QA OA The Levy County Journal EDITORIAL The County Paper, Est. 1923 Ievyjo urn alon line.com The far left is just too angry By Rick Burnham Editor If you didn't catch highlights from the White House Correspondents' Dinner over the weekend, consider yourself lucky. That's the event in which a Hollywood celebrity by the name of Wanda Sykes took the lowest of low roads and wished death on a nationally renowned political personality, much to the glee of our wonderful new president, Barack Obama. If you have never heard of Wanda Sykes, don't feel sheltered. Her career highlights consist of bit parts in a handful of mostly forgettable films, including "License to Wed," "Evan Almighty," and "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," along with a number ofho- hum television appearances too pointless and insignificant to name. Essentially, she plays the wisecracking black woman role. Over and over and over and over. Versatility is not her No. 1 asset. Essentially, she will become most famous for what she did Saturday night. What she did was personally attack Rush Limbaugh, presumably for his earlier comments regarding President Obama- that he hopes Obama fails. Limbaugh has more recently clarified those remarks, saying that if the president succeeds, the United States of America fails. He's right if Obama succeeds, we become a Socialist nation, no better than Venezuela, Libya, Laos and Algeria, to name a few. A growing number of p iPJp ~ ge* his waysand .. , steersyaway. fromSocialism. If that doesn'tt, happen, many of us hope he fails. But this isn't about Socialism, or Barack Obama for that matter. It's about an angry left wing hell-bent on taking the low road time after time, whether you are talking about a mob of gay and lesbian demonstrators taking to the street or the personal destruction of a beauty pageant contestant just because she voiced an opinion that dared to go against the liberal cause of the moment. It's about Wanda Sykes, who openly wished Rush Limbaugh's kidneys would fail. That comment got a hearty laugh from the president, the man who based his campaign on hope and change. (But apparently-not on taking the high road.) You won't get that from the right. No matter what you think, of its ideals, values and beliefs, you know at the end of they day you will not be drug through the mud. They will challenge you on the questions of the day, and more often than not they will come away from those debates on top. But regardless of the topic, the discussion will 3 probably not end in a death wish or anything like it. The right, for example, would never wish for Wanda Sykes to get hit by a Greyhound Bus. That would be an affront to pretty much all that they stand for. Christian values,.a staple of those on the right side of the aisle, would frown at such a suggestion. Similarly, the right would never hope for Wanda Sykes to get caught by a polar bear. That kind of gory picture is best left for those on the far left to draw. Also, the right would never suggest that it would be great if Wanda Sykes' could get sucked into the engine of a 747. That kind of rhetoric will get your right wing membership card confiscated for an undetermined period of time. Do you hope Wanda Sykes eats so many chicken wings that her arteries get clogged and she needs an emergency bypass as a result? One that fails? Then you must not be from the right. Those on the right side of the aisle would never wish such a thing. Our ideals prohibit it. Would you like to see Wanda Sykes trying to fix the battery cables on her car, and one of her friends turn the ignition as a practical joke, only to have the whole thing backfire and set her hair on fire? Me neither. I am from the right, and we don't wish such things. Is there climate change at all? By Terry Witt Staff Writer S ome scientists believe carbon dioxide emissions from cars, trucks and fossil fuel-powered electric generating plants are contributing significantly to the warming of the planet. They say the North Pole and South Pole ice caps are melting because of global warming. Don't tell that to my parents who live in Wisconsin. The last two winters in Wisconsin have been bitterly cold. When I was growing up in Wisconsin, temperatures in January rarely made it above zero during daylight hours and 20 degree below zero was common. Wisconsin had a traditional January in 2009. Where was the global warming? Many scientists believe if we stop or significantly slow human-related carbon dioxide emissions the planet will cool again and everything will be okay. It sounds plausible enough, but I'm not sure the science is there to back up the theory. Common sense tells me there is more to climate change than just carbon emissions, and that's assuming climate change is real and not a normal cycle in the earth's history. We've had several ice ages and several warming trends. Scientists have found the fossil remains of tropical plants under the ice of the North Pole. Climate change is a relatively new phrase. But what is changing, if anything, and what is causing it? For me personally, it seems drier for longer periods of time in this part of Florida, though drought is part of the natural cycle. None of us has lived for 200 or 300 years and can recount what happened during the past two or three centuries, much less the last two or three million years. Is the dry weather we're receiving in this area the result of climate change or are we just paranoid because of all the talk about climate change? Many of the local folks who watch the