By Mr. Curmudgeon

In a debate with Sen. John McCain during the 2008 campaign, then candidate Obama said of his plan to transform environmentalism into a jobs mega maker for America, “…If we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily. It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades.” Tell that to James Sikes of San Diego, California. The environmentally friendly onboard computer of his Toyota Prius hybrid nearly drove him off a cliff. When his “green” automobile accelerated to 94-miles-an-hour, and his efforts to reduce the vehicle’s speed failed, Sikes called 911 for help. A police officer eventually drove his patrol car in front of the out-of-control green vehicle, slowing the Prius lodged against the police car’s rear bumper to a stop. Sikes was lucky. Thanks to the police, he avoided joining the estimated 30 people believed killed by the faulty hybrid vehicle in America. The problem appears to be related to a glitch in the vehicle’s computer program.

Liz Pulliam Weston at MSN Money writes that the high cost of hybrids undercuts its value to the consumer. “Assuming you drive 15,000 miles a year and gas averages $2.50 a gallon (we can hope), you’d be saving $391 a year on fuel. That means it would take you about eight years to break even.” That’s a high price to pay for feeling good about yourself, and that price may include your life.

Academy Award-winning director James Cameron’s career took off with the release of his sci-fi Terminator film series. The premise of Cameron’s story concerned a war to annihilate humanity by conscious computer-operated machines. According to the plot, the Terminators were the unintended consequences of research conducted by the evil U.S. military industrial complex. Who would have thought the softheaded fantasy to “save the planet” would be the catalyst for the creation of deadly man-killing technology…and that affluent Americans would be willing to pay more for an early termination.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

What do evolving apes and melting glaciers have in common? Darwin’s ideas on evolution and the hot and bothered fears of Al Gore over global warming are not facts, merely theories. And both religious dogmas are hotly defended by the high priests of secular humanism. According to the New York Times, “Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.” The “climategate” scandal, which proved global warming “scientists” manufactured data to support the claim that manmade carbon emissions are dangerously warming the planet, has had the unintended effect of leveling the playing field in the marketplace of ideas. Several state legislatures are taking advantage of the discredited global warming theory to give students an opportunity to hear the ideas of competing creators – earthly and heavenly.

“The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy,” the Times reports, “courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general. Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming…” It appears that Gore’s discredited claim that unanimous consensus on the question of global warming should end debate is now spilling over into other areas of scientific “consensus.”

Of Darwin’s human origins theory, Dr. Fazale Rana at Reasons to Believe writes, “Amazingly, studies using mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA markers trace humanity’s origin back to a single man and woman. These studies also indicate that humanity’s migration around the world began at or near the Middle East. Though often presented and discussed within the context of the evolutionary paradigm, this model has profound biblical implications. In some respects, the Out-of-Africa hypothesis appears to be the biblical model awkwardly forced into the evolutionary framework…” The debate, then, is not so much over credible scientific data but who gets to present it…and take the credit.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Al Gore once denounced all who disagreed with the “scientific consensus” that the globe is warming and it’s all our fault. Then hackers (not all are bad) broke into the computers at England’s University of East Anglia and discovered e-mail correspondence between the world’s climatologists  suggesting Gore’s cherished consensus was manufactured. Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who published a paper in the British medical journal Lancet, claimed a link existed between the MMR vaccine (for mumps, rubella and measles) and autism. The number of vaccinations plummeted in the United Kingdom and the U.S. and occurrences of the dreaded childhood diseases rose. News reports later revealed that Wakefield was paid nearly one million dollars for his fraudulent study by lawyers wanting to sue vaccine manufacturers. Currently, 18 European countries have governing bodies to investigate science fraud. In the U.S., the National Science Foundation and other government bodies have subpoena powers. According to Science Daily, “offenders can be required to take a course in scientific ethics or, in the most serious cases, banned from receiving any federal research funding for up to five years.” That’s a slap on the wrist considering the enormous sway so-called experts have over our lives – cap-and-trade and the Copenhagen climate change treaty.

All one has to do to see the insidious effect experts have on our way of life is to watch C-SPAN. Nine times out of ten, there is some bloodless technocrat peering over his readers and telling eager lawmakers how best to manage our lives. And there is a pre-existing relationship between these so-called experts and Congress; much of their research is funded by the very government that uses their findings as an justification to increase imperial federal power. In other words, the educated class of experts feeds the government’s appetite for power. This is why the left condemns the anti big-government Tea Party movement as anti-intellectual.

“The educated class believes in global warming,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks. “The educated class supports abortion rights…The educated class supports gun control…The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high…The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should ‘go our own way’ has risen sharply.” Brooks then adds, “In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction…” Brooks, a Republican establishmentarian, misses the point completely.

