As the House begins its final sprint to rush some sort of cap & trade (tax) legislation to a floor vote this coming week (HR 2454, the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill), it is worth taking stock of where things stand.  I received an email from an Obama supporter (who once confessed, in secret, that soon after his election they had the beginnings of “serious doubts” about his ability to do his job) that contained what I can only call a progressive’s campaign article from The Nation.  One statement summed up its whole, wordy call to arms to push forward with Obama’s fascist plans:

We also need to expand the agenda for reform. For example, if we are to make the investments vital to our future, as the president has called for, a sustained expansion of public investment is essential–and that will require a far bolder tax policy.

It goes on to blather with reassuring hubris about taxes on the “wealthy” and those evil businesses who dare provide people with private sector jobs, but because of its immediacy, this piece is going to focus on the problems with cap & trade.  And the root cause of cap & trade is the New Religion of global warming.  Now, as we’ve noted here before, the gist of implementing cap & trade as mitigation to global warming is intended to gain government and special interest control of natural resources and thereby gain power and control over American citizens once it is realized that the Earth may more likely be entering a serious cooling period.  Plainly put, it’s all about money, not science.  Science hasn’t been in this picture for decades. 

In response to my friend’s email, I sent back a link to an article that presents an overview of some initial reactions to Obama’s latest “climate report”.  A report that, it should be known, was produced by more than 30 scientists working across 13 government agencies.  A report that, according to a UK Guardian article, was:

 “finalized in late April, but Obama administration officials spent several weeks planning (its)  release, honing the language and graphics to make it accessible to non-scientists and to sharpen its core message:  America must take action on climate change.

As part of the PR surrounding the release of the report, the administration approached the San Francisco consulting firm, Resource Media, which specialises in environmental campaigning, to produce a shorter and more digestible brochure of today’s report for wider public distribution.”

Let’s pretend we have some common sense for a moment and consider this carefully.  If the report was so solid in its facts, why was there a need for the administration to spend “weeks” tweaking its message?  Why did the administration need to hire a PR firm whose sole reason d’etre is putting warm, fuzzy spins on the myth of global warming?

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and comes out of Chicago (or San Francisco), it ain’t worth the pot used to hold the water to cook it in, my friends.

The truth is that the “science” upon which the administration’s “report” is based is flawed.  As in skewed.  As in downright wacked.   And with its purpose being politically-motivated and, based on previous experience, very likely deliberately missing and/or excluding key points.  Another in a series of non-partisan scientific reports was released this month by the Nongovermental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).  Here are a few pertinent excerpts.  It is important to note these scientists didn’t need to use a PR firm to translate (spin) it for you so you can understand what they are saying (emphases mine).:

“The IPCC’s key personnel and lead authors were appointed by governments, and its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) have been subject to approval by member governments of the UN. The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all supported by government contracts, which pay not only for their research but for their IPCC activities. Most travel to and hotel accommodations at exotic locations for the drafting authors is paid with government funds.”

“The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (IPCCSAR, 1995) was completed in 1995 and published in 1996. Its SPM contained the memorable conclusion, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The SAR was again heavily criticized, this time for having undergone significant changes in the body of the report to make it ‘conform’ to the SPM—after it was finally approved by the scientists involved in writing the report. Not only was the report altered, but a key graph was also doctored to suggest a human influence. The evidence presented to support the SPM conclusion turned out to be completely spurious.

 There is voluminous materialavailable about these text changes, including a Wall StreetJournaleditorial article by Dr. Frederick Seitz (Seitz, 1996). This led to heated discussions between supporters of the IPCC and those who were aware of the altered text and graph, including an exchange of letters in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Singer et al., 1997).”

“The Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-TAR 2001) was noteworthy for its use of spurious scientific papers to back up its SPM claim of “new and stronger evidence” of anthropogenic global warming. One of these was the so-called “hockeystick” paper, an analysis of proxy data, which claimed the twentieth century was the warmest in the past 1,000 years. The paper was later found to contain basic errors in its statistical analysis(McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003, 2005; Wegman et al., 2006). The IPCC also supported a paper that claimed pre-1940 warming was of human origin and caused by greenhouse gases. This work, too, contained fundamental errors in its statistical analysis. The SEPP response to TAR was a 2002 booklet, The Kyoto Protocol is Not Backed by Science (SEPP, 2002).”

