What government agency makes decisions so weighty they may cost the U.S. economy over $2.5 trillion and over 300,000 jobs over the next 15 years?

What federal bureaucracy holds the power to potentially pull the plug on thousands of consumers at both the peak of summer’s heat and the depths of winter’s cold?

What civic body has the authority to shutter billion-dollar plants while admitting very little positive impact?

An innocuous-sounding body called the Environmental Protection Agency does.

Using manmade (anthropogenic) global warming to justify its actions, the EPA has in recent years set out to decrease emissions. They have sought to shutter power plants and coerce automakers to abide by increasingly stringent mile-per-gallon requirements.

Or at least, it used to. Enter Scott Pruitt, former attorney general of Oklahoma and new administrator of the EPA.

Pruitt made immediate waves when he announced that the EPA would be rolling back many of the policies of his predecessor, Gina McCarthy, shifting focus from combating climate change to keeping America’s air and water clean. This stirred up immediate controversy — how could the head of the EPA even indirectly question the “consensus” of climate change?

Don’t 97 percent of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change?

Certain environmentalist groups are outraged that the head of the EPA would even dream of denying man-made global warming. They lean heavily on the claim that there is a “scientific consensus” on the matter, with 97 percent of scientists believing in anthropogenic climate change. If this is the case, anyone denying climate change is either a recalcitrant reactionary or a first-class buffoon.

However, the claim that 97 percent of scientists believe in man-made global warming is simply not true. The primary source of this statistic comes from a study by Australian scientist John Cook, though there are others. In Cook’s study, he and his team read over 11,000 abstracts from climate scientists, he found that 66.4 percent of scientists expressed no firm position on man-made global warming. Of the 33.6 percent who did express a firm position, 97 percent believed that man plays a significant role in climate change.

Somehow, this 97 percent of a third of scientists ballooned into 97 percent of all scientists across the globe. It could also be said just as easily that 66 percent of climate scientists have expressed no firm position on the matter.

However, many scientists, including one of our own professors, stridently disagree with the so-called “consensus.” Dr. Christopher Kobus is an associate professor of mechanical engineering here at Oakland University and specializes in alternative energy. He believes that man-made global warming is a “fraud.”

“Human activity is a small spec in the CO2 output cycle,” he stated in a special 2010 Senate minority report, “accounting for all of 2.33% of total CO2 output.”

Kobus is not alone in this opinion, with hundreds more scientists dissenting from the “consensus”.

A solution in search of a problem

At the end of the day, everyone agrees, because of the second law of thermodynamics, that the earth is generally getting warmer (funny note: in the ‘70s, the scare was about global cooling). The controversy is whether or not man is the primary cause of climate change.

While man is responsible for the world’s greatest problems, we aren’t responsible for climate change. Because of man’s failures and natural degeneracy, our world is irreparably broken. One day, it will be so hot it will literally burn up. We can’t stop this inevitable reality — we can only be ready to face that end.

Questions? Comments? Radical feelings in need of venting? Contact the author at [email protected].