Story Hour

Executive Summary of Doomsday Stories, by Joel Turtel
Our industrial civilization is heading toward environmental collapse, and mankind's fate hangs in the balance.
Here is an example of a typical environmentalist scare story:
"The present course of environmental degradation, if unchecked, threatens the survival of civilized man. Environmentalists' doomsday predictions would be comical, if it wasn't for the fact that these scare stories have frightened local, state, and federal legislators into creating a massive, poisonous layer of regulations. Environmental regulations violate our property rights, restrict our personal liberties, threaten our standard of living, and throw thousands of Americans out of work.
Environmentalists concoct end-of-the-world scenarios all the time. The mother of all doomsday stories, of course, is global warming. It seems that car exhausts, forest clearing, power plants, and other industrial activities increase carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Increased carbon dioxide will allegedly create a barrier in the atmosphere that traps the Earth's heat, creating a "greenhouse effect" As a result, the Earth's temperature will rise, causing glaciers to melt, seas to rise, worldwide flooding, and calamity to the human race.
Other scientists have their own theories that totally contradict global warming.
"Kenneth E.F. Watt, professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Davis, theorized that an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to global cooling, not warming. Watt argued that carbon dioxide will heat tropical oceans, leading to additional evaporation. Some scientists believe that the Earth is warming, but attribute the change to causes other than carbon dioxide production. After correcting for the "urban" effect, a study by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that there was no statistically significant evidence of warming in the United States [italics added]. Ten years of weather satellite data have also shown no evidence of global warming."
There's little valid evidence of global warming. Instead, there's solid evidence that the Earth has not been warming. Since 1978, a temperature-measuring satellite called Tiros II has been orbiting the Earth 24-hours a day. The satellite's measurements showed no significant increase or decrease in the Earth's temperature. Scientific temperature measurements from Tiros II show no global warming trend in the last fifteen years. In other words, global warming is a myth.
Many eminent scientists agree that global warming and other environmental scare stories are just unproven theories. Prior to the Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, scientists from around the world issued the Heidelberg Appeal. In the Appeal, scientists asked government leaders at the summit to be careful. More than 250 scientists, including 27 Nobel Prize winners, issued the Appeal on June 1, 1992. Former governor of Washington state and former chairwoman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, also thought that global warming is nonsense. Jeffrey Salmon is executive director of the Washington-based George C. Marshall Institute. Panicked, gullible Congressmen believe the scare stories and then pass environmental regulations that strangle our economy and destroy our property rights.
It is time that we see these environmental scare stories for what they are -- a tactic by left-leaning environmental radicals to destroy the thing they hate most.