Garbage In, Garbage Out

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to propose regulating greenhouse gas emissions on the grounds that these "pollutants" pose a danger to the public’s health and welfare, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have warned that if the federal government regulates carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act it will end up imposing an enormous regulatory burden.

"The proposal, once finalized, will give EPA far more responsibility than addressing climate change," warns Roger Martella, who served as EPA’s general counsel under President George W. Bush and is now a partner at the firm Sidley Austin in Washington. "It effectively will assign EPA broad authority over the use and control of energy, in turn authorizing it to regulate virtually every sector of the economy."

This would all be quite silly if it weren’t going to be so expensive — a vast and totally unnecessary tax load piled onto an already suffering and fragile economy.

The greenhouse effect is, in fact, beneficial to all life on Earth. Without it, the planet would freeze at night. We should be wary of tampering with it, even if we could, which (fortunately) we can’t.

If there is currently some modest global warming going on (there’s considerable evidence the recent minor warming phase has slowed), it’s beneficial in that it allows mankind of grow more food. It’s certainly of less concern than global cooling, which will eventually lead to another Ice Age.

The main greenhouse gas is water vapor, which comes mainly from natural sources. Carbon dioxide has only one quarter the thermal absorption of water vapor; there’s only about 3 percent as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is water vapor; and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also overwhelmingly from natural sources.

In short, eliminating man-made carbon dioxide entirely — which can’t be done, in part because the EPA has no authority over fast-industrializing India and China — would impact any ongoing "climate change" by less than 1 percent.

So where’s the "compelling and overwhelming" evidence that carbon dioxide emissions from American cars and power plants "pose a danger to the public’s health and welfare"? Who has died as a result of "global warming"?

It’s all derived from science-fiction computer models — designed by the people who quite presciently gave us the term "garbage in, garbage out."