December 15, 2008

Confessions of a Climate Criminal

Christopher Horner and Bob Maistros: “Climate criminals.”

Mr. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the recently published Red Hot Lies, has been marked for his offenses as a leading and inconveniently truthful climate change “skeptic.”

I, on the other hand, land on the Most Wanted List based on a less intellectual exercise – fathering six children. All of whom should have departed the earth at 9.3 years of age, having already used up sufficient resources to reach the state of “greenhouse pigs.”

The concept that normal, well-behaved First World kids are “pigs” is just one of the often amusing but even more frequently unsettling revelations in Mr. Horner’s opus.

The reader able to slog through his sometimes fractured syntax and puzzling lack of organization will be rewarded with a well-annotated expose of the bias, inconsistencies and cover-ups of the collection of environmental groups, academics, politicians, bureaucrats, non-governmental organizations, journalists, Hollywood types and “rent seeking” businesses Mr. Horner dubs the “Green Machine.”
 

Such as the manner in which the climate movement has built up a false “consensus” of man-made, potentially catastrophic warming by manipulating data, misrepresenting researchers’ actual conclusions, cherry-picking measurement baselines, placing temperature measurement stations in locations like asphalt parking lots in Arizona or above Weber grills, ignoring mounting evidence of actual cooling and depending on computer models that can’t even predict the past, much less reliably forecast the future.

Or the collegial way this so-called “settled science” is enforced in contravention of every tenet of objective inquiry – by muzzling, firing, demoting, threatening, cursing, isolating, persecuting, improperly sanctioning and refusing to report on the work of “skeptics” – not to mention pawing through Mr. Horner’s trash for discrediting evidence and even loosening the lug nuts on another doubter’s car. 

Or the central role in setting the global policy agenda of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a political body that has never attempted to answer the central question it was organized to address (the maximum allowable greenhouse gas concentration to avoid catastrophic global warming), and three-quarters of whose participants are non-climate experts unqualified to comment on its findings.
 

Only in the topsy-turvy world of the warmists could the Chinese have the chutzpah (Confucian for cajones) to ask for climate credit for their policies of forced abortions.

But a more disturbing theme – especially to someone sitting directly in the line of fire – is the book’s recurring references to “climate criminals,” which, of course, come in two varieties. 

The misdeeds of “deniers” are equated with those of Holocaust skeptics – and even of those who carried out that horror – as well as with “abduction and torture of children,” and “human rights abuse.” The suggested punishments? Criminal prosecution, jail terms, even revocation of citizenship.

And then there’s us “pigs,” whose children are being indoctrinated to become “climate cops” spying on their families, friends and relatives committing “climate crimes.” Maybe there is some redemption possible for my young ones yet – to turn me in, in true Soviet fashion, for bringing them into the world.

Yet a bigger worry is the potential for government on a scale never seen. The array of Big Brother actions proposed to address global warming starts with taxes on babies (as if having children isn’t taxing enough) and ranges from bans on pot-bellied stoves, bottled water, plasma TVs, new airports and three-day weekends to levies on parking lots, garbage, second cars and vacation travel.   

All of which brings us back – as everything must these days – to our president-elect. Because unfortunately, his streak of moderate appointments ran out with his environmental and energy team, where one Carol Browner has been appointed to the newly formed position of Environment/Energy/Climate “czar.” Ms. Browner, who once called climate change “the greatest challenge ever faced,” was Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator and a protégée of Al “Oscar” Gore.

Uh oh. 

Ms. Browner’s appointment gives me the feeling that climate might just be one area in which Sleek Barry means to keep his campaign promise: “reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.”

Only one way to do that, according to Mr. Horner: “(I)n the global warming agenda we are dealing with a premise that, once adopted, leads to no other conclusion than to accept government control of nearly every aspect of our lives.” That’s something the Supreme Court has recently given the EPA power to do largely by fiat.

In other words, more than mere metaphorical czardom.

Where do I turn myself in?