Examiner Editorial: Politicians shun facts, blow hot air on climate change
Examiner Editorial
April 27, 2009
Former Vice President Al Gore’s appearance on Capitol Hill on Friday capped four days of testimony that elevated climate alarmism over sound science.
Unfortunately, compliant news media allow Gore’s bloviating to obscure the “inconvenient truths” that would greatly unsettle his eco-political agenda.
Federal legislators are now poised to move forward with punitive anti-emissions schemes such as cap-and-trade that ignore important and highly relevant new studies. These studies indicate that astronomical influences, not man-made emissions, may be largely to blame for any warming or cooling trends on Earth.
Moreover, the whole idea of “global warming” is now in serious doubt. Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., is among the many scientists who now think the planet has entered into a cooling cycle that could persist for decades.
Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia, has argued that it is important to distinguish between actual scientific observations and computer models set up to produce desired outcomes. Singer is not alone: More than 700 scientists now question claims of man-made global warming, according to a report prepared for Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
In short, there is no scientific consensus on the question of man-made global warming and the role of carbon dioxide.
“The alarmists have a problem,” Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, explains. “The climate isn’t doing what their theory says it should be doing. The temperature is not rising in a linear fashion, which the man-made global warming theory says it should be doing. Instead there has been virtually no warming over the past 10 years.”
This is a fact that the political class finds highly inconvenient as it rushes to impose expansive and expensive regulatory schemes.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, declared at the outset of hearings that the policy train has already left the station and that lawmakers will take action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Waxman sounds straight out of Wonderland: Verdict first, evidence afterwards.
The problem is that this approach would sentence beleaguered American taxpayers to hugely expensive new costs and regulations — costs placed on them not because the Earth is actually hotter, but merely because of politicians’ hot air.
