One of the effects of the weakness of the current solar cycle can be seen in our weather here on earth. The global climate has been cooling for more than a decade, and the past winter—which was one of the coldest on record for the northern, midwestern, and eastern states—may be the precursor of temperatures to come. The data confirms this. In November 2013 alone, nearly 1,000 record low-temperature records were set in the United States.37 At the same time, images from Europe’s Cryostat spacecraft showed that Arctic sea ice coverage had increased by some 50 percent, from 1,400 cubic miles to 2,100 cubic miles by the end of the melting season when compared with the same time last year.38 The Arctic, Antarctic, and Great Lakes ice masses have increased so greatly over only the past winter that even if the spring and summer warming in the northern hemisphere is normal, there is the risk of waters rising. It’s not global warming but global cooling that is most likely to cause this to happen.
The climate statistics for 2013 were made public before NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had a chance to tamper with them. The statistics revealed that 2013 was one of the ten coldest years in the United States since 1985, and it saw the largest year-on-year decline in global temperatures ever seen. Before the numbers are officially released to the sympathetic press, these two organizations will rework them so that they reflect the official U.S. position on climate change.39 You can bet on that. When the Akademik Shokalskiy was frozen for weeks in the Antarctic, only Fox News mentioned the fact that the stranded climate crazies were out to demonstrate the existence of global warming.40
There is solid evidence that forces much larger than man’s ability to spew carbon into the air are at work to change the climate. One climate scientist, Benjamin Santer, blames volcanoes. When volcanoes erupt, they inject large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, where it forms sulfuric acid drops that reflect sunlight back away from the earth. The reduced amount of radiant energy causes the lower atmosphere and the earth’s surface to cool. There have been seventeen volcanic eruptions in the past fifteen years, and the mirror effect they create may be contributing to global cooling as well.41 Unfortunately, although Santer correctly identifies the effect of volcanoes as reducing atmospheric temperatures, he is still working under the misconception that human activity significantly increases temperatures on our planet. Half right is better than nothing.
Volcanoes were implicated in another study that used ice-penetrating radar to discover an active volcano under nearly a mile of Antarctic ice. “Eruptions at this site are unlikely to penetrate the 1.2–2-kilometer-thick overlying ice, but would generate large volumes of melt water that could significantly affect ice stream flow,” according to the study. The discovery explains why ice in the west Antarctic region is melting. But it also undercuts global warming frauds’ arguments about man-made causes of the ice melt. Aside from a small region of Antarctica, the rest of the polar cap is experience record-breaking gains in the amount of ice over the past two years.42
Nothing has changed in the left’s attitude toward climate change. Al Gore is still spouting the same tired rhetoric about the dangers of climate change. Like all climate change advocates, he ignores the fact that temperatures haven’t risen in fifteen years. The NASA and NOAA interpretations of the latest official report on global warming still maintain—against the evidence—that their climate models are accurate and that warming is still occurring. A top MIT climate scientist said otherwise when he found the report had “truly sunk to the level of hilarious incoherence.”43 That should tell you all you need to know about the administration’s climate policy.
One of the reasons the environmentalists have switched from using the term “global warming” to describe the earth’s weather to using “climate change” is that although the temperature decline of the past fifteen years effectively disproves that we’re in a warming period, it’s easier to defend when warming doesn’t happen. No matter what evidence crops up to the contrary, “climate change” is a one-size-fits-all term. Despite the fact that the environmentalist movement’s computer models have been demonstrated to be unconnected with real-world activity, there’s no way they can be disproven as long as we’re just talking about a change in the weather.44
In spite of the administration’s energy policies, in states where oil and gas production by private companies has been allowed to proceed without unnecessary government intervention, economies are booming and unemployment is at lows that reflect how responsible energy policy could impact the entire country if the leftists in power would step aside. In Texas, for instance, the oil and gas sector is setting new records and exceeding even the wildest of expectations. Oil production in Texas has skyrocketed by more than 140 percent in the past five years. At the same time, because of Obama’s energy policy, the price of West Texas crude oil has increase by more than 150 percent. Even the corrupt International Energy Agency has had to take notice. Because of the dramatic increase in U.S. oil production, spearheaded by Texas and North Dakota, that organization has estimated that within the next year the United States will become the largest oil-producing country in the world.45
One of the reasons for the increase in oil and natural gas production in the United States is fracking. It’s a clean technology that enables energy companies to extract oil and natural gas from shale. States that allow fracking have seen their economies reap economic benefits; states like California that won’t even consider fracking or other technologically available methods of exploiting oil and natural gas reserves continue to risk teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
In the meantime, while developing economies such as those in India and China are radically increasing their CO2 output, the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere has been reduced by 8 percent in the past two years alone. Not that it matters; carbon dioxide is such a small component of the earth’s atmosphere that doubling our output would have no effect whatsoever on the planet’s climate.
