The great 'global warming' hoax

While all eyes focus on the unfolding drama of the "health-care reform–health-insurance reform–jobs bill," another critical part of the "Change America" plan just took a torpedo midships.

Some 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents from the Climate Research Unit at the U.K.'s University of East Anglia (where the "world's leading climate scientists work") have been leaked. The blogosphere is on fire – cover-up, falsified studies, intimidation of skeptics. It's all there.

The Cap and Trade bill to lower our standard of living and subject our consumer choices to government diktat is based on the public agreeing that what we once called "progress" threatens the planet with destruction and we must stop it. It is a matter of accepted dogma among the collectivist lemmings of the Left that the Earth is warming because of our insatiable appetite for food, clothing and shelter – and cars, big-screen TVs and a zillion gadgets run by electricity.

The industries producing these things produce "greenhouse gas emissions," threatening mass starvation, drought and hurricanes – a slow motion "2012" that must be stopped by decreasing "greenhouse gas emissions." Cows will belch less if we stop eating them, that sort of thing.

The collectivist Left in academia, media and politics got away with imprinting this dogma on the popular mind only because generations of government-school graduates have been successfully stripped of knowledge of history, geology or climate science. There was a time when "science" was a rigorous search for truth that required an open skeptical mind, double-blind studies, multiple repeated experiments, peer-reviewed published data and a strong belief that if you are proven wrong, someone else got it right and the world will benefit. This approach was good enough for Pasteur, Newton and Ben Franklin, but not for today's crowd.

Earlier generations knew that the Earth's climate was constantly changing, affected by numerous influences, some known (sunspots, Earth axis wobble, El Nino), some presumed still to be discovered. Historians knew that European history was influenced by periods of warming and cooling. The Vikings didn't call it "Greenland" because it was covered (as now) with ice. Geologists knew that, in geologic time, the Sahara Desert was a tropical rainforest, glaciers covered Chicago and numerous other wonders.

While people could certainly affect the environment around them to their benefit by agriculture, animal husbandry and industry (this used to be thought of as an indication of intelligence), our grandfathers would have thought the idea that puny mankind could affect the climate of the whole planet absurd. More...