The automobile industry in the United States is the top story in the news these days. Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy and merged with Fiat. General Motors takes their turn and marches into court. Major suppliers such as Visteon and Delphi are taking their turns as well and it is predicted others will follow.

Whenever a report is made about a new product, advertisers claim it is the equivalent of removing tens of thousands of cars from the road. It must be working too. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were about 42,000 deaths from automobile related accidents each year between 1997 and 2005. The numbers were fairly consistent during that time. However, in 2007, the number dropped off and the trend appears to be continuing in 2008 as only 31,110 people died from January through October.

It would appear that we are to be doomed even if we all walk to work and permanently park our beloved cars. According to a report given May 29, 2009 by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to the United Nations, around 300,000 people die each year due to climate-change disasters and caused $125 billion in economic losses. He claimed it seriously impacted 325 million people.

Notice the subtlety in the report. He and others are carefully changing their rhetoric and proclaiming climate change. Of course, the seeds were already planted and many people will hear global warming but the activists no longer shout global warming. Isn’t climate change just a phrase to mean weather? Certainly, the great comedian Will Rogers hit the nail on the head when he told audiences that if they did not like the weather, just wait five minutes. To me, climate change is a lot like death and taxes: it is inevitable.

I think what they are really espousing is controlling the weather. That has been tried so many times. The first thing I think of when weather-control topics are discussed is a 1956 movie starring Katherine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster titled The Rainmaker. That movie was about a huckster claiming that if the town caught in the 1930s dustbowl would pay him, he could make it rain. I also seem to recall (although I could not find the information) that the United States had tried to reduce the impact of hurricanes in the 1940s or 1950s by seeding the clouds with silver nitrate salts. The storm that reached shore was extremely strong and researchers could not be sure if their experiments had no impact or had strengthened the storms. I read that China had used cloud seeding to increase rain in Beijing for the Olympics to help clear the air and it seemed to help.

Some people claim that adding CO₂ to the atmosphere will increase plant grown and crop yield. Some claim that these gases will increase temperatures and sea levels and diseases. A few claim we will cause a new ice age. Personally, I think we should heed the words from an old commercial about eating butter when the lady clearly stated, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”