“The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-AR4 2007) was published in 2007; the SPM of Working Group I was released in February; and the full report from this Working Group was released in May—after it had been changed, once again, to “conform” to the Summary. It is  significant that AR4 no longer makes use of the hockey-stick paper or the paper claiming pre-1940 human-caused warming.  Once again  controversy ensued, however, this time when the IPCC refused to publicly share comments submitted by peer-reviewers, then sent all the reviewers’ comments in hard copy to a library that was closed for renovation, and then finally, but only under pressure, posted them online. Inspection of those comments revealed that the authors had rejected more than half of all the reviewers’ comments in the crucial chapter attributing recent warming to human activities.

AR4 concluded that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (emphasis in the original). However, as the present report will show, it ignored available evidence against a human contribution to current warming and the substantial research of the past few years on the effects of solar activity on climate change.

Why have IPCC reports been marred by controversy and so frequently contradicted by subsequent research? Certainly its agenda to find evidence of a human role in climate change is a major reason; its organization as a government entity beholden to political agendas is another major reason; and the large professional and financial rewards that go to scientists and bureaucrats who are willing to bend scientific facts to match those agendas is yet a third major reason.

Another reason for the IPCC’s unreliability is the naive acceptance by policymakers of “peer-reviewed” literature as necessarily authoritative.It has become the case that refereeing standards for many climate change papers are inadequate, often because of the use of an “invisible college” of reviewers of like inclination to a paper’s authors (Wegman et al., 2006). Policy should be set upon a background of demonstrable science, not upon simple (and often mistaken) assertions that, because a paper was refereed, its conclusions must be accepted.”

Translation:  The IPCC is under pressure to conform to economically-motivated political interests.  In my neck of the woods, the conditions under which IPCC scientists “work” is called a conflict of interest.  Lots of folks call it the fox watching henhouse.  No matter what you call it, it is just flat-out wrong and those who would support and encourage any action taken on this kind of bad science must be viewed with nothing less than great suspicion.  For this kind of “science” is when you can rest assured that its supporters  have a vested interest in personal gain, not some lofty goal for the good of humankind. 

It was argued to me that it is merely a few rogue, “flat-earth” or “fringe”-type scientists who are running around trying to destroy Obama’s U.N.-backed (gods help us all) plans.  Nice try but, frankly, it’s as wrong as the early Darwinians believing in and perpetuating the “romantic” view of the Middle Ages being the time it became common knowledge the Earth is spherical, not flat, when they used the same “flat earth” slur against Christians.  The Darwinians gleefully stepped into a stinky “scientific belief” that was the unfortunate – and wrong – result of Washington Irving’s 1828 fictional account of Christopher Columbus’ attempt to sail to Japan in a ship too small to make such a journey.  Fact is that most of the educated world realized the Earth is a sphere by about 3 BCE and only China, despite her technological advancements, took until the 17th century to come to the same realization (and then only because of Jesuits holding high positions as astronomers at the Chinese court).

The bottom line of all this is that is is best argued that there does NOT exist a collective consensus among scientists about the effects of humans on global warming.  And because of that it is dangerous for people to rush to any actions that will have long-term soci-economic ramifications when such long-term socio-economic ramifications are harmful the the majority of Americans solely for the great gain of a few.  Some proof of the size of the disagreement about global warming that liberals simply cannot get their brain cell around can be found in “The Petition Project”.  As of the latest NIPCC report (see Appendix 4, that details the purpose and process by which signatures are collected), 31,478 American scientists have signed the following statement:

The NIPCC report goes on to state that, “This is a remarkably strong statement of dissent from the perspective advanced by the IPCC, and it is similar to the perspective represented by the NIPCC and the current report. The fact that more than ten times as many scientists have signed it as are alleged to have “participated” in some way or another in the research, writing, and review of IPCC AR4 is very significant. These scientists, who include among their number 9,029 individuals with Ph.D.s, actually endorse the statement that appears above.”

To quote the Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “the stars might lie, but the numbers never do.”  Emails are too easy to ignore, calls and/or faxes to your House Representative (both Washington and local offices) must go out starting tomorrow to tell them that no matter what Nancy Pelosi or President Obama demand, they work for you, the American people, and must vote against H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill.  Congress must know – in no uncertain terms – that rushing to tax ALL Americans on the basis of bad science is not only stupid, but putting already struggling American lives on the line solely for the sake of a greedy few will be the final straw that will cost them their job.