Ken Berwitz

Kyle Smith, writing for the New York Post has an excellent article today about how the hacked emails - the ones which appear to show that global warming is a scam and maybe a hoax altogether - should affect "cap and trade" legislation.  You can, of course, read the entire piece by using the link I've provided.  But since it is relatively long, I'm excerpting the key points below:

The end of cap-and-trade

By KYLE SMITH

Last Updated: 4:31 AM, November 29, 2009

Posted: 1:22 AM, November 29, 2009

 

Surprise: Hacked e-mails have revealed that sober, empirical, fact-loving scientists at the heart of global-warming research behave like a crazed group of Delta girls engaged in a flame war to paint the Kappas as a bunch of nasty skanks.

It may not be the biggest scandal since Watergate. But what appeared to be a clear path to massive cap-and-trade legislation just a few months ago now resembles a Jenga tower, and the scandal looks like the tile that will bring the whole thing down.

The British scientists at the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University and their correspondents, some of them American, apparently conspired to delete evidence to escape required public disclosure; fudged and buried data; tried to lock out skeptics seeking to publish non-alarmist research; and even wanted to “beat the crap out of” a skeptical scientist.

“It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow,” said environmentalist writer George Monbiot in The Guardian. The e-mails “could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” BBC environmental analyst Roger Harrabin fretted that the e-mails will “have a lasting impact within the world of science.” Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry wrote that, “Even if the hacked e-mails . . . end up to be much ado about nothing . . . the damage to the public credibility of climate research is likely to be significant.”

Republican lawmakers are calling for investigations to mirror the ones that will dog the CRU back in Blighty. All of this happens on the eve of next month’s Copenhagen climate-change summit, when President Obama will coo about decarbonizing the carbon-based US economy as if it’ll be as easy as banning smoking in bars.

Every product that is made with carbon-based energy would be punished. The primary appeal of the plan to statists and their never-ending search for new revenue is its ninja-like stealth. Like Europe’s “Value Added Taxes” that are simply included in the price of everything, it wouldn’t be transparent, like a sales tax or an income tax. “It’s really big, really, really hard, and is going to make a lot of people mad,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said this week.

Lawmakers, even Democrats, from states that produce oil, natural gas and coal are opposed to the plan, which is why the Senate has put off discussion until at least the spring. A few months before an election that already looks like a wipeout for Democrats? Sure, they’ll be much more courageous about it then.

All this backsliding comes before most Americans — 55% — have even heard of cap-and-trade. They aren’t going to grow more fond of it once they learn the sticker price — $1,761 per family, the equivalent of hiking income taxes by 15%, according to an internal estimate from Obama’s treasury department. (House Republican leader John Boehner says the actual total is more like $3,100 a year per family.)

Now the CRU e-mails undermine the most basic tenets of global-warming dogma (such as the idea that climatologists are automatically disinterested and neutral truth-seekers) and confirm what many Americans already believe: That global-warming science is highly politicized. (Only one-third of the US even believes that global warming is being caused by human activity.)

That comes on top of a lot of other climate-related “bad news,” which is the tag alarmists use for what the rest of us call “good news.” A now-famous BBC article from Oct. 9, “What Happened to Global Warming?” noted, “For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.”

Other horrible news for climate scientists: One of the hacked e-mails from a climate scientist considers the likelihood that SO2, or sulfur dioxide, being emitted by China’s smokestack economy may be counteracting warming trends elsewhere. So a cheap solution to warming — one that doesn’t rely on dreamy fantasies about rejiggering Western economies — might be to simply build really tall smokestacks to inject SO2 above the earth’s atmosphere to cool the planet like a windshield visor. The same solution is detailed in the bestseller “Superfreakonomics.”

Der Spiegel International wrote this week, “The closer one looks at climate models, the greater the temptation to doubt their usefulness. Is this not a case of altering parameters until they produce the desired results? How much real science can be found in the models? How much is merely the result of tuning?”

Thanks to the CRU scandal, the gap is closing between the BBC and Der Spiegel on the one hand and Homer Simpson on the other. His take on global warming: “I’ve got an inside tip that it’s all a bunch of crap.”

Will President Obama blithely go on his way to Copenhagen and commit this country to climate-change policies, like cap and trade (which, in my opinion is a scam even if global warming were not)? 

Well, if this presidency has shown us anything, it is that Barack Obama has no problem doing eminently dumb, damaging things to the country and lying to our faces about it.  This is a man who mortgaged our children's futures with the so-called "stimulus package", assured us it would cap unemployment at 8%, and then - when unemployment jumped to over 10% - told us that he had saved or created 600,000 - 1,000,000 jobs. 

A President who can lie that overtly about jobs, can lie about climate.   Don't doubt it for a moment.

The big question is:  do Democrats - at least the ones whose seats are not 100% safe - have the same capacity? 

The 2010 elections cannot come fast enough.

And that goes double for 2012.