IN OUR VIEW: Week highlights real climate crisis

Earth Week events in Utah and a neighboring state showed the real climate crisis facing us -- and it's not the one environmentalists talk about.

Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has long been skeptical of man-made global warming claims. He participated in a symposium in Salt Lake County last week where he critiqued a key component of the global warming theory -- that carbon dioxide is a dangerous substance.

Carbon dioxide, he said, "is not an air pollutant. It is plant food. It is also natural."

Nor has the presence of it been proven to cause warming on any scale, much less globally. Consider Salt Lake City, he writes. The average concentration of carbon dioxide is 385 parts per million. But in Salt Lake, the carbon dioxide level in winter rises to 600 ppm because plants and soil take up less of the gas then.

"Have we seen any great warming trend during the winter in Salt Lake City? No. Recent winters have been scarcely warmer than they were 50 to 100 years ago," he told a group at an event sponsored by the Sutherland Institute.

We might add that the current winter, with above-normal snowfall, is no argument for the warming theory.

There are a host of similar findings. Soon has concluded that "cutting carbon dioxide emissions by sharply decreasing the use of natural gas in heating systems or gasoline in cars within the city will make no difference to the weather. It will merely lead the foolish to feel good about saving the planet."

It's not a merely abstract debate. One of the consequences of environmental overreaction can be seen at your local supermarket -- and in food riots across the globe. In a panic over global warming, the U.S. pushed subsides for ethanol fuels. But that means, as a letter to the editor said recently, that we are burning food. That has pushed up food prices worldwide, with no discernible benefit to the environment.

Other potential moves by government, from the imposition of gasoline mileage standards to requirements for fluorescent light fixtures, will have sweeping negative economic impacts.

Now here's a shocker: One pioneer environmentalist said in Boise on Wednesday that that there is no proof that global warming is caused by human activity, but he thinks that building hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide is the right course of action anyway.

That's coming from Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore. The world should act against global warming, just in case, Moore said, adding that the only viable solution is nuclear. He also pointed out that wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal or other renewable energy sources are a long way from being able to supply most of the world's energy needs.

We applaud the honesty. Coming from one of the founders of the modern green movement, it helps bolster our argument that America should tap its oil reserves in Alaska and off the California coast, add refining capacity, and simultaneously move aggressively to develop nuclear power.

The case for nuclear power is the same whether the climate is growing warmer or colder. If we take climate change out of the debate, we face the same problems, only without the fanaticism. And that would be a relief.

There are plenty of reasons to move away from fossil fuels. High oil prices hurt our personal budgets, they strain the American economy and they enrich bad guys such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Oil dependency keeps our nation over a barrel, literally.

But the climate change mania often keeps us from addressing the issue rationally. Doomsday scenarios and the propaganda of panic make debate and compromise difficult. Discussion grinds to a halt, and opportunities to make progress are thrown away.

The real crisis is not the climate but our inability to face facts and choose new energy options. If we can do that, we have a chance to find reasonable alternatives. If we fail, future Earth Days will likely be not green but grim, as energy problems strangle our economy.
Some environmentalists have gotten so worked up about climate change they are now fighting to block ... solar power. This led California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to exclaim, "If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don't know where the (heck) we can put it."

To find out more, read "Greens hamper environmental progress" at http://solarprogress.notlong.com
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