Today’s Tea Party is as horrified at being ruled by an educated class of “experts” as the original Tea Party was at being ruled by a deluded English king who believed he governed by  “divine right.” The outrage over “climategate” and ObamaCare represents a revolution against the rulers by the ruled, not the uneducated against the “educated class.” Free men and women bow to no one. Obama, Pelosi and Reid have a hard time dealing with this revolutionary idea.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Wake-up calls are going off all over the world; the election of Scott Brown as the 41st no-vote on ObamaCare, trillions of dollars in stimulus producing no demonstrable results and now global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that its prediction Himalayan glaciers were destined to melt into one big puddle by 2035 was, well, all wet. “In drafting the paragraph in question the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly,” read a statement released by the UN panel. The paragraph in question was contained in a 2007 report that won the errant members of the IPCC the Noble Peace Prize.

As the Times of London reported, “Monitoring Himalayan glaciers is extremely difficult because most of them lie in some of the most inhospitable terrain in the word at an altitude of more than 5,000 metres (16,000ft). Most studies until now have therefore been based necessarily on a mixture of outdated and incomplete data, satellite imagery, photography, and anecdotal evidence.”

If UN climatologists are in need of “anecdotal evidence” global warming is a load of hooey, they need do no more than step away from their climate modeling computers and walk outside.

Christopher Booker at the London Daily Telegraph observes, “Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed…all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flat lining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.”

When in the 1920s British mountaineer John Mallory was asked, “why do you want to climb Mr. Everest?” he replied, “Because it’s there.” Mallory didn’t have to prove the existence of the world’s highest peak, the evidence of its existence was clear for anyone to see. That is clearly not the case for the hysterical claims made by global warming buffoons.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may have gone a little flabby since his Mr. Olympia days, but one muscle remains robust…the one between his ears. The exemplar of all that is wrong with the “big tent” circus of Republican Party politics is in Copenhagen to lend his voice to the chorus of over 15,000 hysterical global warmers at the UN climate conference.

“The world’s governments alone cannot make the progress that is needed on global climate change,” Schwarzenegger told the London Financial Times, “they need the cities, the states, the provinces, the regions. California is the eighth largest economy in the world and also America’s trendsetter, so what we do has consequences.”

The consequences of environmental initiatives championed by the Left Coast’s movie idol governor will present a microcosm for the rest of the nation, if not the world, of the economic and human toll resulting from legislation to combat an unproven threat.

At Schwarzenegger’s urging, the California legislature passed Assembly Bill 32, or the “Global Warming Solutions Act.” The State’s euphoria quickly evaporated as the nation slipped into an economic depression, with California suffering one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates (12.3%) due to its big-spending Democratic legislature and “reach-across-the-aisle” Republican Governator.

Sanjay Varshney, the business school dean at California State University, Sacramento, released a study estimating that California’s global warming law will cost the average household $3,857 annually, eliminate 1.1 million jobs and reduce the size of the state’s economy by 10 percent. The state measure’s draconian greenhouse gas reduction provisions will increase the costs of food, fuel and electricity to such an extent that it will drive down consumer discretionary spending by a whopping 26 percent.

Roger Sowell, a California attorney who represents individuals and companies in civil matters related to climate change, writes:

“It is hypocritical of government, in my view, to pass strict regulations to reduce tiny amounts of air pollutants with a goal of preventing a very small number of illnesses or deaths, but then to pass Carbon Dioxide reduction laws that will increase costs of electric power and transportation fuels, thus forcing millions of people to choose between paying for electric power, medication, food, transportation fuel, or rent.”

Sowell further states that the law’s “carbon capture” requirement for industry is a costly enterprise that will add 4 to 8 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. “That is roughly a 30 to 80 percent increase over current prices,” says Sowell, “Higher costs of electricity are deadly to the vulnerable groups in our society. Carbon reduction laws are wrong for that reason alone, if for no others.”

And there is no better evidence of the deadly consequences of softheaded environmental initiatives than the attempt to move from fossil to bio fuels. Ironically, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reported an overall 56 percent rise in the price of food for poor countries in 2008 – with a 74% increase for Africa.

According to Richard Walden, writing for the Huffington Post:

“Ethanol production using maize (corn) is growing rapidly at the expense of setting aside adequate amounts of maize for human consumption. This creates shortages and a spike in prices for a wide range of food products.

“…The displacement of petroleum by ethanol is a good thing but it won’t lower air pollution and may just kill people from the resulting riots and hunger caused by food shortages.”

