Al Gore hunts manbearpig in South Park

By Rich Trzupek

It’s time to wrap up The Heretics series. We haven’t come close to covering all of the scientists and researchers who question the tenets of global warming alarmism, but the small sampling of prominent skeptics featured on these pages should be enough to make it obvious that significant, sincere and scientifically valid arguments exist that refute the Gorethodoxy of so-called “climate change.”

In addition to the heretics we have featured, there are legions of others. Atmospheric physicists Fred Singer at the University of Virginia, Richard Lindzen at MIT and legendary meteorologist John Coleman, just to name a few, have been out on the front lines, waging a battle for scientific integrity, for years. The Heartland Institute, a cornucopia of information about global warming, has published the names of hundreds of skeptical scientists. More than thirty thousand scientists, including this one, have lent their names to the Global Warming Petition Project, declaring that they agree with the following statement:

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

The myth of scientific consensus on global warming, once so prevalent, has been discredited to the point that only die-hard liberal policy makers still cling to it. About fifty percent of Americans now believes that natural planetary trends are responsible for climate change and public support for greenhouse gas regulation continues to dwindle. The alarmists are scrambling to repackage their message in hopes of rekindling the global warming fire, but they face daunting challenges. One can only cry wolf so many times before people start to tune you out.

When Al Gore’s disciples attempt to discredit skeptics, aka “denialists” in their world, they usually stick to a couple of themes. The first is to label the individual in question as a corporate stooge, usually with alleged ties to Exxon-Mobil, who has sold out science in exchange for a fat paycheck. The second is to declare that the skeptic is a crackpot who doesn’t really understand the science involved and is simply making wild, unverifiable assertions with no basis in reality. Neither claim can survive close scrutiny.

Read the rest of this piece at FrontPageMag.

See the rest of “The Heretics” series here.

The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign

By Steven F. Hayward

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago-changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media-even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC-are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

Read the rest of this article at the Weekly Standard.

Multiple indicators show less concern, more feelings that global warming is exaggerated

By Frank Newport

Gallup’s annual update on Americans’ attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.

Read the rest and see the charts at Gallop.