Flawed Bill for a Unsettled Premise

The US House today narrowly (219-212) passed the Waxman-Markey energy/climate change bill which includes "Cap & Trade" provisions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Most of the debate centered on the likely huge economic costs of the legislation and the rushed process in which the bill was passed (much like the stimulus package earlier this year). Even some who support carbon controlling legislation, as in this Washington Post editorial, questioned the process and the bill that would pass today. The bill still has to be debated and voted on in the Senate.

But as the House leadership, with the support of the Obama Administration, rushed to pass this bill, the whole premise behind it remains in question. After years of the the drumbeat that the issue of human caused global warming was "settled", the question is becoming more and more unsettled around the world, according to Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

The renewed debate is not just among politicians. More and more scientists are coming out and challenging a "consensus" that may have never really existed.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. 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." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." 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. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

So what kind of climate policy should we have? Since change in the global or regional climates, whether natural or man-made and whether warming or cooling, can have a real impact on people, a vigorous climate research and monitoring program is warranted. And developing alternative sources of and more efficient ways of using energy is important for a number of reasons, including for security, prosperity and general environmental stewardship.

However, we should not pursue a policy of turning our economic lives upside down in an effort to address a problem about which there is not so much of a "consensus" as has been claimed.

In the interest of airing both sides of this anything but "settled" debate, here are links to a NOAA climate site and one maintained by the Heartland Institute.

UPDATE: 6/28/09 Information has been leaked about an internal dispute between two EPA employees and their superiors. The employees claim the EPA is suppressing their report documenting that the agency is blindly following the analyses of other organizations without its own evaluation in light of more recent climate research.

Carlin and Davidson go on to recite the scientific work that shows rather clearly that human activity is a minor factor, at most, in climate change--which has, of course, been occurring from the beginning of Earth's history to the present. Their report is a useful summary of the evidence for those who are not familiar with it.

If the Obama administration gets its way, Americans will not become aware of the scientific evidence: Obama's EPA suppressed the Carlin/Davidson report and tried to keep it secret for political reasons. The emails obtained by the CEI are revealing.

This is the Obama Administration that seems to be suppressing scientific evidence. Haven't we had it drummed into us by much of the media that only the Bush Administration and those evil Republicans would suppress scientific evidence?