EPA takes charge of the weather, plans to deprive plants and trees of carbon dioxide, other gases

My tribe paid a high price for venturing into the distant wilderness without first consulting the Environmental Protection Agency.

Some reached the coast of what would become Newfoundland, where their settlement was unearthed decades ago. Others settled in what became Iceland, where they set up a primitive democracy that still endures a thousand years later.

Another group of Norwegian Vikings hauled up on the shores of Greenland, which appeared to them a land of milk and honey. They established farms, and appear to have prospered for more than three centuries.

As things turned out, they had happened upon Greenland during a period of warming. Then the ice came back and all of them died. The Little Ice Age, which ranged from approximately 1350 to 1850, had arrived.

In retrospect, it seems so simple that even a cave man could figure it out. Weather changes, sometimes remarkably fast and furiously, sometimes slowly but ferociously. Those who are in the wrong place often die.

Now, however, the weather is about to play a new, unprecedented political role, and the EPA is becoming the point of the spear in a neo-fascist scheme devised by the Obama administration to take unprecedented control of the American economy.

The EPA has ruled that current higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and related gases are the "unambiguous result of human emissions."

Scientific research shows that the more greenhouse gases there are in the atmosphere the more heat is trapped, raising the earth's temperature.

The EPA has endorsed that research and determined that "natural variations" in climatic conditions, such as solar activity, couldn't explain rising temperatures.

Okay. How, then, does the EPA explain the warming that transformed Greenland from a big block of ice into fertile land that my fellow Norwegian tribesmen farmed for about 350 years?

No one was there when they arrived. What, if not solar activity, had turned up the temperature in Greenland? The EPA has to answer that question or I, for one, will deliver the derisive laughter that propaganda organization so richly deserves.

To reach its desired conclusion, long in the making, the EPA draws two arguable conclusions:

1. Higher temperatures are undesirable and must be prevented.

2. Higher temperatures can be stopped by government regulation of carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous gas that humans exhale and plants inhale, and other greenhouse gases.

Never mind that the evidence for global warming - a less-than-one-degree rise in average temperature over 100 years - is worthy of derisive laughter.

Never mind that the average temperature has actually been falling for the last seven years.

By happenstance, Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed some of these questions at the just-concluded Obama-Chavez festival in Trinidad and Tobago, where he warned that the Caribbean region faces "very, very scary" rises in sea levels and intensifying hurricanes, while Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be flooded.

But skeptics promptly pounced on Chu's claims.

"Secretary Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of 'evidence' of a looming climate catastrophe," said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

"Secretary Chu's assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12, 2008: There is 'no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.'"

Hurricane activity in both hemispheres is at 30-year lows, Morano said, and experts such as MIT's Kerry Emanuel and Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "are now backing off their previous dire predictions."

Trouble is, neither skepticism nor contrary evidence will deter the neo-fascists, who are determined to take control of the economy because free enterprise and consumer preferences haven't delivered the result they want: a nanny government that determines which cars we drive across a landscape dotted with windmills and "Obama Saves" signs.