Global Warming is the centerpiece of White House revenue-generation and energy policies. A mind-numbing 1,500-page bill would tax, regulate and penalize all U.S. hydrocarbon energy use to “save the planet” from climate Armageddon. Not one member read the legislation, but the House passed it 219 to 212. The Senate promises an August vote.
However, average global temperatures peaked in 1998 and since have fallen slightly, even as carbon-dioxide levels continued climbing. Thousands of scientists say CO{-2} has little effect on planetary temperatures, and there is no climate crisis. The legislation would cost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars for a hypothetical 0.1 degree F. reduction in global temperatures.
The administration responded to these inconvenient truths by issuing another “report” by government scientists carefully selected to include only climate-crisis believers. It then hired an activist media firm that specializes in environmental campaigns, to hype meaningless computer-generated Hollywood disaster scenarios:
Catastrophic sea levels, floods in lower Manhattan, California beaches permanently submerged. Ferocious hurricanes. Droughts. Food shortages, epidemic diseases, a quadrupling of heat-wave deaths. Aged sewer systems convulsing from massive storm runoff. Polar bears disappearing from the Arctic.
It may be the most flagrant attempted con-job in U.S. history.
If successful, it will give Congress, activists, courts and bureaucrats control over almost every aspect of American life. Government will confiscate hard-earned dollars, convert them to payoffs for activists and companies that get on the climate-crisis bandwagon, consign uncooperative companies to oblivion, impose eco-tariffs on imports, restrict access to energy, and inflict skyrocketing costs on families, industries and transportation.
The sham “report” conflates and confuses human activities and emissions with the powerful natural forces that have caused major and minor climate changes and weather anomalies since the dawn of time. It relies on conjecture, conformist thinking and conspicuous elimination of contrary, skeptical, realist scientists and studies that do not support climate cataclysm conjecture and ideology.
The authors “largely ignored” critical comments to earlier drafts and made the final version “even more alarmist,” says Joseph D’Aleo, first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Weather Analysis and Forecasting Committee.
The report “misrepresents my own work,” says University of Colorado environmental-studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. It makes claims that aren’t supported by citations provided, relies on analyses that were never peer reviewed, ignores peer-reviewed studies that reach opposite conclusions from those proclaimed by the report, and cites papers that do not support asserted conclusions.
The report also relies heavily on surface temperature data from monitoring stations located next to parking lots and air-conditioning exhaust ports — falsely skewing temperature records upward. It relies on long chains of assumptions and speculation, but provides little supporting evidence.
An even more egregious miscarriage of science is its reliance on worst-case scenarios conjured up by computer models.
These climate models have never been validated by actual observations, notes Prof. Robert Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at Australia’s James Cook University. Indeed, Australia’s own climate-modeling agency (CSIRO) stresses that climate-change scenarios are based on computer models that “involve simplifications of [real world] processes that are not fully understood. Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted … for the accuracy of forecasts inferred” from its reports.
“Modeling results are interesting — but worthless for setting public policy,” Carter emphasizes. But that is exactly how they’re being used.
Sure, it’s conceivable that Antarctica could melt, causing sea levels to rise 20 feet, as Al Gore and the government con-artists suggest. Greenhouse gases would merely have to increase average annual Antarctic temperatures from minus-50 degrees F today to plus-40 degrees for a few centuries, to melt 200,000 cubic miles of South Pole icecaps.
That may be as likely as having the planet overrun by T-Rexes cloned from DNA in fossilized mosquitoes. But it’s conceivable. And in the realm of global-warming politics, that’s all that matters.
As one climate activist group put it: “The task . . . is not to persuade by rational argument.” It is “to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.” The strategy is to treat “climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is the route to mass behavior change.”
If the congressional, administration and activist conspirators behind this deceit were in the private sector — peddling bogus drugs rather than bogus science — they’d be convicted of fraud. Instead, they’ll probably get bonus checks.
It’s time to tell Congress: No more con jobs and tax hikes.