So at 1:30 the White House is holding a press conference to release a new report claiming that the cooling climate is warming faster than predicted, etc., etc., and boy wouldn’t it be great if we accepted the responsible agenda of an energy tax. Like, oh, hey, the one the House is expected to take up anon!
I say anon because, at least as of early yesterday evening, the rumor on the Hill was that the inevitable sell-out by Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee had been agreed in principle, and Rep. Colin Peterson — who also rolled over to Speaker Pelosi on his own farm bill, staff are noting, so he shouldn’t be expected to hold out long on the Obama Energy Tax — will bring his band of about three dozen Democrats over to the “Aye” column. If true, the rumor has it, the bill was slated for the House floor next Thursday. I have little fear of the latter, even if the former is inevitable.
Today’s event is surely aimed in part at swaying those holdouts, but is also another in a series of such stunts, employing the same alarmist authors, begun with the Clinton-Gore administration’s November 2000 report making the same claims, with an eye toward convincing the voting public that you-know-who ought to occupy the Oval Office.
That first “National Assessment on Climate Change” didn’t work — except possibly to frighten the climate into a cooling submission — and my organization, CEI, led the successful effort to have the document discredited (we negotiated a settlement with DOJ requiring it to carry a warning label stating that it was not subjected to scrutiny under the Federal Information Quality Act).
As luck would have it, I was just working on my comments on EPA’s “endangerment” finding that, apparently, carbon dioxide threatens human health and the environment (um, try living without it). The thrust of those comments are that the Finding — which admits to having outsourced its judgment on the science to the UN IPCC and, natch, the authors of today’s “report” – is premised upon computer models whose output, I argue, is inadmissible in a federal court for its failure to satisfy the “sound science” standard articulated in SCOTUS’s 1993 Daubert decision. In short, they’re making their claims up.
The same can be said of today’s report, which based on early reporting seems not only to fudge observations but, once again, relies on disproven computer models for lurid future scenarios. We’ve caught a major error already, by the way, and will wait and see if the product is as sloppy as has been reported, or merely the reportage. More on that later, if the whopper is in fact in today’s latest “world to end: women and minorities to be hit hardest” report.