forgottenliberty.com

President Obama was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  The question burning in everyone’s mind is, “What has he done to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?”  The AP is reporting that the application deadline was only 12 days into his Presidency.  What had he accomplished after only being President for a few days and a Senator for a few years to make him think he could actually win? 

Well,  what has he accomplished?  Before he was President, he really hadn’t done anything.  He didn’t even show up for many of his Senate votes.  When he did show up, he frequently voted ’present’.  In the first few days of his Presidency, he mainly focused on getting the Stimulus bill passed, not on promoting world peace. 

Maybe his accomplishments after being elected President are what caused him to win the prize?  Some of those accomplishments  include quadrupling the deficit and watching the unemployment rate soar past the 8% mark that he promised wouldn’t happen.  He has seized control of banks and the largest car company in the world.  He has pushed for a health care reform bill that will result in an eventual government takeover of our health care choices.  He gave a speech to the Arab/Muslim world promoting peace, but since then violence has increased in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.  His speech did nothing to quell the hatred towards the United States and our allies.  This is evident by the recent planned terror attack that was stopped by the FBI and the NYPD.

So, what has he done?  Former Nobel Peace Prize winners include Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Martin Luther King Jr., The Red Cross, and the Dalai Lama.  We can find obvious reasons for these recipients winning the prize.  But then again, some other Peace Prize winners include Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Yasser Arafat.  Now we can add President Obama to the list of Peace Prize winners who didn’t deserve it.  Has the Nobel Peace Prize become  meaningless and pointless?

Part 3 in the Is Global Warming A Hoax? series.

The global warming debate is far from settled.  Both sides will continue to argue their points, but seldom does any one ask what the ideal temperature of the Earth is.  To me this seems like an important question.   Many politicians have recently given us dire warnings about what will happen if we don’t support their environmental plans and implement their legislation… but is a warming Earth actually a bad thing?

There is evidence that shows the Earth may be entering a cooling cycle due to sun spot activity, but for the sake of argument, let us assume it’s a proven fact that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm for some time.  Could a warming Earth be beneficial to life?  If so, why should we listen to the politicians who want to drastically change our economy and way of life in hopes of avoiding a slight increase in global temperature?  This question must be answered before we can consider believing those who keep telling us the sky is falling.

A warming Earth has both positives and negatives.  Generally speaking, life is most abundant closer to the equator (rain forests for example) and least abundant at the poles.  A slightly warmer Earth would theoretically support more life because a larger amount of land mass would have a tropical climate.  Agriculture would also benefit because more land would be available to farm and growing seasons would be longer.  However, if the Earth warms enough to increase the size of the tropical regions, large amounts of Arctic and Antarctic ice would melt causing sea levels to rise.  This would cause low lying cities to be swallowed by the sea.

Duncan Steel, from the University of Salford, wrote an article about climate that I think partially sheds some light on this question.

Looking at the climate over an extended timescale, longer than the Holocene (the relatively warm past 12,000 years), one sees that the usual condition of Earth is far colder than that enjoyed now. The norm is Ice Age. Cool the climate just a little, and a feedback effect drops the temperature further: the Arctic snowfields creep further south and, because snow reflects away more sunlight than bare ground, the temperature drops lower, more snow falls, and on it goes.

Metaphorically, the global climate is similar to a cliff edge, next to which a drunk is staggering. One step in the wrong direction and over he goes. Although we’d all like things to remain the same, the reality is that nothing, most especially the weather, is constant. Coolings seem to be rapid, and cause disastrous downfalls of civilisation. But we can cope with slow upward trends in temperature. Our mantra should be slow change good, fast change bad.

Given that we cannot stop the occurrence of random steps toward the precipice, what we need to do is arrange for our drunkard to be a safe distance from the cliff edge. That is why global warming is a good thing.

According to Mr. Steel, a warming Earth is a good thing because