The treehuggers have been busy trying to get Prime Minister Stephen Harper to include the ubiquitous “climate change” — otherwise known as Global Warming except when it’s inconvenient — on the G8 and G20 economic summits timetables. At first, the Conservative leader was standoffish about the idea, but he has apparently “warmed” up to the idea.

Despite more important issues to discuss, like the fact that Europe is falling apart while France and Germany pay the equivalent of war reparations to try and save Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland from economic ruin, the world wants to talk about melting glaciers and hurricanes.

Last month it was filthy Mexico that came calling to lecture us about the importance of Canadian leadership on global warming. Which was sort of like getting a lecture on virtue from a call girl.

Well, the lecturing must have worked, because the government has capitulated, and put climate change on the G8 and G20 agendas.

“We anticipate that climate change will come up, in fact, at both summits,” Andrew MacDougall said.

“Actually, the prime minister was on (the telephone) with Chancellor (Angela) Merkel this morning of Germany and they discussed the fact that this issue, climate change, will be raised at both summits.”

So not only will we be spending $1 billion on security for this dog-and-pony show [or $930 million as the case may be], but we’ll be putting climate change on the agenda, a time and money waster that Copenhagen proved is second to none.

Has nobody read the memo? Are we still going on about this 2007 Nobel winning fad?

This is the end of the world as we know it. Every 100 million years, a rock the size of a small asteroid slams into the Earth, causing global earthquakes, one-kilometre high tsunamis, and global extinction.

But man-made climate change? Not likely.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is now widely believed to have deliberately misled the global public into believing that there was a consensus among thousands of scientists with peer-reviewed research and irrefutable, “settled” science. According to Mike Hulme, an IPCC insider and whistleblower, the real number of scientists in the infamous “consensus” was a few dozen experts.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Right. But let’s not allow evidence of scientific tampering for the manipulation of the global political agenda to at all dissuade the G8/20 discussions of how driving to work causes hurricanes in Malaysia.

It’s snowing in Alberta in May. Which, of course, proves global warming is happening. Photo: Larry Wong/Canwest News Service

According to the Ottawa Citizen, more than 250 “prominent scientists”, including 11 Nobel laureates, are calling on people to cease personal political attacks and focus on the facts. For a moment, I welcomed the idea of ending the “politicizing” of climate change, and the personal attacks that come with not accepting the gospel of anthropogenic climate change.

And then I realized they didn’t mean an end to all political attacks. Just the ones directed at them.

So the 250 prominent scientists have turned around and called those who disagree with them “deniers”, a loaded term that is associative with those who disbelieve in the historical evidence of a holocaust against the Jews. Delightful company to be in, I’m sure.

“Recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence,” the scientists say in an open letter published the journal Science.

Special interests? What special interests? Who and what are these special interests they’re referring to? Speaking of dogma, using the term “special interests” is like invoking the catch-all bogeyman of rhetorical commentary.

Society, the letter says, has two choices. And only two, apparently. The first is to hide our heads in the sand and ignore that imminent devastation awaits our inaction. The second is to do precisely what they advise us not to do, which is to use guilt trips, distractions, and outright lies in order to encourage political influence to take action.

Two can play at the metaphor game, and if given the choice between the ostrich and chicken little, I’ll take the ostrich every time.

As for the 11 Nobel laureates, well, they’re members of the entire IPCC panel that shared in the 2007 prize with pop culture hero for a day, Al Gore, who has since become a little busy moving into a new mansion. The $8,875,000 gated villa on the beach with 1 1/2 acres, six fireplaces, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and 6,500 square feet of living space, has come from his considerable income in the climate change Armageddon speaking tour racket, and investment in “green” industries that he has used his political clout to get government to subsidize.

You can’t just break the public trust with a scandal like climategate, and then ask for an end to the “politicization” of science by telling the skeptics to shut up and stop being “deniers”. Where I come from, we call that elitism.

No, when you’ve earned the right to be trusted again, we’ll let you know. You could begin by accepting that there is no so-called consensus on climate change being attributable to mankind, that those who are skeptical of the so-called consensus are not deniers, and that the scientific community needs to work harder to provide evidence that the changes in climate are irrefutably linked to airborne hydrocarbon emissions caused by human beings.

Until that happens, right back at ya, “warmists”.

