Will California Outlaw Breathing?

Governor Gray Davis of California has just signed a new state law that makes breathing illegal. Well, not quite. But the governor has declared carbon dioxide—the air we humans exhale—a “dangerous pollutant.”

The target of the new law is not human breathing—yet.

Its immediate target is the automobile, with which California has a love-hate relationship. The new law directs California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) to achieve “maximum, feasible, and cost-effective reductions” of CO2 from automobiles, beginning with the 2009 model year. The real goal is to force Americans to drive tiny, tinny little four-cylinder econoboxes like the Yugo. No more lumbering Chevy Suburbans or range-roving Range Rover V-8s. Advocates of such measures also want to get rid of those gas-guzzling status symbols like Mercedes, Jaguars, and Cadillacs. To the crushers with any car that doesn’t get 80 miles per gallon!

The hysterical thing about this latest California foolishness is that its ostensible purpose is to stop the global warming trend! What global warming trend? The eco-folk keep telling us, “The world has warmed half a degree Centigrade in the last century.” It has. But how much has it warmed in the last fifty years, while SUVs were spewing more CO2, and Chinese coal-powered factories were fouling the air in unprecedented fashion? Virtually not at all. What does that say about the global warming theory?

High-altitude weather balloons and satellite readings—for the upper atmosphere, where the warming is theorized to hit first—tell us that the temperature is no higher today than it was sixty years ago. More important, the temperatures today are cooler than during the Medieval Climate Optimum of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when people rode in ox carts instead of SUVs.

Last year, researchers who analyzed the floor of the North Atlantic announced evidence of nine Little Ice Ages, alternating with nine moderate global warmings, over the past 12,000 years. The cycles moved erratically, averaging 1,340 years—and coincided almost exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. How many of us would really be surprised to find that the earth’s temperature is governed by that fiery star, 300,000 times our size, around which the earth orbits?

Based on the evidence these researchers discovered, we are currently about 200 years into another moderate global warming that will give us better crops, less frostbite, and no melting of the polar ice caps. Unfortunately, another Little Ice Age, starting in about the year 3100, will follow it. (No doubt the alarmists will advocate that we start stockpiling insulation and woolen caps now.)

In science, one observed anomaly is supposed to invalidate a theory. We know that burning fossil fuels couldn’t have caused the Medieval Warming; that’s one anomaly. Neither could it have caused the so-called Roman warming that preceded the medieval one. That makes two observed anomalies. The latest finding from the North Atlantic now gives us nine anomalies, and a probable basis for a new theory—one that doesn’t blame fossil fuels for global warming.

Even the eco-folk admit that if the Kyoto Treaty triples our gasoline and electrical prices, it would make virtually no difference in the theoretical rate of global warming. We might need to make electricity ten times more expensive to suppress its use effectively.

The same people who now tout global warming also told us that the human population was spiraling out of control. Instead, it is rapidly stabilizing and will head downward after 2050. They told us that the Pacific Northwest salmon were going extinct—but now the salmon catches are cycling upward too. The eco-folk said harvesting trees was bad—but because of their efforts, those trees now just burn in bigger, hotter forest fires. They told California it couldn’t build new power plants—until the rolling blackouts produced public licenses for a whole new set of power plants.

Global warming is the eco-folk’s biggest ploy, intended to replace technological abundance for billions with “mud hut” scarcity for a few.

Fortunately for most of us, the eco activists have California as a laboratory to test their bad ideas for the benefit of the real world.

This article appeared in the Knight-Ridder Tribune on July 24, 2002, and is reprinted with permission.