On March 5, North Korea simultaneously launched four missiles into Japan’s territorial waters. In his new year’s address, the North’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, bragged that his nuclear-armed rogue state would soon be testing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the US. A day later, President Trump tweeted in response, “It won’t happen!” but characteristically didn’t elaborate. On March 17, Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, visited the demilitarized zone on the border between North and South Korea and stated, “Let me be very clear, the policy of strategic patience has ended.”
In my new book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, Vol. 2: The Way Forward, I warn that a new “Axis of Evil” has now formed, one which gravely threatens the US. Due to the eight years of feckless leadership provided by our former Commander in Chief, that axis is now comprised of North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China. Most Americans instinctively know that revanchist Russia, run by a former Soviet KGB capo, is a hostile power. Yet most would also be reluctant to view China as an enemy, despite the obvious fact that it refuses to prevent its rogue client state, North Korea, from threatening the US. This is the unmistakable act of a hostile power.
Just as the American left is horribly mistaken in believing that its adherence to the dogma of Obama’s “strategic patience,” or that appeasement of our fervent adversaries are means to improve our national security, so too does its slavish devotion to anthropogenic climate change contribute to our greater peril. Both are threats to our national security. Both are wrong and are based on false assumptions, bad data, and historical illiteracy.
Man-made climate change can be debunked in many ways. For example, the March issue of the Smithsonian Magazine (not exactly a bastion of conservatism) published a piece on the mysterious disappearance of the Vikings from Greenland. Norsemen, who thrived for three centuries there on the edge of the known world, suddenly vanished. The author/anthropologist, Tim Folger, writes that a renegade Viking Icelander, Eric the Red, discovered Greenland in 985, “landing his fleet of 14 long ships there.” And, for the next three hundred years, the Vikings flourished during what the archeological community today refers to as the “Medieval Warm Period.” As the sea ice decreased during those centuries, sailing from Scandinavia became less hazardous. Longer growing seasons made it feasible to graze cattle and sheep. The Vikings transplanted their medieval lifestyle to an uninhabited land, theirs for the taking.
But what made them leave suddenly? Folger writes that weather in Greenland dramatically began to cool, triggered by an event on the other side of the world. In 1257, a volcano on the Indonesian island of Lombok erupted in what scientists digging ice cores in Antarctica now figure was the most powerful in the last 7,000 years. The sulfur released into the atmosphere reflected solar energy back into space, cooling the climate on a global scale. The climate change was at first gradual but by 1300 was persisting. In the 1340’s, vast numbers of people in northern climates either evacuated and went south or starved. The Vikings left Greenland. All of them.
In my first book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, Volume I, I describe an authenticated climatic event which began the rapid unraveling of the Roman Empire in western Europe. On New Year’s Eve, 406, a massive portion of the Rhine river froze solidly enough to allow huge numbers of German warrior tribesmen to run across the ice and to pour into Northern Gaul, bypassing the Roman forts perched on its western bank, seeking plunder deep into the interior. The invasion was so massive, and the Empire so financially weak, that in a few short years all of Gaul and Spain were lost to Rome.
What is salient about this event is that we have no record of the Rhine ever freezing again after 406, which would indicate a very cold pre-medieval period. And given that we know from abundant scientific and archeological evidence that there was also a “Medieval Warm Period” which lasted from 900 to 1300, this would also indicate, over the last two millenniums, the earth has both cooled and warmed quite dramatically. And it has done so due to other gigantic forces that have nothing to do with the human production and use of fossil fuels.
In short, the theory of man-made climate change is bunk. But it is worse than that. It also dangerous to our survival as a nation and as the protector of the free world. As we all know, the climate-change dogmatists want the West to greatly restrict and hugely tax the extraction and refinement of carbon-based fuels and transfer our finite capital resources to the production of alternative fuels. This anti-market, anti-capitalist approach might be acceptable, unless you happen to work in the oil or coal industries, if it were not so dangerously naïve.
Should this US president or a future president, based on the best assessments of senior military advisors, need to preemptively take out the North Korean nuclear threat, its patron China might enter into a war with the US on her client’s behalf, perhaps Russia and Iran as well. And should a third world war ensue, we would truly know the utter folly of our not being energy independent when we had it in our grasp to do so. Importing crude oil from the Middle East on huge defenseless tanker ships, in a world conflict, could quickly be an impossibility.
Looked at another way, perhaps if we were not in the thrall of the enviro American left, we would already be energy independent. That in turn might well be another deterrent to our major adversaries. Russia and China, calculating whether to enter a conventional war against the US, perhaps would see that their energy supplies could not outlast an energy independent America. Therefore, our energy independence could prove to be necessary in preventing the next world war.