According to several sources, the buzz at the Liberal Thinkers’ Conference was new taxes, among them the reviled and rejected carbon tax. Stephane Dion put all his eggs in the carbon basket in the 2008 election, and was thoroughly rebuked by Canadian voters, putting the issue to bed. Or so we thought at the time.

Now we’re hearing the same ideas being floated by people coming up with policy ideas for the Liberal Party going forward. The timing of the carbon tax just shows you how out of touch most of these people really are on the climate change issue. The theory of anthropogenic climate change [or the term formerly known as "global warming"] has taken a severe beating this year, thanks in large part to a series of scandals that climate scientists at the forefront of political activism on climate policy-making have been caught lying, fabricating numbers, and blacklisting skeptics.

The issue was brought up on a recent CTV panel hosted by Jane Taber, featuring Liberal MP Justin Trudeau, Conservative MP Shelley Glover, and NDP MP Nathan Cullen. Mr.Cullen responded to the idea of a carbon tax by questioning its effectiveness for doing anything:

“In terms of the conference itself, and trying to get at the carbon tax again, I thought they floated that balloon already and went down that path. I guess there’s some debate within the Liberals. Was it the message or the messenger? Was the carbon tax the right idea with the wrong person in Stephane Dion, or should they try the carbon tax again?”

Why can’t it be both? The wrong person with the wrong idea.

“Frankly, I’m in British Columbia where there is a carbon tax. It’s impact has been relatively limited, and really where the Conservatives need to be taken on is in the pricing of carbon. Period.”

This seems to echo some comments made at the Liberal conference. Michael Phelps, a former CEO of Westcoast Energy, said “You’re going to monetize carbon one way or another.” This suggestion was praised by Liberals following the event on the internet, saying that a carbon tax is far better than a cap-and-trade market.

But this is all beside the point. For now, the Liberal leader is Michael Ignatieff, and he knows and understands that a carbon tax, like the coalition, is a political non-starter. If he waffled on this one, it would be an epic flip-flop, even for this man.

I’m not sure what the point of “monetizing” carbon is, or even what that’s supposed to really mean. Energy sources are already monetized by their increasing costs and scarcity of supply. Hydro and natural gas rates are going up by nearly 10% this year in the province of British Columbia. Gasoline is $1.09.9 in Vancouver right now, with $0.03.62 of that going to the government for carbon taxes. That hasn’t reduced demand for gasoline in Vancouver one bit [it's just another tax], and has only accomplished a larger tax burden on drivers.

No, the strongest corrective in the carbon market occurred in July of 2008 when the price of a barrel of gasoline hit $147 American, creating a pump price of $1.52 per litre of oil in this province. This simultaneously coincided with the carbon tax [the BC Liberals are absolute experts at introducing new taxes at the absolute worst time], so that when the prices fell to a dollar again, nobody even noticed the carbon tax, much less reserved their usage of gasoline because of it.

The carbon tax is a loser all around, unless it’s set at a prohibitively high price, at which point you kill your own energy-producing industries. Michael Ignatieff had enough savvy the last time he was in British Columbia’s UBC for a speaking tour to admit that the oil sands are a $6-billion contributor to the federal treasury. Not exactly something you want to throw away while you’re running structural $20 billion deficits.

A new study, funded by NASA, has discovered that the most serious drought in the Amazon in over 100 years has had little impact on the rainforest. This flies in the face of the IPCC’s claims that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be significantly damaged by a small reduction in rainfall, potentially leading to replacement by tropical grasslands.

The IPCC proposed the dire possibility in 2007 of a warming Amazon climate that researchers attributed to human activity. The UN predicted that by 2025 or 2030, at least half of the Amazone Basin will disappear because of severe drought, fire, or logging. The report went on to say that by 2050, parts of the Amazon will be decimated, with an extinction of between 20-30% of the world’s plants and animals by 2100.

While we can’t exactly wait until 2100 to find out whether the IPCC was right or wrong, the new NASA research suggests that the 40% figure, also used by the World Wildlife Fund in fund-raising, has no scientific basis.

Scientists now believe that the rainforest, estimated to be 9.9 million years in age, could be more resilient than originally thought. Researchers from Boston University published a study of satellite data for the Amazon rainforest in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters, that looked at 2005 for the worst drought in a century.

Although people who depended on the water from the Amazon suffered, the researchers could find no evidence that the rainforest itself had been damaged. The level of “greenness” in the forest between drought years and rainy years were more or less indistinguishable, scientifically speaking.

