We "global warming deniers" are dismissed as cranks when we point out the authoritarian tendencies in the environmentalist movement, and link them to our supposition that Climate Change is an all-encompassing, non falsifiable hypothesis being used to undermine both individual liberty and the liberal government that sustains it.

Why, then, do we keep reading things like <a href="http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6878">this</a>?

<i>This piece has appeared as a guest column in the CW</I>


“It’s a free country,” is a common, snarky response to both doubting fellows seeking approval for their actions and preening egotists who think they know best. The phrase encapsulates American political culture: that neither brute nor egghead can tell a citizen a citizen what to do, that everyday people concerned with practical things don’t owe a lick of deference to agents of the state, armed with guns or PhDs.

But, we must ask, is it? Is America a free country? Certainly we citizens enjoy great amounts of freedom, but are we increasingly pawns manipulated by our government in the name of “social justice”? Ask yourself these questions:

How can an adult citizen – who can own property, own a weapon, vote, and die in the military - be charged as a “minor” in possession of alcohol?

How can an adult twenty year old citizen buy an AR15, be able to be entrusted with an automatic weapon by the Army, and yet not be allowed to purchase a handgun? Why are citizens subjected to asking permission of the State to carry their own property in the service of the fundamental right of self defense, even despite a clear, constitutional “shall not be infringed”?

Why is it that most speech is considered free, but speech about politics near election time is subject to myriad rules? Why can a citizen be fined and potentially jailed for having the gall to use his own dime to mention a candidate’s name on the airwaves near election time?

Why is everything from Washington nowadays “comprehensive,” “mandatory,” and “necessary”? Why can we not keep our own earnings, plan our own retirement, educate our own children, make sick or well our own bodies, keep our own lives private, or so often defend our own families without some busy-body from government at all levels telling us Yes, No, or Maybe-So?

The stark and sole answer to these questions is that we have given up so many of our private choices to government at all levels, and so many of our public choices best handled by communities, the several states, and/or hardly at all have been handed to or usurped by a federal government with a self serving, centralist worldview and insufficient knowledge of and deftness about local issues. Nine out of ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights are regularly abrogated, to the detriment of everyone’s right and responsibility to make one’s own decisions. Soldiers aren’t being quartered in our homes, but agents of the state have a presence in almost every document we put our name on and in every product we bring home (or are forbidden from so doing).

We can be arrested now for more violations of the law than at any time in our past: when was the last time Americans could openly drink a beer, sit around a beach bonfire, or so much as have a Swiss Army knife in a sports stadium without viewing the presence of a police officer as a source of worry? America is in a sorry state; I, for one, don’t see anything getting better.

This episode: the Necessary and Proper Clause versus the Tenth Amendment.

The Necessary and Proper Clause. Article One. Section Eight.

<blockquote>[Congress shall have the power...] To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof. </blockquote>

The Tenth Amendment. Amendments to the Constitution. Amendment Ten.

<blockquote>The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. </blockquote>

Notes:

1. As always, given the very nature of written Constitutions and written law, a preamble states the intent of the document and is not meant to carry the force of law. Thus appeals to a literal "general welfare" are faulty.

2. The Necessary and Proper Clause refers to "foregoing" powers, meaning that the power of Congress referred to in the clause only operates in context to the powers already listed (mostly in Article One, Section Eight). These "necessary and proper" powers are tempered by numerous other restrains such as those on ex post facto, bills of attainder, and Article One, Section One, which prohibits Congressional delegation of its sole Constitutional authority. Due to this fact, there is no dispute with the Tenth Amendment.

3. The Tenth Amendment, which due to the textual and common "foregoing" explicit and implied in the Necessary and Proper Clause does not conflict with any other portion of the Constitution, explicitly makes extra-constitutional laws unconstitutional. It states that in order for Congress to make a law, there must be Constitutional grounds for that law; there must be text within the Constitution that supports the supposition that such law is within the natural purview of both a legislative assembly and this Congress. It goes further and states that what is not in the jurisdiction of the federal government (most matters not related to the national defense or of Great Import - in other words, most governmental matters) is to be in the jurisdiction of the several states or, a state failing to contain within its constitution empowerment to that effect, the people.

4. Let us suppose, as a paltry few Federalists (as opposed to Democratic-Republicans), most Progressives, and all progressives have since 1791, that there was an inherent contradiction between the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Tenth Amendment. Which one would be considered to supersede; which one would take precedent as the Supreme Law of the Land?

