Considering that one prediction of climate catastrophe after another has fallen by the wayside since the publication of this piece on my P. A. Ritzer blog on 3 July 2014, I thought it might be fun to republish it here.1 Among the many discrepancies between reality and the global-warming narrative, a few stick out to me. Of course it goes without saying that we have to concede that the extremists have switched out the term “global-warming” for “climate change,” which, though it gives far greater latitude to the extremists to make their case, at the same time, it ought to restrict the effectiveness of their scare tactics to the very few (one hopes) who believe the climate of the earth has remained ever static.
Where and when was the first Catholic diocese in the new world?: There is an interesting question for any history buff, whether of the Catholic persuasion or not. And the answer may surprise you. No, it was not the Diocese of Baltimore founded in 1789, or the Diocese of Quebec (1674), or the Dioceses of Mexico (1530), Puebla de los Angeles (1525), Santo Domingo (1511) or Puerto Rico (1511). No, the first diocese in the New World was the Diocese of Gardar founded in 1124. But wait, say you, ‘twas 1492 when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” True, so true, but 500 years prior to, Erik through the waves did hew, with intrepid crew, in 982. Erik the Red that is. In fact he hewed through many a wave before that, but it was in 982 that Erik first settled in Greenland after all that hewing. Nor were his nautical adventures complete, for after returning across the waters to Iceland, he led others over to Greenland in 985 or 986 to create two settlements.
Thereafter, his son Leif, who had converted to Christianity and been commissioned to “cooperate with priests of the expedition in propagating” the Catholic Faith by King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway, introduced Christianity to Greenland in the year 1000—before the Great Schism and over five long centuries before Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and Henry VIII—when it was still the case that to be Christian was to be a member of the Catholic Church. This eventually led to the establishment of the Catholic Diocese of Gardar by 1124. This diocese appears to have grown to have 2,800-4,200 or more inhabitants with 280 manors, 16 churches, and 2 monasteries. The inhabitants of the diocese raised cattle, sheep, and goats, and hunted on land and sea, and fished.2 But as the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age, the climate began to grow increasingly harsh in the latter part of the 14th century, so that, eventually, the inhabitants were required to eat even their breeding stock before they either perished or abandoned the settlements in the 15th century just a few decades before Columbus’ first reached the New World. The Greenland settlement lasted 450 years or so. In comparison, the United States of America is not yet 250 years old, and it has been only 418 years since the establishment of the colony of Jamestown. The point though, is that long before the industrial age, or the automobile, or jet airliners, there existed the Medieval Warm Period and then after that the Little Ice Age. Hmm.
Bovine flatulence: Ok, the United States has some 90 million head of cattle, and they are supposed to be helping create the greenhouse gases that are supposed to be creating global warming or climate change, which is bad or cataclysmic or something. But bison grazed the grasslands of what would become the United States long before any cattle were brought here by Europeans, and experts have estimated their numbers to have ranged between 60-100 million. Besides taking into account the bison’s greater mass, one must also include the higher numbers of other indigenous grazers like elk, deer, pronghorn, and more. Seems there must have been a lot of flatulation going on out there before Europeans or even indigenous people ever stepped upon the continent. Seems kind of natural. So, how bad is that?