The IPCC has been accused recently of using greatly exaggerated claims for global warming in order to politicize the cause, and get governments to take action to stop it. But the damage done to the credibility of the scientific community over climategate may be irreparable, and new reports of falsified data are not helping.

Climate scientist for Georgia Tech, Judith Curry, recently said in an interview with Discover magazine that she recognizes the damage that climategate has done to the reputation of scientists, but that it’s still worth pursuing action. When asked whether we should wait until all scientific uncertainty is resolved before taking action, she answered that the “probability of something bad happening is at least as high as the probability that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” And while that threat turned out to be false, we addressed the threat anyway. So, Ms.Curry claims, we have a history of taking action on things that “have a low probability of happening.”

Here’s a little piece of advice. Comparing the need to act on climate change to the war in Iraq is probably not the best selling tool at the disposal of climatologists.

Ever since I appeared on the CBC in early December to argue about Climategate, a mountain of evidence has come forth to indicate that the story the CBC ignored for so long, has genuine scientific evidence backing it. Whether it be Glaciergate or Africagate or Naturaldisastergate [sorry, I made that last one up myself], the CBC is unrelenting in it’s intent to ignore the issue.

If you actually search for the term climategate on the CBC website, you’re given some very slim pickings indeed. There’s Rex Murphy’s editorial that aired the same day I was on TV, the Maxime Bernier open letter to the Gazette, and there’s a very belated explanation from the CBC ombudsman on the Delayed coverage of “Climategate”. But not much else in the way of reporting what’s going on the world on this critical story, other than a brief summary of events from a Canadian Press story in February.

Instead, we’re fed a steady dose of climate change articles and editorials from “experts”, authors, and scientists, giving an ample amount of coverage to David Suzuki and his foundation. Indeed, if you enter the term “climategate” into the CBC search engine you are returned with 54 results, one of which was my first and final appearance on the public broadcaster. But enter in the term “climate change”, and be prepared for a flood of 9,040 results. Granted, some are years old and, but I think my 0.6:100 ratio point is taken.

What the CBC does give plenty of face time to, is articles like this one, written by Richard Handler, entitled The burden of believing in global weirding. Using the same shamefully patronizing language of the subject of his story, Al Gore, he writes that it would be “wishful thinking” to believe that all this bad news about Climategate disproves the science of man-made climate change. He goes on to attribute the cold and snowy winter experienced by most of the Northern Hemisphere this year to, you guessed it, global warming.

One of the greatest shams of the “Inconvenient Truth” rhetoric is that it doesn’t stand up under the “follow the money” scrutiny. Climate scientists like Dr.Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC, and thousands like him around the world, have greatly benefitted from funding placed in climate research. And the CBC crown corporation has spent millions of dollars on programs promoting scientists, like David Suzuki, who fulfill an editorial directive. Meanwhile, those people like Al Gore, involved in the collusion between government and green energy corporations, have made millions of dollars on legislation aimed at shifting government spending into areas of green technology.

On February 5, the CBC Ombudsman, Vince Carlin, explained in a statement why the CBC delayed coverage of the Climategate story.

According to Esther Enkin, Executive Editor of CBC News, the explanation was merely a lapse in assessing the value of the story. Defending the move, she pointed to other mainstream news outlets that similarly ignored the story. To this I would respond with a simple comparison.

The CBC ran a story one day after University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran claimed, without evidence, to have seen the unredacted documents pertaining to the Afghan detainee issue that would prove Canada’s direct involvement in ordering the torture of captured combatants. The “value” of broadcasting unsubstantiated rumours of secret documents not meant for public consumption would, it seems, depend entirely upon whether other media outlets are doing the same thing. It isn’t as if CBC tried to scoop CTV on the Amir Attaran story, right? But climategate? Well, let’s just wait two weeks and see if anybody touches it with a ten-foot pole.

The ombudsman statement continues:

While it may be comforting to some to point to the lapse in coverage by other major main-stream outlets, I am afraid that CBC Journalistic Standards and Practices, and our own self-esteem, do not allow that as an excuse for poor journalism. Ironically, the story may have received more coverage than was really justified by the “real” scientific revelations contained in the documents–i.e., not many.

In any event, this was not the CBC’s finest hour. I trust that appropriate attention will be brought to bear on the weekend staffing of CBCNews.ca and other immediate response units of CBC News.

