By Alan Caruba 
The global warming hoax didn’t happen over night. It is generally dated from an appearance before Congress by Dr. James E. Hansen in 1988 predicting a dramatic rise in the Earth’s temperature based on the increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. At that time, Dr. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned that steps had to be taken quickly to reduce CO2 emissions.
Ever since then, Hansen has been active in his effort to convince everyone that he’s right and condemning anyone an opposing point of view. “The science is settled” has been the mantra of men like Hansen and, of course, the bilious Albert Gore of “An Inconvenient Truth” fame.
The background music has been supplied by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has merrily falsified alleged scientific data to advance the hoax while the U.N. Kyoto Protocol imposed limits on CO2 emissions. Most of the nations that signed it have largely ignored it, discovering that it harms their economies. The United States avoided signing, but Americans have now elected a president who is utterly devoted to this “solution” to a problem that does not exist.
In “Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know”, co-authors, Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr., the former a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and the latter a professor of the climatology program in the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University, lay out just how the actual science has been deliberately distorted and politicized.
Two factors have been at work. One is money. Much of the funding for climate research comes from the U.S. government. To get that funding, the science has to fit the political agenda of whatever administration was in power. The second factor is media coverage of the issue. Journalism thrives on bad news and, after gleefully reporting a coming ice age in the 1970s they embraced an apocalyptic global warming and the vocal environmental movement in the 1980s.
Despite the fact that the Earth, based on weather satellite data, is now ten years into a distinct cooling cycle, the mainstream media continues to embrace global warming as real, along with the cries to end the use of coal for the generation of electricity. Coal, one of the most abundant and inexpensive sources of energy in America, accounts for just over fifty percent of all the electricity Americans use daily.
“Climate of Extremes” points out that “As virtually all global warming science is a publicly funded enterprise, political dynamics must in part be involved. At the simplest level, global warming is just one of many scientific issues competing for funding. AIDS and cancer, for example, are competitors.”
There is an additional factor that cannot be ignored. “The reward structure in academia–promotion, tenure, and salary–is based on the quality and quantity of peer-reviewed research. The requisite level and number of publications for tenure is virtually impossible to achieve without substantial public funding.” In short, environmental extremism was very good for the careers of those who kept attributing everything from allegedly endangered polar bears to the shrinking snow cover on Mount Kilimanjaro to global warming while warning against it.
While Al Gore grew rich and famous working the global warming hoax, it seemed like everyone, including prestigious organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science wanted to get in on the act. On June 15, 2004 they put together a panel of U.S. climate scientists to discuss global warming, but the panel was totally composed of its advocates and no dissenters. By that time, however, a Gallup poll revealed that a plurality of Americans had concluded that the news reports were exaggerations.
By then, even prestigious journals such as Science and Nature had totally disgraced themselves by publishing allegedly peer-reviewed articles about global warming. National Geographic continues to publish comparable nonsense.
Thanks to the ardent efforts of countless environmental organizations, global warming had been totally integrated into the thinking of those inside the Beltway so that millions of taxpayer dollars, then and now as part of the stimulus package have been spent to prove what the actual science demonstrates is bogus.
Indeed, on March 8-10, the second annual International Conference on Climate Change will take place in New York, bringing together several hundred climatologists, meteorologists, economists, and others to further dismember the hoax.
Meanwhile, the true cost of the global warming hoax lives on in idiotic government mandates for blending ethanol with gasoline or demands for “alternative energy” (wind and solar) unsuited to providing anywhere near the billions of megawatts the U.S. requires to function. If a “cap and trade” proposal regarding greenhouse gas emissions passes Congress, an invisible, baseless tax on energy will be imposed on all Americans.
We have all been lied to by a shameless confederation of scientists, their professional publications, their formal organizations, and politicians seeking to use this big scare to advance their careers and agendas. The problem for all of them is that the real science does not support global warming and never did. Real scientists, branded dissenters, skeptics, and deniers, held true to the principles of science, knowing that it would eventually end this vast and terrible hoax.