The “fault,” at this juncture, is giving credibility to Al Gore. It was understandable that Bill Clinton would sell Al Gore as a presidential timber. When he was picked for Vice President, I chalked it up to Clinton’s attempt at getting a life insurance. With Al Gore in line for succession to the Oval Office, who was going to want to harm a President William Jefferson Clinton? The Democrats have such a perverted sense of reality.

The point is, after reading Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance,” it is one of the few “wonders of the world” that anybody could give Al Gore an iota of credibility. That book established Gore’s bona fides, beyond any shadow of a doubt, as a certifiable charlatan. But then again, not very many people may have read it. (Full disclosure: I got it from a $1-book stand and I read it commuting to/from work in the NYC subway.)

Some might deem it an exercise in futility to focus on Al Gore at this juncture in history. With the advent of the transformational, transcendent Obama, Gore himself is history. I wish it were quite that simple and harmless. Gore, being the self-proclaimed high priest of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) duly ordained by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, has successfully charmed the public into accepting his balderdash as gospel.

The same intellectual dysfunction and disconnect that were dismissive of “Earth in the Balance” have embraced the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and allowed it to creep into our educational system. It is analogous to making “Earth in the Balance” a required reading material for high school seniors as a pre-requisite for graduation. 

It is noteworthy that this same dysfunction allowed the elevation of BHO to the Oval Office to become the Ditherer-in-chief and make America the laughing stock of the world, not to mention the de facto betrayal of our troops who are holding forth in Afghanistan.

It matters little that Al Gore is gallivanting around the globe with his huge ‘Carbon Footprint’ making millions of dollars in the process, peddling fictitious literature billed as gospel. What is most crucial is that the Obama regime with all the powers and resources of the Federal Government at its disposal is buying into and espousing the Al Gore agenda hook, line and sinker. Anybody who dares to sound a note of alarm or caution is vilified as naysayers intent on obstructing the President, or worse, as racist opposing the President’s agenda because he happens to be black.

It behooves to keep in mind that one of the premises of “An Inconvenient Truth” is the mantra that the science of Global Warming is a settled issue. That there is an overwhelming consensus within the scientific community does not make the belief a well established body of knowledge. Science is not a matter of faith and consensus. It is a matter of verifiable facts and phenomena that can be replicated repeatedly under carefully controlled constraints.

It used to be that scientific theory was established by a preponderance of verifiable evidence. Not anymore. In the age of Gore and Obama, science is established by a preponderance of repeated incantation, followed by a preponderance of favorable media coverage.

Consensus does not a science make. Carbon Footprint and Carbon Offset, are not scientific concepts. They are political constructs, concocted for propaganda, designed to politically and financially benefit their proponents. It has as much basis in reality as did mortgage-backed securities which obliterated the real estate market and the entire financial system needed a multi-billion dollar bailout.

Beneath the Veneer of Hypocritical Rhetoric

Anthropogenic Global Warming, as postulated by the Kyoto Protocol is not even a scientific theory. It is only an unprovable hypothesis. The notion of "Greenhouse Effect" postulated in the context of the entire planet earth is, at best, an extrapolation of boundary value conditions, not otherwise warranted by experimental constraints.

It is the process of experimentation that elevates an hypothesis into a theory, i.e., when replicable results supportive of the hypothesis are obtained, repeatedly. No such experimentation has been deployed in support of Anthropogenic Global Warming. A computer simulation is not an experiment. It is nothing but an exercise in modeling reality. Its validity depends largely on the set of assumptions that govern the set of process relationships stipulated in the model. It does not prove anything, by any stretch of the imagination.

At the time of this writing, there is a brewing scandal surrounding the apparent falsification of ‘scientific’ data by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglea in the UK, known to be the intellectual brain thrust for AGW.  It is a breach of protocol governing scientific inquiry that would have warranted sending the offenders to the stakes, if not for the fact that doing so would be a serious sacrilege to the noble memory of Giordano Bruno.

For the sake of pedagogical integrity, let us disregard the potential ramifications of such a scandal and confine ourselves to verifiable facts. Carbon dioxide accounts for 0.0314 vol % of the atmosphere and ranks fourth in the distribution after nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. This amount constitutes 1.5% of the total carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, the dissolved component accounting for 98.5% of the total.

People exhale carbon dioxide all their lives. Lower forms of being in the biosphere generously discharge it from the other end, an activity most notably attributed to cattle. Plants use it in photosynthesis. Coral reefs use it to produce more coral reefs, to eventually become limestone and marble, eons hence.

With all these multitude of phenomena in which carbon dioxide is involved, where is the research that isolates in a quantifiable format, the human contribution? The answer appropriately brings to mind a quatrain from Omar Khayyam:

 XLVII 

When You and I behind the Veil are past, 

Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last, 

Which of our Coming and Departure heeds 

As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast. 

Notwithstanding the bloated egos of most politicians and some 

punditocrats, our physical universe as pertains to the planet earth, 

is still heliocentric. Much of what is going on that affects the 

temperature mostly is influenced by solar activity, or lack thereof.

Temperature fluctuations are well documented in the historical geologic record. They are somewhat loosely correlated with solar magnetic storms or sun spots (emphasis mine):

“At over 1.4 million kilometers (869,919 miles) wide, the Sun contains 99.86 percent of the mass of the entire solar system: well over a million Earths could fit inside its bulk. The total energy radiated by the Sun averages 383 billion trillion kilowatts, the equivalent of the energy generated by 100 billion tons of TNT exploding each and every second.”

Not even all the messianic powers of Barack Hussein Obama, reinforced by all the major bloviators in Capitol Hill (think Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Chuck Schummer, etc.) has any prayer of reversing the influence of these staggering numbers.  So, where does the urgent call to action by the Global Warmists come from? Let’s take a look at another, rather longer, historical record (emphasis mine):

“Based on a combination of historical trends over the last several thousand years with the recent trends reasonably attributable to anthropogenic causes of temperature increase, it appears that some small additional increase might be reasonably possible (but not certain) by 2100, but most likely within a range < 0.4^OC, which would put it in the range of several warm periods in historical times that were particularly productive times.”

On a normal day in either winter or summer, when my HVAC system is engaged in the house, I suffer through a greater temperature variation going from the first floor couch to my computer room on the second floor. The answer is painfully obvious. The urgency is analogous to the avowed need to pass the stimulus bill of thousands of pages without being read, let alone analyzed by those who have to vote on it.

To propose to deploy inordinate resources for Global Warming is political folly worthy of celebration only in The United Nations. Let American taxpayers not have anything to do with it.