Senator Jeff Kruse - February 20th, 2014

 Working Hard For You

FEBRUARY 20, 2014

Because there were several responses to my last newsletter relative to the California drought, I thought a reply was appropriate.  First, I do know tree growth can be measured by their rings.  It should be pointed out, however, that there are many other factors involved in the growth of any plant besides water.  Additionally I would suggest they probably didn’t cut down a bunch of 500 year old trees in the central California before they made their statement.  What we have here is another example of political science overriding real science.

Many years ago Al Gore came out with a movie called “An Inconvenient Truth”, which I did go see.  There was actually a fair amount of good science in the movie.  The problem for me was where things were fudged to fit a political agenda.   One of the main points he made was that the increase in carbon in the atmosphere was causing global warming.  He used ice core samples from the Antarctic to prove his point.  The problem with this was he intentionally inverted the relationship.  The real science showed that the increase in carbon levels in the atmosphere were a result, not a cause, of temperature increases.  One can only assume he did this to benefit his political agenda, although he has made a fortune personally off of carbon credits.

A few years before that there was a panic about the hole in the ozone.  Our reaction was to ban aerosol cans and change the way we operated cold storage facilities.  This cost industry hundreds of millions of dollars.  After the fact we found out the hole in the ozone grows and shrinks naturally, but the damage to the economy had already happened.

For those of you who are true believers in global warming there is probably nothing I can say to change your mind. I would point out, however, that we are currently in one of the coolest periods in our planet’s 2 billion year history and in fact in the coolest period of the last one billion years.  The Tertiary, Cretaceous, and Jurassic periods were massively warmer (without human intervention).  We had a major temperature drop during the Pleistocene period, which was the last ice age.  We are still in the process of coming out of the ice age, but the planet temperature is still 15 degrees below what it was during the middle of the Tertiary period.  This is probably enough science for now, but for those of you who claim I don’t research what I write about I just wanted to show that you are wrong on that point. 

These issues go way beyond the issue of global warming.  We shut down timber harvest in our federal forest based on faulty data relative to the spotted owl.  We are in the process of further reductions for the marbled Murrelet based on antidotal evidence without any real science at all.  In some areas, our fish populations for example, we are pushing really hard to reach a point where our decisions will be based on real science.  It can, however, be hard to get there when the science doesn’t match up with a particular political agenda.

I am a farmer and my family has been farming much of the same land for 90 years.  If we didn’t take good care of our natural resources we wouldn’t still be in business.  The same can be said for those in the timber and fishing industries.  Maybe it is time to quit using the environment as an excuse for social change and more government control.  We need to do this before freedom becomes just a part of our history not our reality.

Sincerely,

Senator Jeff Kruse