weather aren't sure they've ever seen as much dry weather in their lifetimes. Is it being caused by global warming? Or is it just Florida's usual dry weather in April and May? I have another pet theory. For many years environmentalists warned us of the dangers of losing our tropical and temperate rain forests. The most famous of these rain forests is the 1.2 billion-acre tropical rain forest in the Amazon in South America. It is located in five nations with Brazil holding about half. The Amazon rain forest is half the size of the United States. It is located on the equator. It's my view that the deforestation of rain forests, particularly in the tropics, is having a major impact on our weather in Florida. We don't live far from the tropics. Rain forests create their own weather, in my view. As these massive and very wet forests release moisture into the air, the winds carry the moisture around the planet, dispersing the water around the globe as rainfall and snow. Deforesting the rain forests decreases the amount of water being carried by the winds and affects the amount of rainfall we receive in Florida and elsewhere. Droughts appear to be more prevalent and they seem to last longer with less rain carried on the tropical winds. With less rainfall, the climate is warmer. Rain tends to cool the earth. That's the view of a non-scientist. I read an article on the Internet that said the world loses nearly 58,000 square miles of tropical rain forest every year. That's an area the size of Illinois. These forests are killed mostly by native peoples. In some areas along the equator, they hack down the tropical rain forests and burn the wood to create charcoal, a saleable product. A 2008 analysis by the University of Adelaide in Australia called this massive loss of rain forest a "trajectory towards disaster" that would lead to the extinction of unique species (60 percent of all species on Earth live in tropical rain forests) and contribute to global warming. I think that's an understatement. The destruction of tropical rain forests is probably the major cause of global warming. At least that's my view. I don't think weather scientists have adequately studied the damage being caused by the deforestation of rain forests. The forests are being cut down for wood and farming. The native inhabitants have no idea of the global climate change they are causing and many meteorologists have stopped looking at tropical rain forest losses as a weather disaster. Some believe it is contributing to climate change. If global climate change exists, I personally believe rain forest destruction is causing most of it. The problem with not having good science about climate change is that politicians tend to guess about what policies should be implemented. Or they tend to sit on their hands and fret without doing anything. The latest fad among politicians is to promote a carbon dioxide cleanup of the atmosphere as the answer to global climate change. I think focusing primarily on carbon as the primary cause of global warming is like trying to cure cancer with penicillin. We do need to clean up carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere, but it's not the answer to global climate change. The lost rain forests lack the sex appeal of a pollutant that we can't see in the air. It's easier to scream the sky is falling than to look at something as imminently practical as saving the forests that provide the earth with much of its rainfall and oxygen, and which cool and clean the' atmosphere of contaminants. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency, publishes an informative web site that tells us the Earth's atmosphere is made of 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen. You can do the math. It means 99 percent of the Earth's atmosphere is made of nitrogen and oxygen, with 1 percent of trace gases mixed in. Trace gases are the greenhouse gases we hear so much about. Carbon dioxide, ozone, methane and carbon monoxide are trace gases. According to the NOAA web site http://noaa.gov/climate. html greenhouse gases allow shortwave energy from the sun to reach the earth's surface, but absorb some of the energy reflected back into the atmosphere by the earth. This trapping of energy acts like a greenhouse, hence the name greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases that trap the sun's energy are causing global warming. That's the theory. If the polar ice caps are melting as much as greenhouse gas theorists claim, why are we not seeing a great rise in the level of the ocean's surface? Why are the winters ice-cold in Wisconsin? Why haven't we seen more Hurricane Katrina storms like the one in 2005? That's what global warming scientists are telling us. As the world's oceans warm, the intensity of the storms will increase. I would be the last one to say that we won't get any more Hurricane Katrina's on the Gulf Coast. We could get one this year. If a Katrina-level storm were to hit Levy County from the Gulf of Mexico, it would be devastating. So let's pray it doesn't happen. I'm saying that climate change as a science is a relatively new field. Let's not jump to conclusions about what may or may not be changing our weather, if in fact it is changing. And let's not rule out the possibility that the destruction of tropical rainforests is having a major warming effect on the planet. As less rain falls, the planet and its oceans warm. Could it be that simple? May 14, 2009 Could destruction of rain forests be causing climate change? op" I rv IV% Qq