Amid all the Hope 'n Change* now taking place in Washington, there's been a steady increase in change of another kind. Kimberley Strassel writes about it today in the Wall Street Journal as the U.S. House prepares to make another naked power and money grab under the guise of protecting the earth. As if.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen.
Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the
U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate
summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to
receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement
last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her
nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist
who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the
worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel
Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of
54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the
American Physical Society revise its position that the science is
settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the
physicists' open letter.)
Australia is considering their own Cap & Tax bill, and some after kicking the tires are walking away.
Mr. [Steve] Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed
science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending
the Heartland Institute's annual conference for climate skeptics. He
also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama's special assistant on energy
and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his
doubts. They apparently didn't.
Earlier we learned that the administration that was going to raise science to its rightful place in this debate is doing nothing of the kind. (Originally in the NY Times Science blog.)
You can check out
Dr. Pielke’s blog or a detailed rebuttal of how the report presents science in his area
of expertise, the study of trends in natural disasters and their
relation to climate change. While the new federal report (prepared by
13 agencies and the White House) paints a dire picture of climate
change’s impacts, Dr. Pielke says that the authors of this new report,
like those of previous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change and the Stern Review, cherrypick weak evidence that fits
their own policy preferences.
He faults all these reports
for all relying on “non-peer reviewed, unsupportable studies rather
than the relevant peer-reviewed literature” and for “featuring
non-peer-reviewed work conducted by the authors.”
Which is, of course, exactly what Mr. Obama (while in the Senate) and his fellow Democrat senators previously accused Mr. Bush of doing.
The Cap & Tax program will raise prices for Americans on all goods and services. The costs will be passed on to the consumer at every step of the production chain, and all in the name of cutting CO2 emissions, something that Mr. Obama calls a "contaminant," speaking of not understanding the science. This is about government central control of economic activity, and about increasing tax receipts. The one thing it's not about is protecting the environment.
The best evidence that this is nonsense hasn't yet been mentioned. The fact that Al Gore is it's prime spokesman is the biggest red flag of all.
6/26/09 1600: Christopher Monckton takes apart the aforementioned administration report here (note: pdf format).
6/26/09 1625: Ooh, it looks like the environmental gestapo does not tolerate dissent. But I thought that was the highest form of patriotism? Found at Wizbang.
*Hope 'n Change = increase in government control of, well, everything, including our lives
