Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe Slams Eco-Religionists

This Senator is getting sick of the whole Global Warming alarmism and the efforts by the religious zealots of the Eco-Left to distort science in the name of their religion. He gave an amazing speech on the Senate floor.

You should read the whole thing here. Its long, but I’ve taken some of the salient points and put them here.

Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930 s the media pedaled a coming ice age.

From the late 1920 s until the 1960 s they warned of global warming. From the 1950 s until the 1970 s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years. Recently, advocates of alarmism have grown increasingly desperate to try to convince the public that global warming is the greatest moral issue of our generation.

The National Academy of Sciences report reaffirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period from about 900 AD to 1300 AD and the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1850. Both of these periods occurred long before the invention of the SUV or human industrial activity could have possibly impacted the Earth s climate. In fact, scientists believe the Earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland.

It is very simplistic to feign horror and say the one degree Fahrenheit temperature increase during the 20th century means we are all doomed. First of all, the one degree Fahrenheit rise coincided with the greatest advancement of living standards, life expectancy, food production and human health in the history of our planet.

The Little Ice Age, which resulted in harsh winters which froze New York Harbor and caused untold deaths, ended about 1850.

The history of the modern environmental movement is chock full of predictions of doom that never came true. We have all heard the dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, resource scarcity, mass starvation, and the projected death of our oceans. None of these predictions came true, yet it never stopped the doomsayers from continuing to predict a dire environmental future.

The more the eco-doomsayers predictions fail, the more the eco-doomsayers predict.

While greenhouse gas limiting proposals may cost the industrialized West trillions of dollars, it is the effect on the developing world s poor that is being lost in this debate.

Expanding basic necessities like running water and electricity in the developing world are seen by many in the green movement as a threat to the planet s health that must be avoided. Energy poverty equals a life of back-breaking poverty and premature death.

If we allow scientifically unfounded fears of global warming to influence policy makers to restrict future energy production and the creation of basic infrastructure in the developing world — billions of people will continue to suffer.

Political campaign funding by environmental groups to promote climate and environmental alarmism dwarfs spending by the fossil fuel industry by a three-to-one ratio. Environmental special interests, through their 527s, spent over $19 million compared to the $7 million that Oil and Gas spent through PACs in the 2004 election cycle.

Finally, a September 15, 2006 Reuters News article claimed that polar bears in the Arctic are threatened with extinction by global warming. The article by correspondent Alister Doyle, quoted a visitor to the Arctic who claims he saw two distressed polar bears. According to the Reuters article, the man noted that one of [the polar bears] looked to be dead and the other one looked to be exhausted.” The article did not state the bears were actually dead or exhausted, rather that they looked that way.

Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.

The American people know when their intelligence is being insulted. They know when they are being used and when they are being duped by the hysterical left.

The ridiculous notion that using energy makes you a sinner and is dooming the earth to catastrophe is literally killing people in Africa. African and other developing regions need real infrastructure in order to keep them safe and healthy. They need refrigerators to keep their food cool. And lighting to read by. And power sources to help their industries thrive. They dont need empty platitudes or admiration about how they are “one with the environment” when their life expectancy is 40 years old.

And by attempting to use polar bears as a cute and fuzzy face to the dangers of global warming is sickening too. They represent the sacrificial lamb of the eco-religionists who must die on the “altar of global warming” in order for the rest of the unwashed energy users to come to salvation. Puh.

Im glad there are common sense Senators in Congress who have the guts to speak the truth for science.