Not much has changed since this statement. CBC continues to ignore the scientific debate, and continues to editorialize the “consensus” view. While they can afford to pay journalists to give full-time attention to speculating about redacted documents pertaining to Afghanistan, it would seem nobody in the mother corp can spare more than a few moments to write about the ongoing scandals of the IPCC and the information wars on climate.

There’s are few things more specious than using the warm weather experienced by Vancouver this past January and February in order to prove that global warming is real and man-made. But that’s precisely what premier Gordon Campbell is saying after the weather made a mess of Cypress Mountain with record-warm temperatures in recent weeks. The weather has been so nice in January and February that some took to calling them the Spring Olympics.

This warm weather has only convinced Mr.Campbell to step up his efforts to fight “global warming”, and that his carbon tax is a good idea.

“I think people are not looking at the big picture. We just had the warmest winter in over 100 years in Vancouver,” Mr. Campbell is reported as saying in The Globe and Mail.

“In British Columbia, we live with the problems that have been created by climate change. You just can’t turn your back on that,” Mr. Campbell said.

The Premier is referring to the weather between January 8 and February 9, a record for the warmest period on date going back to its earliest records kept since 1896.

But to look at the weather for a single area, and then attribute it to being a global problem, seems more than just a little illogical. Particularly when temperatures in the contiguous United States and parts of Canada have been deluged with a particularly cold, and harsh winter.

For instance, if we were to look at temperatures from Toronto, the warmest January-February in the past decade occurred in 2002 when temperatures were recorded at a mean of half a degree below zero Celsius. The coldest Jan-Feb period in the past decade in Toronto came in 2004, with a mean of -9.4C. Jan-Feb in 2010 ranks fifth warmest, or fifth coldest, depending on how you look at it, for the past decade.

If you go back several decades for the same time period, 1970 was Toronto’s coldest at -10.9, followed by 1940 at -9.4, and then 2010. The decades for Jan-Feb in 1980, 1960, 1950, and 1990 were all warmer, while 1950 was a balmy average of -1.8.

But since we’re talking about Vancouver, let’s look at its historical temperatures. Again, using the same Jan-Feb period, it’s true that this year ranks as the warmest ever at 7.2 Celsius. In the past decade, the average has been as warm as 6.3C twice, in 2006 and 2003, as high as 5.1C in 2001, and recorded its coldest January in 2008 at 2.8C. For the record, every single January in the past decade has had temperatures above 2.8C, which means that above zero temperatures in Vancouver is very normal, if not as high as 7.2C. Furthermore, the three years preceding 2010 had the coldest January-February period of the decade.

Now, still having fun with math, if we look at the mean temperature for this period in Vancouver in 1940, it was 4.5 Celsius, good for fifth warmest if it were placed in the past decade.

If we look at the warmest years going back every year to 1937 [the farthest back Environment Canada provides records] for this time period, three of the past ten have occurred in the past decade. 2010, 2006, and 2003 were all 6.3 Celsius or warmer. But both 1994 and 1983 were tied with 2003 and 2006 for warmth, while 1986 was two tenths of a degree Celsius cooler than those four. 1958 comes in at seventh warmest at 6.0 Celsius; 1953 is eighth at 5.9C; 1992 is ninth at 5.8C; and 1981 is tenth at 5.5C.

So three of the warmest years also happened in the eighties, two in the fifties, and two in the nineties. The dispersal seems random enough to suggest not only that unusually warm Januaries have occurred several times in the past 60 years, but also that temperatures above zero for January are so common as to not warrant surprise. 1983 was 0.9 degrees cooler than 2010, and if we’re to believe anthropogenic climate change science, it’s impossible that 1983 could have produced that result artificially. That tells us not only that natural temperature fluctuations can occur frequently, but that there’s no accurate predictability to their variance. Although there is a trendline in the graph, that variance continues to show from year to year.

Related

Just for fun, I’ve thrown up a Toronto graph as well.

The headline isn’t entirely accurate. The former Vice-President of the United States was not actually discovered in a block of ice floating in the Ocean above Canada, but the discovery that he’s still alive is at least as shocking. The planet’s first carbon billionaire emerged in the pages of the New York Times yesterday after practically disappearing under an avalanche of bad press surrounding scientific tampering with the climate consensus for the theory of anthropogenic climate change. With each gate-suffix appended to the end of a every new scandal emerging on climate change practically every day, the least popular man in the world right now would have to be Al Gore and his travelling sideshow of Armageddon stories on a scissor lift.