Another area in which fracking is proving to be an extraordinarily efficient technology is in the amount of water necessary to produce energy. One million BTUs of energy produced by fracking requires about three gallons of water, the lowest amount of any energy-producing source. Do you know how many gallons of water are required to produce one gallon of ethanol, the environmentalists’ energy source of choice? 15,800! It requires nearly sixteen thousand gallons of water to produce ethanol that will generate a million BTUs, where fracking requires three gallons of water to produce the same results.
Even former leftist EPA head Lisa Jackson had to admit the effectiveness of fracking. In testimony before Congress, Jackson admitted, “I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.” From efficiency in the use of land to reduced negative impact on wildlife, fracking is proving to be one of the most productive technologies ever in producing energy.46
Forced by the overwhelming body of fact, climate change activists have been forced to concede that the average surface temperature on our planet has not increased in a decade and a half. But they describe this as a “pause.” A fifteen-year pause! And during all of that time, so-called greenhouse gases have not stopped being emitted into the atmosphere, and in fact the amounts have increased over that time. The IPCC has known this for at least ten years, but that didn’t stop them from beating the global warming drum. They still insist that those who actually look at real climate data are “denialists” and that the earth is still facing catastrophic consequences if we don’t stop our current energy production practices.47
The Obama administration’s climate change policy is actually endangering our national security. While China’s state media were releasing that country’s plans to conduct nuclear warfare on the United States, Barack Obama had more pressing concerns. He was issuing an executive order directing the government to prepare for the impact of global warming.
As our enemies become more and more emboldened by Obama’s reducing our military read
iness and allowing himself to be pushed around by what amounts to no more than international schoolyard bullies, the president, because of his mistaken notion of what’s happening with our weather, has ordered federal agencies to “work with states to build ‘resilience’ against major storms and other weather extremes” that may be coming by reinforcing everything from bridges to buildings.48
Obama’s energy policy continues to target reducing America’s energy independence to as great a degree as possible. In my opinion, the president has demonstrated that he has no intention of lifting his shutdown of oil exploration and production on federal lands or of stopping his criminal delay of the building of the Keystone XL Pipeline, even as it becomes clear that if he had done so several years ago we would be in a stronger position to stop Vladimir Putin’s attempts to rebuild the Russian empire. In North Dakota, energy production is creating an economic boom that has resulted in a state budget surplus and reduced unemployment to barely measurable levels while increasing wages in even the most menial jobs to upward of $20 an hour. Those working in the oil fields typically earn five times more than that.49
The administration’s answer: Throw up new roadblocks that will continue to delay the building of the Keystone pipeline, even as Canada begins to ship oil to China.
As I’ve demonstrated in this chapter, not only is the green-energy initiative fraudulent—built as it is on unsupportable theories and nonexistent proof that releasing carbon into the atmosphere is dangerous to our climate—it is but one more way in which we are being divided into groups of private citizens and political and economic power mongers, the very groups who are likely to oppose each other in the coming civil war.
CHAPTER 9
The War on Our Schools
Already at a disadvantage because they’ve spent their time in school parroting leftist platitudes rather than thinking for themselves, graduates are now forced to compete for minimum-wage jobs for which they’re overqualified. In the process, they continue to live with their parents because they can’t afford a place of their own. The brick-and-mortar universities, which were once the cornerstones of free speech and educational inquiry, have become debt-ridden gulags of biased, agenda-driven indoctrination.
As many of you know, I grew up in the Bronx. My father was an immigrant and not an educated man. He was hardworking and intelligent, but he didn’t have the opportunity or the money for college, though education was very important in my family. I went to public schools and City College. I wasn’t naturally a good student, or rather I wasn’t a good memorizer, which was the modus operandi in school back then. I was much more of a dreamer and a free thinker. And when I discovered jazz in my teens, I thought I needed to know nothing else. What could be more important in life than Stan Getz or Charlie Parker?
Though jazz would remain the soundtrack to my life, it became evident that I couldn’t live on music alone. I worked hard, became a good student, and would ultimately acquire several graduate degrees, including a doctorate from the University of California. My dissertation was published as a book, which is extremely rare. The child who had trouble memorizing the date of the Magna Carta and the multiplication tables is now a doctor and the author of twenty-eight books.