This was born out in 2008 when Bangladesh, Egypt and Haiti erupted in riots due to surging food prices. World Bank President Robert Zoellick told CNN, “While many are worrying about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs…”

Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs, said, “We’ve been putting our food into the gas tank – this corn-to-ethanol subsidy which our [US] government is doing really makes little sense.”

California may be, in Schwarzenegger’s words, “a trendsetter.” But the question is whether that trend is to the betterment or detriment of human beings. Arnold’s inability to make that distinction proves his skull is thicker than his Austrian accent.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Addressing the climate conference in Copenhagen, former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore was out to make an impression. He insisted that unless world governments agree to turn their citizens into surfs of the United Nations climate bureaucracy, the polar icecaps will melt. “Some of the [computer] models suggest to Dr. [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.” Unfortunately, someone asked Dr. Maslowski about Gore’s claim. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” Maslowski told the Times of London. Apparently, even pseudo-scientists have standards.

It has not been a good few weeks for global warming advocates. The release of e-mails proving the fraudulent manipulation of temperature data by leading climate scientists has called into question the necessity of giving UN functionaries unprecedented power to turn the Earth into a carbon-free gulag.

Yesterday, members of the poor G77 nations walked out of the climate summit in a huff. They were angry that summit delegates were unlikely to pass a legally binding agreement to transfer vast sums of wealth from productive to nonproductive nations.

Some believe Gore’s fabricated claims were intended to scare the superstitious climate conferees into enacting a bolder climate treaty. Instead, Gore speech added an exclamation point to the charge that global warming is the invention of agenda-driven climate scientists bearing apocalyptic computer models.

Understanding the gravity of Gore’s pratfall, Professor Jim Overland, of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was beside himself. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from skeptics.” What Overland is really saying is that for global warming enthusiasts, Gore’s fictional tale inadvertently points to an inconvenient truth.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Demonstrators estimated to number around 100,000 marched from Copenhagen’s Chistiansborg Slotsplads to the Bella Center where delegates representing 200 nations are gathered to find an expensive and freedom-killing solution to a nonexistent problem – global warming. The demonstrators expressed frustration with all the talk at the climate conference and want action. The protestors, however, were less united by their wants than they were in their clamor.

A lone voice in the crowd, barley heard over the loud swish of police helicopters, was David Pontoppidan, a sociology student from the University of Copenhagen. “We want free debate,” the New York Times reported, “We want to be able to be taken seriously even though we don’t agree with the U.N.” Welcome to the club, David.

Al Gore’s sci-fi classic, “An Inconvenient Truth,” may have been short on truth, but its real purpose was to inconvenience those wishing to engage in honest debate regarding the preposterous apocalyptic claims made by the tax-supported high priests of climate science. A central tenant of Gore’s fable is that the overwhelming consensus among climatologists confirms that global warming is real and that we are its cause.

As the e-mails from “climategate” show, that consensus is the product of a massive scientific fraud. In defense of the Climate Research Unit – the central perpetrator of the scam – the mass media argues that we Americans are too stupid to truly evaluate whether years of gathered climate data is real or manufactured. We are to shut up and let our betters in white coats and at the U.N. design sadistic carbon-cutting policies that require us to march back in time to live like pathetic urchins in a Dickens novel. To contradict this dogma is sacrilege. And that is the real point.

Climate change has evolved into the central dogma of the eco-religion. Unlike religions stemming from the Judeo/Christian tradition – that are scrupulously removed from the public square by our political and legal institutions –the opposite holds true for the eco-religion. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, is a hateful impediment to the new religion and it won’t be tolerated.

President Obama’s presence in Copenhagen signals his distrust of our political traditions, built on the consent of the governed, in favor of Gore and his high priests – who wish to subject every man, woman and child on Earth to the dictates of a new religion built on a foundation of fraud.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Many of the delegates currently attending the Copenhagen climate summit know who the real enemy is. It’s not global warming or big oil. For advocates of the “climate justice movement,” the enemy is us – every citizen of the United State of America. In an editorial appearing in 56 newspapers around the world, its authors say, “Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty…even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president [Obama] cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.”

The editorial conductor motions to the string section of the global warming orchestra and the violins begin their sorrowful moan:

“…The rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions…”

Then the editorial gets to the heart of what the Copenhagen summit is really all about – what to Americans will seem an ear-splitting gong:

“Social justice demands that the industrialized world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries…

“Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.”

