"Just the facts, maam. Just the facts."

            Last week you ran another “news” story about the negative effecto f human activity on the earth’s climate.  What I didn’t see was a news story about Patrick Moore’s testimony before the Environmental and Public Works Committee on February 25. 

               Patrick Moore, Ph.D., an ecological scientist and one of the founders of Greenpeace stated before the committee that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years.”  Moore left Greenpeace when he saw that they had “abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.” 

               The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states: '”It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming' since the mid-20th century.” Professor Moore disputes that notion. "'Extremely likely' is not a scientific term.”

               Moore told the subcommittee: "Perhaps the simplest way to expose the fallacy of ‘extreme certainty’ is to look at the historical record. When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished. Then an ice age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.” The fact that both an ice age and a warming period occurred at high levels of CO2 should give a scientist pause about the fundamental contradiction.

               Moore also pointed out that temperature increases from 1910 to 1940 are identical to increases between 1970 and 2000, but the IPCC ignores that scientific data in order to support the agenda of their “doom and gloom scenarios.”

               Oscar Wilde said, “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”  The “news” world apparently uses articles about the weather to distract readers from thinking about real news.  Who is responsible for the Benghazi lie?  Who urged the IRS to target conservative groups?  What is Charles Minn’s take on the Fast and Furious scandal? 

               How about doing an expose on the federal government’s ineptness as an investment banker? They flushed a trillion of our tax dollars down the toilet with investments in companies like Clinch River Breeder Reactor, Hydrogen Car, Synthetic Fuels Corporation, Fisker Motors, Ener 1, Spectra, Solyndra, Watt, Beacon Power, and A 123. For more local appeal, you could do a feature about Yumans whose lives have been disrupted by the havoc the Affordable Care Act.

               We can’t do much about the weather, but with your help we might be able to put the brakes on federal government spending and at least partially ameliorate the nightmare debt we’re bequeathing our grandchildren