

The world's only superpower will be economically, politically and militarily crippled and no longer able to defend human freedoms around the globe. Our allies will be left vulnerable as the true threat to the peoples of the earth — not bogus man made global warming but the real and existential threat of global Islamic jihad — will emerge stronger and more vicious as America falters.

Global jihad will wreak havoc upon societies as it exerts more and more Islamist and Sharia power throughout the world, fuelled now by vast and ever growing inflows of petroleum based capital from an enfeebled Europe, America, and what is left of the free world.

The fanatics who espouse man made global warming should consider the research carried out by Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia.

He says that global warming is equally apparent upon the planet Mars as it is upon Earth. The reason is because of "...a long-term increase in solar irradiance, which is heating both Earth and Mars." In other words it is the activity of the Sun.

Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun's heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets. "Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance," Abdussamatov says.

Abdussamatov's work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists. Perhaps those scientists, who are now the bishops of the new religion and, like their predecessors were unwilling to accept ideas or proofs that contradicted their rigidly held dogma, will grow more violent and vindictive towards the skeptics.

Even though some 6,000 eminent scientists around the world provide contradictory evidence towards the notion of man-made global warming, the followers of the prophet Gore will have none of it. Perhaps that is why they have now included the term, climate change, to obfuscate the matter.

The very idea that Mars, just like Earth, warms and cools because of the natural activity of the sun is hardly revelatory or revolutionary. But it makes nonsense of the current and fashionable belief that humanity, because of its industry and machinery, produces a disastrous effect upon Earth's climate.

The environmentalists and the Greens hate the automobile. They prefer bike paths to new roads and work tirelessly to reduce carbon emissions as if they are exorcists driving out demons.

For the Greens and the environmentalists the car is the main culprit and its eventual disappearance as a gasoline driven machine will, they are convinced, help end man made global warming.

But the Earth was once much warmer than it is today and the polar caps on Mars are displaying a warming trend. The Jurassic and Cretaceous periods in earth's history make today's climate seem particularly cool and, as far as I know, there were no carbon emitting automobiles sharing the Earth with the dinosaurs.

And after all, how many cars are there on Mars?

© Victor Sharpe