It's the sun, stupid!

President Obama is determined to kill the coal industry through his specious argument that carbon dioxide is destroying the planet so he’s ordered coal producers to reduce their CO2 output by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. He calls it “carbon pollution” which is a clever tactic employed by those out to destroy our economy. Take something that is actually beneficial to the ecosystem like carbon dioxide and make it sound sinister. “Carbon” instead of “carbon dioxide.” Sounds like something black and dusty, like we’re dumping coal into the atmosphere.

This is NOT pollution. It's steam!

Hey, I think we’re onto something. Make “carbon” synonymous with coal and it’s a short step to banning coal outright. It was no coincidence that another coal company announced bankruptcy the same day Obama announced his EPA initiative to put them out of business. Alpha Natural, which operates 60 coal mines, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, trying to stay alive under the withering attacks from the Obama administration.

Despite overwhelming evidence debunking the manmade global warming theory, Obama has become desperate to implement his job-killing policies before he leaves office. Perhaps he knows that time is not on his side. With each day that passes it becomes more and more certain that we’ve been bamboozled by the global warming alarmists into dismantling the greatest free-market society known to the human race.

Let’s review what we know. The global warming theory posits that an increase in carbon dioxide will necessarily result in an increase in global temperatures. Carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 35 percent since the dawn of the industrial revolution. We’re told they’ve accelerated in the last 20 years. That means the earth’s temperatures should have gone up considerably as well. They haven’t. Temperatures have certainly increased slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age which ended in about 1850. However, if you look at satellite data, it shows we haven’t warmed since December of 1996. If the earth had a fever, as Al Gore once claimed, apparently that fever broke 19 years ago. 

NPR says global warming is on vacation. Vacation? How much vacation does global warming get? What, is he union? I think they better send out a search party for global warming. They might find that he’s gone to work for the competition: global cooling.

Yes, many scientists are coming to the conclusion that we’re in the beginning stages of a cooling period. Yeah, I’d say if we haven’t warmed in 19 years we’re certainly not in a warming period. To what do they attribute this cooling? The sun. That’s something that’s baffled me for years and we explored in our movie, An Inconsistent Truth. Why is it that people can be fixated on a gas that makes up four-hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere and they totally ignore that big burning ball of fire in the sky?

Slate.com’s astronomy blog tried to calm the fears of the global warming hysterics by saying, “While changes in the Sun’s activity have a very marginal effect on global warming and/or cooling, human contributions to carbon dioxide in our atmosphere completely overwhelm the Sun’s influence.” Again, they’re assuming a trace gas in the atmosphere is more of a deciding factor on the earth’s temperature than the only thing that actually controls warmth: the sun.

It’s nonsense, of course. If the sun is heading into an inactive phase it logically follows that temperatures will drop. If carbon dioxide really does cause the earth to warm then we better be spewing all we can into the atmosphere. We’re going to need it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.