By Mr. Curmudgeon

Like so many on the soft-headed left, James Jay Lee just wanted to save the planet. So, he stormed into the Discovery Channel television headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, took three hostages at gunpoint and demanded that the cable network produce environmental documentaries showing that, “Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population.” A Montgomery County SWAT sharpshooter helped to bring Lee’s dream alive by shooting him dead, reducing the world’s human population by one. It’s a start.

The hostage situation in Silver Spring is something of a morality play. The mouth-breathers of the environmental movement would love nothing better than to take us all hostage. They may not have the ability to save the planet (not that it’s under any real threat), but they are trying like the dickens to take it hostage. First came the Kyoto Treaty. Now the Copenhagen Treaty, with Obama’s impending Cap-and-Trade legislation to help fund a UN administered global wealth redistribution scheme.

In the end, it’s an exercise in futility at best and self-destructive at worst. That is why this November’s elections are so important. With two years left in our one-term president’s tenure in office, voters need to send genuine opposition representatives to Washington to curb the wild-eyed enthusiasm of Obama and his environmental policies before they dash all hope for America’s economic recovery.

To put it in perspective, think of James Jay Lee as the personification of Cap-and-Trade, and the Tea Party as the Montgomery County SWAT team.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat paid America’s conservative movement (read Tea Party) the ultimate compliment. Regarding Harry Reid’s admission that cap-and-trade carbon emissions legislation is dead, Douthat writes, “If their bill is dead, it was the American conservative movement that ultimately killed it. Climate legislation wasn’t like health care, with Democrats voting ‘yes’ in lockstep. There was no way to get a bill through without some support from conservative lawmakers. And in the global warming debate, there’s a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the conservative movement and the environmentalist cause.”

In what has to be a major blow to the New York Times, Beltway Republicans appear to be more frightened of the Tea Party than a verbal knuckle-wrapping by columnists at the Times. Environmental supporters of the legislation blame “…figures like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, erstwhile supporters of cap-and-trade who have steadily backpedaled away from it.” It just underscores the importance to the Republican cause for voters to “backpedal” from accomodationist Beltway Republicans in the primaries.

Douthat makes the usual mainstream media claim that to be a Republican automatically makes you a conservative. John McCain? Lindsey Graham? Conservatives? Really? Mavericks, certainly. And by mavericks, I mean the kind of Republican that has compromised with every damaging big-government enterprise that now brings our once great country to the brink of collapse. This brand of Republican conservatism hasn’t the stones to perform the duty implied by its very name…to conserve. They are too busy helping Obama’s Democrats deconstruct America into a leftist banana republic.

It’s bad enough that Beltway Republicans let the New York Times define conservatism. The question that puzzles me is – why do Republican voters?

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Former Vice President and Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore was described as acting “angry, becoming verbally sharp and loud.” No, he wasn’t furious at rising sea levels or dying polar bears. He allegedly grew uncontrollably angry that his massage therapist would not have sex with him. So says the National Enquirer, whose obligatory extraterrestrial exposés are far less credible than their sex scandal reporting. After all, the Enquirer broke the story on then presidential candidate John Edwards’ extramarital affair and subsequent love child. Why is it that a supermarket tabloid that covers alien conspiracy theories is more concerned the moral character of our politicians than the New York Times?

The massage therapist in question told Portland, Oregon police, “I was shocked and did not massage beyond what is considered safe….” Now that’s enough to make you gouge your mind’s eye out.

When the New York Times reluctantly followed up the story, calling Gore for comment, he declined. At least for now, Gore isn’t willing to own up to what may prove to be an inconvenient truth.

It hasn’t been a good year for Gore or global warming. It was discovered that the world’s leading climatologists fudged data to support their hysterical end-of-the-world computer models, and the world experienced one of the harshest winters on record. Then last January, the Gores announced that their marriage of 40 years was ending.

In testimony pleading for Congress to save the planet, Gore once said, “Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it’s a challenge to the moral imagination.”

Gore’s moral imagination was consumed with polar bears, melting glaciers, rising sea levels and, apparently, longing for the touch of that special massage therapist. There just wasn’t enough moral imagination left to save his marriage.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

President Obama’s wind Czar, or whatever he calls himself, must be livid that good liberal Massachusetts isn’t playing ball with the administration…again. First, they send Republican Scott Brown to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. Now they brazenly file delaying lawsuits to stall the construction of a lame-brained wind farm that will scar 25-miles of scenic coastline with 130 spinning propellers. Once built, it will produce negligible amounts of energy, but it makes Obama look heroic as he tilts at Al Gore’s invisible friend global warming. The feds then added insult to injury by paying Siemens Energy Inc. a half billion dollars for wind turbines. With the Euro dropping in value due to the bankruptcy of Europe’s crumbling nanny-states, Siemens appreciates the generosity of U.S. taxpayers. You see, Siemens is a German company.

In order to head-off possibly harmful publicity, Siemens announced it will open a Boston sales office. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said the Siemens’ gesture would “create jobs in Massachusetts.” The sales office will employ 5, maybe 10 people. When completed, the wind farm boondoggle will cost an estimated $1.6 billion dollars.

Remember those television commercials with oilman T. Boon Pickens hawking the benefits of wind power? It seems odd that Democrats would embrace the brainchild of the man who contributed cash to the Swift Boat veterans, whose ads did so much to scuttle Sen. John Kerry’s presidential ambitions. But his words make clear why Nancy Pelosi once asked Pickens to speak before Washington’s Democratic Caucus. “We have to have the right leadership and everybody in this country has to cooperate,” said Pickens, “…we have to march in the same direction…”

Recently, we saw a clear example of what Pelosi and Obama see as leadership. Over the objection of a majority of the Americans, they bribed, threatened and employed parliamentary tricks to force ObamaCare down the throat of a nation. Obama and Pelosi identify with Pickens’ idea that America must “march in the same direction.” That is why the November election is so important. It’s our chance to change that direction and rein-in Obama and Pelosi’s need to dictate marching orders. If Obama could harness the power generated by the upcoming winds of change, he could power America for the rest of this century.

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.

 

 Melting Theories [3:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.