The Day of the Jackal and the Last Ice Age

All week long as I’ve slogged through the snow, froze as I scrape the ice off my windshield, and listened to the furnace rumble on again and again; I’ve wondered, “where is this global warming they’ve been promising?”

There have been a few warm winters, the snows in Siberia are a bit dryer than in the 80’s, and we are told there is an earth devistating warming trend on its way. Not only earth devastating, but man caused – specifically SUV sales and George W. Bush caused. I’m quite sure that if the Enviro-Nazis would have been around at the end of the last ice age their complaints against troglodyte campfires would have preempted human evolution.

“In August was the Jackal born;
The Rains fell in September;
Now such a fearful flood as this.’
Says he, ‘I can’t remember!’”

These lines from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books are given as a rebuke to a young jackal whose pretended wisdom amuses those wiser beasts who have “been around” a few more seasons. Environmental extremists, desperate for a cause capable of frightening the masses into accepting their demands, have latched onto a few warm winters as a club to bludgeon their agenda down the global craw. Fortunately there are a few of us who have been around. I say fortunately, because these self-serving fund raisers are capable of preempting our way of life. Perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of this falsehood is the environmental hammer lock on American Oil production. A situation made possible by the vilification of fossil fuel production as well as consumption. American is not allowed to utilize its oil and coal resources, and condemned for exploiting the foreign energy sources available to us. These agitators damage us all by hanging a theory of planetary disaster on a few decades of weather fluctuations and pasting the blame for this weather on American. Their harm is real and recognizable.

1. They damages our economy by giving advantage to foreign competitors and waists enormous time and recourses in frivolous law suits which clog our over burdened courts and put off necessary projects. (Think Legacy Highway!)

2. Anti - administration pundits exacerbate anti-American attitudes across the world. Giving America’s enemies propaganda weapons to use against this country. They entangle the Iraq war in false claims of oil greed; which emboldens terrorists.

3. They lock up American resources, increasing our dependency on “Arab Oil” and putting our nation at a strategic as well as economic disadvantage in a very competitive world.

4. They increase the suffering of the poor by:

a) Preempting economic growth and the jobs cheaper energy could stimulate into existence,

b) Increasing food production and transportation costs which, to use the sensational rhetoric of the left, forces the poor to choose between spending their money on food, medicine, or fuel. I wonder how many grandmas have frozen this “globally warmed winter” because there was no cheep American fuel to warm them.

5. They send up production prices, transportation prices, the cost of heating or cooling working places, school, and stores; increasing consumer prices as personal resources are wasted.

6. They force up airline cost and harm this valuable part of our economy and all its adjunct industries.

7. They increase the cost of auto production. These artificially forced up expenses are passed on to consumers who barley can afford the “guilty pleasure” of driving their own cars.

8. They encourage global methane production, which shoots up as the population of pooping Caribou skyrockets. (Alright – I admit I am kidding here, though I actually had a University Professor tell a class I was attending that beef cattle were causing global warming by relieving themselves. When I asked him why the same wasn’t true of the billions of buffalo that once roamed the Pre Columbian plains – he said I was being “too negative”.)

I remember the bitter winters of the 80’s when the environmentalists were predicting the beginning of an Ice Age. When the mountains of snow flooded over dams and sent the waters of the Great Salt Lake across Weber, Davis, and Salt Lake Counties. Then in 1988 a drought brought a summer of fire to Yellowstone. I can also remember the heat and the drought of the decade before that.

1977 was the last of several years of drought. I spent that summer in the Yellowstone backcountry at Camp Loll BSA. Some weekends I took the kids who worked for me on drives past Grassy and Jackson Lake. As the water in these man made reservoirs disappeared, my staff became concerned. They came to me one Saturday afternoon, after the scouts had left. They demanded they be allowed to spend the next two days building a dam across the end of Lake of the Woods – the natural lake on which our camp sits.

“Why?” I asked.

“To keep the Lake for running out.”

“How deep is Lake of the Woods were it runs into Cascade Creek?”

“About this deep,” one of the staffers said, holding his fingers about three inches apart.

“When the lake goes down three inches won’t it stop running out on its own?”

“Oh ya,” they said, and walked away without a word - no thanks for the wisdom that freed up their weekend.

The world needs to seek a little truth too. Phony science used to prop up attacks on America must be debunked. We must not listen to the yapping of the Jackals. We need to find some wiser heads.