Democrat Beach Mansions: We have all heard how global warming was going to raise sea levels to unprecedented levels, leading to disastrous flooding of New York and other cities. For instance, when Katie Couric on the Today Show on 24 May 2006 asked former Vice President Al Gore, of Inconvenient Truth fame, “What do you see happening in 15 to 20 years if nothing changes? . . . Even Manhattan would be in deep water,” he replied: “Yes, in fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.” And yet, not long before that, Gore had purchased a $9-million, ocean-view home in Montecito, California. Huh. Also in 2006, Obama Science Czar John Holdren went even further, predicting: “As global temperatures rise, they may cause the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet to slip more rapidly. Then we’ll be facing a sea-level rise not of one to three feet in a century, but of 10 or 20 feet in a much shorter time. The Supreme Court would be flooded. You could tie your boat to the Washington Monument. Storm surges would make the Capitol unusable.”3 OK, so why did Barack Hussein Obama—a true global-warming, climate-change believer—after he left the White House, purchase an $8.1 million-dollar, 8,200 square-foot home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C.? Makes one wonder. Well, it just may be that the Obamas, of-the-people Democrats that they are, hedged their bets with two or three other multi-million-dollar homes that they could flee to when the waters of the global-warming deluge were lapping about the Supreme Court. Could that be why they also purchased a 6,892-square-foot house on 29.3 coastal acres on Martha’s Vineyard for $13 million?4 Well, I may be missing something, but that does not make a lot of sense to me. I was privileged to visit Martha’s Vineyard a few times in my youth, and if I knew the oceans were going to rise, it would be one of the last places I would build even a shack let alone a mansion. But, fear not, should their Kalorama home and their Martha’s Vineyard home succumb to the rising waters, they could still stay high and dry in their $18 million home in Waimanalo, on . . . the island of Oʻahu . . . in . . . Hawaiʻi.5 That’s beachfront property again, . . . with rare private-beach access. Huh. Must be really steep beaches, because, I mean, if the ocean rises, that would affect all ocean-front beaches, right? Because, uh, aren’t all the oceans connected? Just asking.
©2025 P. A. Ritzer
3 July 2014
We know that the global-warming alarmists have warned us that if we keep burning “fossil fuels” the oceans will rise and flood huge portions of the inhabited world (e.g., see National Geographic, September 2013). The dreaded sea-level rise, which President Obama’s election was supposed to slow—in his own words: “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”—is supposed to happen because the Arctic and Antarctic ice will melt. Nevertheless, despite record amounts of carbon in the atmosphere, the volume of ice on Antarctica has reached record high levels according to government scientists [according to the well-worth-reading “Gov’t Scientists: Antarctic Sea Ice Is Growing — Because Of Global Warming” by Michael Bastach, July 03, 2014 in Daily Caller]. And to what do these scientists attribute the record levels of ice? You guessed it: global warming. You all know how warming makes more ice. So, since more ice in the Arctic and Antarctic means lower ocean levels, and record ice levels are reached due to global warming, should we not want more global warming to lower ocean levels? Just asking.
Honestly, at what point do people tire of liberals and their Big Lies, designed to scare people into ceding more of their liberties to liberals: Big Lies like overpopulation (truth: reproduction rates have fallen dangerously below replacement levels in most of the “developed” world) and global warming (truth: no global warming for 18 years), so big that the whole world is at stake, so big that there is nothing anyone can do but the liberals who will gladly trample the liberties we throw down so that they can give us another utopia like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy or Communist China, Cuba, North Korea . . .
Copyright © 2014 by P. A. Ritzer
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Marc Morano, “Top 10 Catastrophic Climate Predictions that Failed,” Climate Depot (8 March 2025), accessed 28 May 2025, https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/03/08/top-10-catastrophic-climate-predictions-that-failed/.
Joseph Fischer, “America, Pre-Columbian Discovery of,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol 1 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1907), pp. 416-423.
Larry Bell, “Rising Tides Of Terror: Will Melting Glaciers Flood Al Gore's Coastal Home?” Forbes (26 January 2012), accessed 5 May 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/06/26/rising-tides-of-terror-will-melting-glaciers-flood-al-gores-coastal-home/.
Kristi Pahr, “All About the Obamas’ 3 Stunning Homes in the U.S.,” Apartment Therapy (27 June 2024), accessed 5 June 2025, https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/where-do-the-obamas-live-37408163.
Sandy Harjo Livingston, “10 Facts about Obama’s $18M Hawaiʻi Beachfront Mansion,” KHON2: Working for Hawai’i (17 March 2025) accessed 5 June 2025, https://www.khon2.com/local-news/10-facts-about-obamas-18m-hawaiʻi-beachfront-mansion/.
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