If you were lucky enough to have been born in the United States before about 1975—as I was, just barely—and if you were fortunate enough to have completed your public-school education by the mid-to late 1980s, you were the beneficiary of the best primary and secondary school system in the world.
But then Jimmy Carter became president and created the Department of Education in 1979. At the time, the United States was first in the world in the quality of education by every measure. Under Carter, instead of leaving education to people at the state and local levels, where it thrived, the federal government took over U.S. schools, and the quality of education began to sink, slowly at first, and gradually more rapidly. Now our international standing in education is trapped in the teens and low to midtwenties in virtually every ranking of every academic discipline.1 American high school students’ academic performances have sunk to fourteenth in reading, seventeenth in science, and twenty-sixth in math scores when measured against students in other countries around the world.2
Student performances on the 2012 Program for International Assessment tests revealed that Asian countries in particular provide their students with a much better education than the United States does. Chinese students, specifically those living in the city of Shanghai, posted the highest scores in the world in math and science. Students in Vietnam, which has been a third-world country since before we fought there in the rice paddies during the 1960s and ’70s, now score higher than those in the United States.
Even current U.S. Education secretary Arne Duncan, an Obama lieutenant and leftist ideologue, characterized the flat scores as a “picture of educational stagnation.”3
Let me give you a few reasons why.
Negative Outcome-Based Education
In 1979, the illiteracy rate among high school students in the United States was about 1 percent.4 In other words, if you were in school before that time you were among the 99 percent of high school students who could read.
In the early 1980s, an approach to learning known as “outcome-based education” was introduced in the Chicago city schools. It was later expanded across much of the U.S. educational system.
This instructional methodology dictates that until all students have mastered the content in a given subject area, no student is allowed to advance to the next level. If you’re an above-average student and know the subject matter, you have to sit on your thumbs until everyone has caught up with you.5 If you ask someone who is a proponent of this method, they will give you a lot of double-talk about the outcome of the whole class being more important than the success of the individual student.
Do you know what happened in Chicago after this subversive approach was introduced?
Within five years, nearly half of all the public school students in Chicago dropped out.6
Literacy rates plummeted.
There is no question in my mind that Chicago’s current inner-city violence and unemployment is caused in no small measure by the intentional destruction of the city’s school system through the introduction of this leftist educational agenda.
And I have little doubt that, as Carter effectively nationalized education in this country through his creation of the federal Department of Education, this approach has been largely responsible for the dramatic drop in the national literacy rates of our elementary and high school students.
By 2010, although graduation rates were at an all-time-high 78 percent of high school students, 26 percent of twelfth graders could not read at their grade level. Put another way: More than a quarter of today’s graduating high school students are functionally illiterate.7
According to the U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Literacy, in 2013, 19 percent of high school graduates could not read at all.8
Despite the decrease in our students’ academic ranking around the world since the late 1970s, there are nearly 5,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States with some 18 million students in attendance. That’s more than double the number of students attending colleges and universities in the ’70s.9
At the same time, in order to accommodate an increasingly ill-prepared population of college-eligible students, standards in higher education have dropped precipitously. Apart from the top-tier colleges and universities, most college curricula for incoming freshmen now consist of little more than remediation to bring students up to the standard of high school graduates of the 1970s.10
So how do our Ivy League leaders handle such a problem? They look the other way while our educational system becomes rife with cons and criminals.
For instance, a Dallas-based company that bills itself as a “custom writing service” creates papers for barely literate students to turn in as their own work. There’s so much demand for the firm’s services that
it now employs more than one hundred writers. As the company’s news release explains, students “no longer have to face the burden of academic coursework.”
Students—and it breaks my heart to call them that—rave about the service. Here are some of the things they have to say:
“The paper was written excellent… My professor was satisfied, and so am I.”
“I’ve sent the paper to evaluation first ’cause I wasn’t sure if they can find a writer with a relevant academic background… But yes, they did! It seems like she read my thoughts and written the paper as if I did it myself, lol :-)”
“Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better. Just noticed a few typos, but that’s okay.”11
We were once a country that produced the likes of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Now we have this.
Compounding the diminished quality of the education they received in our elementary and high schools, 18 million college students are living in an education bubble. Simply put, an education bubble is the same as a bubble in real estate or finance. As tuition goes up, the financial benefits of a college degree decrease. The student who takes a student loan is immediately underwater, just like the person who buys a house at the height of the market and the next week the bubble breaks. College graduates are underperforming so badly today that new legislation is in the works that would mandate colleges demonstrate the success or failure of the education their students receive by publishing data on the salaries their graduates earn.12
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 18
