The Great Climate Change Boondoggle: Part One.

This past weekend, the United States’ House of Representatives narrowly passed the Waxman-Markey energy reform legislation with a vote of 219-212. Environmental groups, a number of scientists from around the world and President Obama (who promptly implored the Senate to follow suit and pass the measure as well) lauded this action, while a growing number of global warming skeptics merely sat by and shook their heads.

“Why would those skeptics be shaking their heads, let alone exist”, you may ask. After all, isn’t global warming a fact? Hasn’t it been proven “beyond a reasonable doubt”, as the United Nations suggests? In fact, isn’t the planet’s very survival growing more and more tenuous with every day that passes without radical climate change legislation?

In a word, hardly.

And that is why we are being force-fed this ridiculous “Cap-and-Trade” program: the momentum in the climate change and global warming debate is now slowly shifting to the side of the skeptics.

Here are just a few recent samples of this momentum shift (Thank you, Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal):

• In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming.
• In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role.
• In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted.
• New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
• 700 scientists disagree with the United Nations’ 2007 climate summary (the most influential climate change study)-13 times the number of scientists that authored the summary.
• Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief.
• Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history."
• A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled.
• Australia is currently in the process of retracting their carbon emission laws.

This opinions are just the icing on the cake, as science makes the case for itself.

Despite the Environmental Left and Al Gore’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, the fact of the matter is that the Earth is not get warmer. In fact, the Earth’s temperature has stabilized since 2001, this fact is made even more shocking when you factor in that CO2 levels in that time have steadily increased.

Of course, when we skeptics throw out those numbers we are treated as ignoramuses, as the global warming believers merely state that we don’t understand the science.

In fact, according to them everything is evidence of global warming.

Here’s just one example of this (from an Associated Press story on global warming from late 2008):

“Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it's thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.”

With the presence of an impotent media that refuses to question even glaring inconsistencies like this, the global warming crowd can use, literally, anything as proof that global warming is not only happening, but it is also caused by mankind.

So despite all of these questions and all of this doubt, we are about to pass this economically crippling legislation during the deepest recession in decades. How crippling? Well, tune in for Part 2 to find out.

That’s all for now folks. Until next time, take care and be well.

-John