Investor's Business Daily, March 21st, 2007
Climate Change: If Al Gore was so confident about his global warming testimony, why did he break Senate rules requiring submission of an advance copy? Maybe to deny the "deniers" a chance to rebut his theories?
Al Gore's contempt for global warming skeptics was shown by his decision to arrive 30 minutes late at Wednesday morning's House hearing so he wouldn't have to listen to Republican members make their short opening statements.
On the Senate side, GOP members of the Environment and Public Works Committee also were slighted, receiving Gore's opening remarks at 7 a.m., hours after Democrats were provided with them.
The Oscar-winner was granted his demand of an unprecedented 30-minute opening statement as well as the waiving of the committee's standing rule that such statements be submitted 48 hours in advance. The Senate panel agreed to reduce the requirement to 24 hours. All that remained to be decided was who would roll out the red carpet.
Gore failed to meet even that deadline, however, suggesting the man who has declared the warming debate to be over did not want the "deniers" he was about to lecture a chance to scrutinize it for accuracy. "How," asked Joe Barton, ranking Republican at the House hearing, "are we supposed to prepare questions for our esteemed witness when we are basically given his testimony two hours before he shows up?"
When Gore finally granted an audience, he said he wanted to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 90% by 2050, not counting the CO2 he contributed during his opening statement before the House. "The planet has a fever," he opined. "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor."
After Gore's testimony, a better course of action might be to ask for a second opinion.
Later in the day, the House panel heard from Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, a leading Gore critic. In his prepared testimony, Lomborg argued that "statements about the strong, ominous and immediate consequences of global warming are often wildly exaggerated."
Lomborg feels that we could do more for the planet and its inhabitants and at less cost -- for example, by simply providing clean drinking water and sanitation to all its inhabitants.
"Climate change," he said, "is not the only issue on the global agenda," adding that warming is "actually one of the issues where we can do the least good first."
James Inhofe, senior GOP member on the Senate side, is someone who has asked for second opinions. He has concluded that man-caused global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people."
Democratic proposals to cap greenhouse gas emissions would be "the largest tax increase in American history" in terms of its all pain, no gain impact on the environment and the U.S. economy, he said.
Inhofe notes that French scientist Claude Allegre, who 15 years ago was among those who signed the "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" letter warning about climate change, now sees global warming as overhyped as an environmental risk.
In an article titled "The Snows Of Kilimanjaro" that ran last September in the French weekly L'Express, Allegre cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro's retreating snow caps, among other so-called warning signs, come from natural causes. "The cause of this climate change is unknown," Allegre says, adding that there's no basis to say, as Gore does, the "science is settled."
Showing similar skepticism is University of Copenhagen Professor Bjarne Andersen, an expert on thermodynamics. "It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the Earth," he says, which explains the repeated failure of computer models to predict even the past.
"A temperature can be defined only for a homogenous system," he says. "Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences in temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate."
That giant sucking sound is the air leaving Al Gore's hot air balloon.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