In other words, we Americans will have to pay for our high standard of living by living like hunter-gatherer equatorial pygmies. Climate change, after all, has little to do with weather and everything to do with economics. It’s the kind of “change” that is eerily similar to the one President Obama campaigned on. When Ohio’s Joe the Plumber encountered candidate Obama loitering on his front lawn, old Joe could hardly have imagined that Obama’s promise to “spread the wealth around” was a threat that had global implications.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

As the delegates to Copenhagen’s climate summit debate the nuanced wording of a draconian measure to place billions of us carbon emitters under the thumb of U.N. climateers, a question comes to mind: what action will the U.N. take to enforce a global climate treaty once the measure is agreed upon? You can catch a revealing glimpse of the U.N.’s organizational skills as played out in the African Congo.

Several months ago, the United Nations agreed to allow the Congolese army to join the copious ranks of its 19,000-man Central African peacekeeping force. The world body went so far as to provide food and ammunition to the eager new recruits. A document from the United Nations peacekeeping force (know as MONUC) states that its mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo is “…the maintenance of the cessation of hostilities and the disengagement and redeployment of the parties’ forces, the comprehensive disarmament, demobilization, resettlement and reintegration of all members of all armed groups…and the orderly withdrawal of all foreign forces…”

During the past three months, U.N. peacekeepers conducted Operation Kimia II, which was originally designed to disarm and repatriate Rwandan rebels. Instead, U.N. peacekeepers knowingly supported abusive “military operations,” says Human Rights Watch.

The New York Times reports that the U.N.’s Congolese contingent failed to read the fine print of their peacekeeping mandate. Instead, they “killed hundreds of civilians, gang-raped girls and even cut the heads off some young men.”

And what, you might ask, was the response from the U.N. under secretary general for peacekeeping operations? “We knew this was a risky operation,” Alain Le Roy told the New York Times, “We have no other option.”

Alain Le Roy may feel he has no choice but to feed and arm marauding killers, but the United States should know better than to make binding agreements with a nihilistic organization that refuses to distinguish between peacekeepers and predators.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

With the Republican Party bereft of testosterone, it has fallen to Gov. Sarah Palin to say what Republican geldings won’t. In a column published in Tuesday’s Washington Post, Gov. Palin commented on the manipulation of climate data by the malevolent Climate Research Unit (CRU) at England’s University of East Anglia:

“The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

“Climate-gate,” as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit…have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle — the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the United Nations organization overseeing events in Copenhagen, defended the CRU’s data hoax, which is not surprising. The CRU provided much of the data the IPCC uses to pressure weak-minded world leaders:

“Comments on blogs and in the media about the contents of a large number of private emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, have questioned both the validity of the key findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and the integrity of its authors. IPCC WGI condemns the illegal act which led to private emails being posted on the Internet and firmly stands by the findings of the AR4 and by the community of researchers worldwide whose professional standards and careful scientific work over many years have provided the basis for these conclusions.”

The AR4 report is a crucial document contending, “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th Century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [We The People] greenhouse gas concentrations.” So, it’s understandable that the IPCC is concerned climate-gate e-mails threaten the legitimacy of the U.N. and Al Gore’s so-called scientific censuses. As Palin states:

“The e-mails reveal that leading climate ‘experts’ deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What’s more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.”

Horrified that a leading organ of the mainstream media would give space to a rare Republican critic of global warming, Tim Lambert of ScienceBlogs.com wrote a response to Palin’s Op-Ed entitled “The Washington Post can’t go out of business fast enough.” Lambert lamented, “…Now they have a piece by climate expert Sarah Palin. The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes.”

Though unintentional, Lambert raises a profoundly important point. Why would any alert being trust the purveyors’ of incomplete and manipulated data with deciding the fate of billions of human beings simply on the basis of their so-called “expertise?” Would you roll over if handed a computerized bank statement shorting your saving account by several thousand dollars? After all, the bank’s data-entry specialist can certainly claim the title “expert.” Lambert is angry because by publishing Palin’s Op-Ed, the Post opened the door – if only briefly – to the fallibility of the self-professed infallible experts.

Copenhagen’s 11-day summit, therefore, is the byproduct of climate science fiction. Like the humorless intergalactic scold Klaatu in the 1951 sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” climatologists assure us that the U.N.’s dictatorial mandates won’t require “giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle.”

Earthling Sarah Palin isn’t so sure:

“Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference.”

It’s not the bad science that bothers me. It’s that the Copenhagen conference seeks to achieve agreement to erase national sovereignties, giving the U.N. unprecedented power over all human activity on Earth. Like the enforcing robot Gort, the U.N.’s iron bureaucrats believe they are programmed to save us from ourselves, thus saving the planet. This would be laughable if the reality of it weren’t so sci-fi scary.