In fact, right about now, Mr.Gore is looking a little bit like Ricky Gervais in the film The Invention of Lying, when lifelong failure and antihero Mark Bellison discovers that he can change the world by telling everybody that there’s “a man in the sky”. The tall tale is believed because, in this parallel dimension, lying has never been invented. This fabulously implausible story gains Mark untold riches, a mansion, and worldwide fame. But it doesn’t make his lie any more true.

And so it goes with Al Gore and his $100,000 speaking fees, as he regales the planet with fairy tales about hockey stick graphs, underwater cities, and natural disasters wreaking havoc. And as everyone knows, people love a scary story. Just ask Hollywood.

Mr.Gore begins his op-ed with the same kind of “inconvenient” protestations against being wrong. He would love to be wrong, he explains, while finishing the same sentence with “unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

Somehow I sincerely doubt that. Al Gore not only has his lucrative speaking events where he tells his scary stories, but he has a finger in every environmental pie from California to the Caucasus, investing in fly-by-night green industries the way that people used to invest in dot com startups before Y2K. And just like the millennium IT crash, you can be sure that Mr.Gore will have cashed in his chips long before the world wakes up on January 1 and realizes that all the world’s nuclear weapons did not, in fact, auto-deploy while we were sleeping and vaporize us.

At that point, Mr.Gore can proudly proclaim that he saved the world, that disaster is no longer imminent, and like a thief in the night, quietly scuttle his billions into some other enterprise meant to profit Gore Industries. And just like a liberal, he’ll have done it all on your money. After all, there’s no money sweeter than other people’s money.

But back to the present day. Al Gore is fighting against a growing backlash of people who, like the boy who cried out in the street that the Emperor has no clothes, are beginning to believe that the wool has been pulled over their eyes by a con artist. And like a typical con artist when cornered, his defence is nothing if not predictable: “Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?”

He admits that it is true that the IPCC knowingly published a flawed report of the melting rate of glaciers in the Himalayas, and then used that information to sell climate change. He also admits that e-mail messages “stolen” from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists “may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law”. But, and you knew there was going to be one didn’t you, he writes, it’s only because the poor benighted fellows were so “besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics.”

Oh, well, excuse our exuberance in actually getting you to provide the evidence for your “man in the sky” claims. I’m sorry this little trifling matter of proof is such an inconvenience for your attempt to stifle debate on the subject. I know it’s terribly irritating to have to back up wild claims such as the end of the world as we know it with something more substantial than brimstone rhetoric and hellfire prose.

Al Gore even manages to throw in a new lie in his defence of global warming, that being the assertion that the globe just recorded the second-hottest January “since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.” How carelessly this man bandies about figures and quotes from obscure sources. That claim comes from Neville Nicholls, a professor and climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne. But it’s been widely disputed already, and frankly, laughed at in the Northern Hemisphere, budy trying to get through one of the coldest and snowiest winters in 30 years.

In Al Gore’s denial of “deniers”, the pejorative meant to ridicule and stifle dissent, he reveals more of himself than he may realize. Any truly open-minded person would, at this juncture, admit that the consensus is no longer unanimous, though I suspect it never was, and that the reputation of climate science has taken a serious beating from the actions of the IPCC and their agents themselves. They have nobody but themselves to blame for aspersions they cast on their own cause through seemingly fraudulent use of data and flagrant abuse of self-appointed power.

As for the southern politician, who quotes Churchill to finish his op-ed, allow me to quote the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Climate changes. Four times a year, to be exact.

Even if you believe that the harsh winter that has swept over most of the Northern hemisphere like a flash ice age of blizzards and near-record snowfalls is anomalous to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, it takes a extraordinary level of audacity to claim that January was the hottest on record. For if weather is merely anecdotal and climate is science, it doesn’t take a scientist to know that January dumped enough snow and cold weather on the contiguous US to bury Al Gore’s mansion.

Yet, that’s precisely what some climate scientists have claimed in Great Britain, a country suffering its worst winter in 30 years. The claim, based on global satellite data, is that January was the hottest month the planet has ever recorded. This, as the Arctic invasion of the British Isles resulted in such chaotic travel that the country ran out of grit to deal with the roads. At one point during the winter, the entire country was covered in a blanket of snow.

According to an Australian “weather expert”, however, Professor Neville Nicholls of Monash University in Melbourne, he contended: “January, according to satellite data, was the hottest January we’ve ever seen.

“Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen. November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen.”