The very nature of Amendments, whether to statutes or Constitutions, is that they render previous contradictory text null and void. The Thirteenth and Seventeenth Amendments famously did such things. Why? Because they were included in the text of the Constitution at a time proceeding earlier text; they "amended" what was considered to be a less than beneficial arrangement (although, as in the case of the Seventeenth, we can see that not all amendments are salutary). The simple fact that the Tenth Amendment was an amendment, and that it was made law after Article One, Section Eight, means that in any potential disagreement the Tenth Amendment takes precedent. Thousands of years of legal practice, and metaphysical and universal Good Sense, make this so.

What does this mean? This means that, unless a particular program -let us use as an example, an old age pension - is a delegated power in the Constitution, then no law that Congress may make to effect such a program can possibly be necessary and proper. This means that, with "foregoing" included in the clause, in addition to the very nature of written constitutions being whole and without "living" powers, the Constitution, as far as the listed portions go, is in harmony.

And most importantly, no one can use the Necessary and Proper clause to hide from the fact that when Congress attempts to enact a program that does not have explicit Constitutional approval - whether this be securities law, drug prohibition, Social Security, or funding petting zoos for inner city school children - then Congress is acting outside of its legal mandate, and any products of such are unconstitutional, illegal, and, in a sane and moral world in which we do not live, ignorable.

[Note: I attempted to submit this response to my campus newspaper, The Crimson White. It was, obviously, rejected]

When it comes to global warming, don't believe the hype.

Superstition and despotism - western political culture is imbued with a history of rising out of these perfidies. The thought that our actions - rain dances, virgins thrown into volcanoes, our perceived immorality - mitigates or brings on the ravages of nature is an old one, and it is a thought that the scientific process has time after time shown false. The fear that accompanies these superstitions has been a tool of despots for just as long - fear of diving punishment has led to obedience and subservience to "God Kings" and to the divine right rulers. H.L. Mencken once summed up this world view: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Today, we are confronted in many ways - all of them which feel to the great body of normal people with normal lives (those who are not perennially indignant activists and/or glossy eyed zealots) less than immediate and in many cases quite abstract and sophistical - by these examples of mysticism and tyranny. One of these such monsters is the specter of anthropogenic global warming, the largest in a long stream of hobgoblins for which we the peons, rubes, and knuckle-draggers are ultimately blamed.

Fortunately for mankind, but unfortunately for Jay Hodgson - author of the recent opinion in the CW, "The melting snows of Kilimanjaro" - the activists and sign-wavers whose self-esteem and federal grant money depend on milking fear for all it is worth, we as a people do not have much other than smog and wallet-lightening to fear from driving around our fossil fuel powered cars. This viewpoint - held by many well respected physicists, oceanologists, and meteorologists in the academia and public service - however, is dismissed by those eager to wallop the nasty, mean corporations in the name of the environment (and virtually everything else) as illegitimate from the start since "there is no doubt" and "the scientific community is actually near 100 percent agreement." Dissent from the environmentalist line is shunned because disagreement with "the experts" and with a majority of informed and uninformed citizens is somehow dangerous. Those who disagree with the proposition that man is mostly or at all the cause of global warming are routinely described by both the activists and the press as "deniers" - somehow linking those who question the misinterpretations, distortions, and outright fabrications of such groups as the IPCC to Holocaust deniers.

Anthropogenic global warming skeptics and indeed all people have good reason to doubt claims such as those made in Al Gore's ironically named documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The very IPCC graph that Al Gore displays, showing a correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperatures, casts doubt on the propositions behind Gore's pronouncements. One must show contingency to breach the boundary between correlation and causation. In simple terms: if X and Y always occur together, X can only cause Y if X comes before Y. Luckily, the data shows such a contingency, but unluckily for the scare-mongers the causation is in reverse of what they state. Global CO2 spikes after a rise in global temperatures, in time variations typically between 200 and 800 years. Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth, with an average depth of 3,700 meters. One cubed meter corresponds with 1000 kg of water. It thus takes eras for entire oceans to undergo significant changes in temperatures. Along the same logic, it would take several hundred years for even the upper ocean to consistently change temperature. When this happens, though, carbon dioxide that was absorbed by the ocean is released into the atmosphere (the ocean, for the uninformed, is the source of the vast majority of atmospheric carbon dioxide in particular and greenhouse gases in general), explaining the centuries long gap between rises in global temperatures and rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In order to turn the causation the other way, though, "climatologists" base their computer models off of false data: they factor in amounts of current and future carbon dioxide that are many times more than actual current levels and most predicted increases.

