A Small Victory In Court

There are several major politcal battles which need to be won in order to retain optimal individual liberty within limited government protections. One of these is establishing the proper use of science in the formation of public policy. A large amount of environmental science is a politically motivated and beautifully wrapped package of selectively picked cherries, so it’s good when Global Warming Believers Lose Appeals Court Ruling.

“An effort by a dozen states and several cities to make the Environmental Protection Agency regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases as air pollutants was rejected Friday by a federal appeals court.”

Tracking the story back to the Environmental Protection Agency there is a post about the EPA Assessment of Global Warming Impacts. This government website recites the standard list of totally undefined and immeasurable potential things which may possibly someday be bad in the future. The following excerpts are not scientific analysis; they are examples of creative writing. In the last sentence they admit they don’t know what will happen.

Impacts: Rising global temperatures are expected to raise sea level, and change precipitation and other local climate conditions. Changing regional climate could alter forests, crop yields, and water supplies. It could also affect human health, animals, and many types of ecosystems. Deserts may expand into existing rangelands, and features of some of our National Parks may be permanently altered.

Most of the United States is expected to warm, although sulfates may limit warming in some areas. Scientists currently are unable to determine which parts of the United States will become wetter or drier, but there is likely to be an overall trend toward increased precipitation and evaporation, more intense rainstorms, and drier soils. … Unfortunately, many of the potentially most important impacts depend upon whether rainfall increases or decreases, which can not be reliably projected for specific areas.

There is one large file with long charts and plenty of subscripts and superscripts scattered around the text. Greenhouse Gases and Global Warming Potential Values (PDF) looks exactly like the type of scientific report that activists would include in supplemental support materials for lawyers, politicians or other citizen groups.

Global Warming Potentials (GWPs) are intended as a quantified measure of the globally averaged relative radiative forcing impacts of a particular greenhouse gas. … Carbon dioxide (CO2) was chosen as this reference gas.

Although the Earth’s atmosphere consists mainly of oxygen and nitrogen, neither plays a significant role in enhancing the greenhouse effect because both are essentially transparent to terrestrial radiation. The greenhouse effect is primarily a function of the concentration of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other trace gases in the atmosphere that absorb the terrestrial radiation leaving the surface of the Earth. … Overall, the most abundant and dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor. Water vapor is neither long-lived nor well mixed in the atmosphere, varying spatially from 0 to 2 percent.

Please note that water vapor is the “most abundant and dominant greenhouse gas” composing up to 2% of the atmosphere. Sometimes you can see it shaped like clouds and sometime you can feel it fall like rain. Have you ever heard environmental activists call for government regulation of water vapor emissions? The reason they ignore the role of water in the atmosphere is because the ultimate goal of the “global warming” movement is not saving the climate. The ultimate goal is political control of both the government and the economy.

Finally it is also important to understand that carbon dioxide is a natural component of the atmosphere. Pollution implies adding something not normally present in a mixture. If I pour pure water into a lake have I polluted that lake? If my breathing releases carbon dioxide into the air have I polluted the atmosphere? The two molecular building blocks of life, carbon dioxide and water, are never accurately or technically pollutants.