That’s unlikely to convince Americans at the moment, who have been pounded with blizzards this winter, including one that managed to close a Senate Committee on Climate Change owing to “inclement weather”.

Just before the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games were getting underway, Washington DC was walloped with a snow storm that paralyzed the city and brought air and road transport to a complete stop. Nearly two feet of snow fell over a period of 24 hours, almost reaching a record of 2 feet, 4 inches, dating back to 1922. That was less than two months after a storm in December left 16 inches of snow behind.

Now the storms are hammering the northeast again, with 21 inches falling in New York City and a million people losing power from Maine to Pennsylvania. Hurricane-force winds, flooding and more than 2 feet of snow hit New Hampshire, knocking out power from 330,000 homes, and leaving even the state Emergency Operations Center running on a generator.

Ironically, my brother, who has been vacationing in Florida since November, decided to leave because it’s been unbearably cold there this year. He is, instead, coming back to Canada in order to fly out to Australia to go hiking. Maybe he can look up Professor Neville Nicholls while he’s there and give him the scoop of what’s actually going on in the Northern climates.

This has to the funniest catch yet. Via Drudge, the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has postponed a hearing entitled, “Global Warming Impacts, Including Public Health, in the United States” owing to inclement weather.

This weather:

Snow blew across the Midwest on Tuesday and headed for the hard-hit Mid-Atlantic region, where federal government offices have been closed since last week and utility workers struggled to restore power already knocked out by a weekend blizzard.

The latest storm hit the Midwest early, closing schools and greeting commuters with slick, slushy roads from Minneapolis and Chicago to Louisville, Ky. Hundreds of flights were canceled at Chicago’s airports as the storm moved across Illinois, where up to a foot of snow was forecast.

Meanwhile, from the Twitter account of Senator Jim DeMint:

The above video is a time lapse display of the February 5-6 avalanche of snowfall in Washington DC. Buried somewhere under that expanse of fluffy white frozen water, however, is an administration so out of touch with the principal challenges facing the country, that even with a colossal debt of $12.4 trillion it can find the money for the creation of new agencies.

The Obama administration is committing to the formation of a new climate change agency that would study the dangers that man-made global warming presents to the United States. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that the NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with the National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.

Never mind that we’ve run out of “gates” to append to all the various climate scandals that have been revealed in the wake of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. Never mind the fact that the melting glaciers claim was taken from an obscure 1999 magazine article by The New Scientist and had no basis in peer-reviewed science. Or that the IPCC claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020 was similarly pulled from thin air. Or the fact that forest fires, hurricanes, and drought were all heaped into the same ubiquitous global warming explanation as a means of frightening people into surrendering more tax monies for climate researchers.

No, the President is now busy ignoring the popular will of the people by creating needless agencies in plain view of the fact that 50% of the U.S. population believe that if climate change is occurring at all, it is based on planetary trends and not man emitted carbon dioxide.

But it gets worse. President Obama’s regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, has made the argument that the United States government should ban conspiracy theories. Chief among these conspiracy theories, which Mr.Sunstein lumps in with 9/11 and assassinations, is the theory that global warming is a fraud.

In a paper written by Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule from Harvard Law School in January of 2008, the authors say that “conspiracy theories create challenges that are distinct from those posed by false but dangerous beliefs”. Cited as one of those dangerous beliefs is those who say that “climate change is not occurring”. The paper encourages actively “undermining such theories” and on breaking the closed information networks that produce these conspiracy theories.

It seems that there’s a fine line between legitimate scientific research, such as unsubstantiated claims about glaciers in order to secure billions in worldwide funding, and the conspiracy theorists who dare to challenge their conclusions. But when you have Hillary Clinton and the Democrats vying for a $100-billion wealth transfer to the third world to help them “cope” with the effects of climate change, when the same political party is running fiscal deficits nearing the $2 trillion range, it’s only fair to wonder what it all means.

In the end analysis, what’s most distressing about the creation of cap and trade markets, carbon taxes, and great big bureaucratic agencies to “study” climate change, isn’t just that they seem grossly premature with the growing mountain of evidence that the debate on consensus continues. It’s that they have framed the debate in such a way that those who challenge the scientific claims of the warming crowd are called deniers, conspiracy theorists, and worse, shills for Big Oil or corporate America.

Well, if that’s the case, can anybody tell me where I can pick up my pay cheque?

h/t iOwnTheWorld & Kate