“When you look back in history, and you look at these cycles, you have to come to the conclusion that God is still up there.”
Even if you have followed closely the Washington debate over extension of unemployment insurance benefits, you may have missed the latest development in the U.S. Senate. From a news release by Senator James Inhoffe, R-OK:
U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), senior member of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, today introduced Amendment No. 2615 to the Senate’s unemployment insurance extension bill (S.1845) that would prohibit the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) from finalizing any new regulation until it publicly reports how the agency’s existing regulations under the Clean Air Act are impacting the economy and job creation. The amendment is cosponsored by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), EPW Ranking Member David Vitter (R-La.), Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).
From Inhofe’s website: “Following record snowfalls in Washington, members of U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe’s family built an igloo and named it ‘Al Gore’s home.'”
On January 8, Inhofe rose in the Senate to address his amendment, and the myth of climate change. Some of his evidence: the January weather that brought a cold front to much of the United States, the ships that recently became temporarily stuck in year-round Antarctic ice, an 1895 prediction of an ice age, and freezing temperatures at Al Gore events. Gore is a favorite target of Inhofe. See the photograph at right.
What is the legislative connection between climate, unemployment and EPA (and Al Gore)? Inhofe finds it all “humorous.” His statement, which begins below, is a primer on how elected climate deniers characterize climate change, its history and science. A link to the Congressional Record follows, where he explains that his mythbusting evidence is proof of God at work.
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, it is a little bit humorous to me that we are talking about extending unemployment benefits in the midst of one of the most intense cold fronts in American history. I saw one newscaster yesterday who said: If you are under 40, you have not seen this stuff before. It has to make everyone question–and I am going to tie this together–whether global warming was ever real.
While I know the leftwing media is giving me a hard time for talking about my opposition to the administration’s global warming policies when it gets cold outside, I think it is important to point out two things. No. 1, the administration is intentionally ignoring the most recent science around global warming, and No. 2, global warming policies costing between $300 billion and $400 billion a year, along with the rest of the EPA’s environmental regulations, are resulting in millions of job losses.
We are talking about extending unemployment benefits, yet it is really jobs we need, and the jobs are being robbed from us by the overregulation that is taking place in the Environmental Protection Agency, and of course, the crown jewel of all of those is cap and trade. When I say $300 billion to $400 billion a year, that would constitute the largest tax increase in American history.
I find that sometimes when we are talking about these large numbers–and I am sure the Presiding Officer agrees with this–it is hard to relate that to everyday people, to our own States, and to how it affects our families. So at the end of each year I get the total number of families in my State of Oklahoma who filed a Federal tax return and I do the math. In this case, it would cost about $3,000 for each family in my State of Oklahoma to pay this tax, this cap-and-trade tax that supposedly will stop us from having global warming.
It is interesting that people now realize this would not stop it. Even if we did something in the United States, it wouldn’t affect overall emissions of CO2, and that is what we are talking about. That is what makes global warming so important to mention as we debate the extension of unemployment benefits.
If we want to improve our employment figures, what we need to do is stop the onslaught of environmental regulations that have come out during this Obama Presidency.
First, let’s talk about the global warming issue. It is interesting that we have often seen global warming related to events affected by unseasonable or unusually cold weather. Often, this has occurred whenever Al Gore has been involved in an event. Let me give a couple of examples. In January of 2004, Al Gore held a global warming rally in New York City. It turned out to be what would go down as one of the coldest days in the history of New York City. Three years later, in October of 2007, Al Gore gave a big global warming speech at Harvard University, and it coincided with temperatures that nearly broke Boston’s 125-year-old temperature record.
In March of 2009, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was snowed out of a global warming rally in Washington,DC. Because of all the snow, her plane wasn’t able to land and they had to cancel her appearance at the event.
A year later, in March of 2010, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee had to cancel a hearing entitled “Global Warming Impacts in the United States” due to a major snowstorm. At that time, I was the ranking member of that committee, and they were all geared up, ready to have this big hearing, and they couldn’t do it because of a major snowstorm. That was in 2010. So this has been going on now every year going back to 2010.
Just last year, in July of 2013, a cruise liner that was chartered to discuss the impact of global warming planned to sail through the Northwest Passage of the Arctic but got stuck because the passage was full of ice. Now, more on that in a minute. In that same month, Al Gore had an event in Chicago training people about global warming but was greeted with the coldest temperatures in 30 years.
A lot of folks, even in the last day, have said that just because there are cold temperatures does not mean global warming has stopped. Most alarmists will, however, correct you that it’s no longer global warming, but instead, climate change. Increases in temperature still matter. In a November 2013 Executive order, the President implemented new climate change policies–very expensive ones; large tax increases–stating that “excessively high temperatures” are “already” harming natural resources, economies, and public health nationwide. In other words, he’s implementing his climate change policies because of rising temperatures, otherwise known as global warming.
So temperatures falling and really cold days do matter. It does matter when the ice caps are growing and temperature increases pause for 15 years. And that is what has happened for the last 15 years. If global warming is not happening, then there is no need for the ensuing policies–whether you call it global warming or anything else.
Monday was a cold day. At one point, the temperature average in the country was 12.8 degrees. In Chicago, it was 16 degrees below zero. That broke the record that was set way back in 1884, when it was 14 degrees below zero. This made Chicago colder than even the South Pole at the same moment, where it was only 11 degrees below zero.
Just this week, down at the South Pole, a number of ships were stuck in the ice, even though it is in the middle of the summer down there. This was all over the news, and for good reason.
On November 27, a research expedition to gauge the effect of global warming on Antarctica began.
On December 24, a Russian ship carrying climate scientists, journalists, tourists, and crew members for the expedition became trapped in deep ice up to 10 feet thick.
An Australian icebreaker was sent to rescue the ship, but on December 30 efforts were suspended due to bad weather.
On January 2, a Chinese icebreaker, the Xue Long, sent out a helicopter that airlifted 52 passengers from the Russian ship to safety on the Australian icebreaker.
The Chinese vessel is now also stuck in the ice along with the Russian vessel. Twenty-two Russian crew members are still on board the Russian ship, and an unreported number of crew members remain on the Chinese ship.
On January 5, the Coast Guard–that is us; we came to the rescue–called to assist the ships that are stuck in the Antarctic. Our icebreaker ship is called the Polar Star.
Continued in the Congressional Record.