In fact, much of the climatologists' energy is directed into the creation of various computer models in an attempt to predict future climate: these are the basis of most of the media hysteria that we hear on a constant basis. The very fact that these models are constantly being updated and revised - with the models of even past IPPC panels being obsolete - calls their entire legitimacy into question: the earth's climate is filled with literally millions of possible confounds dating back to times where our estimates of conditions are little more than intelligent sounding guesses. It should come as no surprise then that climate model after climate model has failed the most simple test of validity: the ability to predict present conditions based off of previously discovered and solid historical data. The very climate model used by the 1995 IPPC report to generate the now well known and scary looking "hockey stick" graph showing a future exponential rise in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide has been shown to generate that same graphical pattern no matter what data was entered into it. The climate is simply too vast and too complex to take into account all possible confounds, and this guarantees failure if one's basic premise is flawed or if one refuses to take into account such a possibility.This makes very much sense if one considers a basic proposition: if meteorologists are wrong to alarming degrees about weather months, weeks, even days off, how in the world can we expect an accurate prediction of conditions in years to come?

Fortunately, there is something quantifiable that, regardless of other conditions, correlates even closer than CO2 with global temperatures: solar radiation. During periods of intense solar activity (as measured now and in the past by frequency of sun-spots, and additionally in the present with various technologies), the world has heated. During periods of solar radiation decline, Earth has been plagued with "mini Ice Ages." During one such high period of solar activity known as the Medieval Warm Period, Norsemen farmed Greenland and vineyards thrived in even northern England. During a large period of low solar activity, the Rivers Thames and Delaware went so far as to freeze - a very uncommon occurrence. We have recently discovered that the Martian Polar Ice Caps - indeed the whole of Mars - in addition to other planets in our Solar System (key word: Solar) have been warming for quite some time: specifically, since the 1970s, when Earth came out of a 30 year cooling period (replete with hysteria about "Global Cooling" and an impending ice age).

In human history, global temperatures, atmospheric CO2, and the rate change of both have been higher than we have seen of late. And throughout history, such phenomena have acted independently of human action. This makes nothing but sense when one considers that atmospheric carbon dioxide makes up around a paltry two percent of all greenhouse gas. The overwhelming volume of greenhouse gas is made up of water vapor at 95 percent. Water vapor is 270 times more efficient at heat absorption than carbon dioxide (and the vast majority of carbon dioxide is generated by - guess what - natural causes). Given that the past is replete with climes much more rich in CO2 and solar radiation, we must ask the question: What sport utility vehicles were the Normans, Mongols, and Teutons driving to cause all of that 14th century mugginess? And who was that brave and ingenious cro magnon soul who saved mankind from the Ice Age by churning exhaust from this Suburban into the atmosphere?

For the sake of brevity, I will now delve right into the juicy parts of opinion writing: political accusations. Why has this hysteria become such a driving force in politics, and why does it seem that those whose general political philosophy call for ever powerful government (the Left in general and McCain types on the Right) have such a monopoly on this flabbergastingly insipid issue. The answer, dear Watson, is power pure and simple. The activist Left has for generations attempted to make normal Americans feel guilty about their own personal success, telling them that by feeding their families and maybe, just maybe, saving up enough money for a nice vacation and a car big enough to take the kids to soccer that average Americans are living off of the backs of variously defined workers (as opposed to the end-game of socialist states, where only Party apparatchiks and the secret police - in Britain, the CCTV watchers et al - live off workers backs, and the workers live off stale bread). Politicians and bureaucrats are ever desperate to justify their existence and feel important at all of the right Washington cocktail parties. What better way to accomplish these ends than to tell citizens that their own enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is dooming us all to Biblical events of the sort predicted by Gore and the writers of Day After Tomorrow. People who dare point out that a given proposal to arrest global warming is unwise, untenable, unconstitutional, or downright un-American and authoritarian can be brushed aside by claiming the most dire of dire emergencies: global catastrophe on a grand scale. Or, in the words of Benito Mussolini: "We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become." The environmentalists think that humans are too impudent and childish to be left to their own devices and property - we humans apparently make a sufficient muck of things that only the elite brains of those who care are fit to rectify the situation. On behalf of those in the public who express considerable doubt about the theories lumped on us by the sophists and calculators of the hopefully-ruling class, I would like to say to Mr. Hodgson, the author of the small violin sad song story about Kilimanjaro: stop trying to throw us into the volcano like so many virgins in the vain hope that Pele will spare us his wrath. The Earth will do what it wants, when it wants, and we are only along for the ride. Free citizens don't need some cabal of busy-bodies poking around in their affairs, and fie upon those who would attempt to use this blown up (and, many would say, made up) concern of "catastrophic climate change" to get Americans to give up even more of their freedom.