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The governing class\u2019s obsession with Green religion can seem eccentric were its public policy intentions not so greedy.<\/p>\n
This winter \u2013 like all winters \u2013 is the most brutal on the human condition as the homeless scramble for refuge from frostbite, sudden snow squalls tragically blind drivers, and early freezes cost fruit farmers millions in lost revenue. Yet there was President Obama \u2013 he of the gas-guzzling limo fleet and Air Force One \u2013 introducing his climate warriors, EPA nominee Gina McCarthy and Energy Dept. nominee Ernest Moniz, in the White House Monday.\u201cThey\u2019re going to be making sure,\u201d said the president, that \u201cwe\u2019re doing everything we can to combat the threat of climate change.\u201d Outside the coal-heated confines of the East Room, D.C. was shivering in unseasonably cool , 30-something temps.<\/p>\n
At a time of 8 percent unemployment, falling incomes, and inner city crime mayhem, claiming dominion over the global thermostat is an odd priority. But then politicians have much to gain if they can regulate carbon dioxide \u2013 the essential emission of industrial society. So, like the political necessity of invoking God (whether a churchgoer or not), pols reflexively memorize the Green catechisms.<\/p>\n
My Politics colleague Dale Hansen\u00a0recently compared<\/a>\u00a0climate science denial to the denial of evolution. But in almost 30 years of covering environmental issues, I find the better analogy to climate change is creationism. It is faith, not science.<\/p>\n How else to explain the change in \u201cscientific \u201d terminology in just 40 years? During the frigid winters of the 1970\u2032s, a \u201cconsensus\u201d of scientists claimed global cooling threatened the world (my favorite solution: \u201cmelting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot\u201d \u2013\u00a0Newsweek, 1975<\/a>). Just 20 years later , the droughts of the late \u201980s inspired a \u201cconsensus\u201d on man-made global warming. As that fever cooled, the \u201cconsensus\u201d moved to climate change \u2013 that\u00a0any<\/i>\u00a0weather extreme is caused by industrial emissions.<\/p>\n Like pagan gods that change depending on unexplained threats to the tribe, the definition of global warming shifts with the political winds. There has never been a consensus on climate (the latest poll of scientists findsonly 36 percent believe<\/a>\u00a0in man-made climate catastrophe), other than that we are in a warming period after the Little Ice Age of the mid-1800s \u2013 and that the Kyoto international treaty\u2019s draconian emissions cuts, even if achieved, would have no effect on temperature trends. Climategate exploded global cooling-warming-change science\u00a0in 2009 \u2013 revealing that top scientists like Michael Mann had doctored their research, exposing them as the carnival snake-oil salesmen (a lucrative trade that bags millions in government research dollars) that they are.<\/p>\n