RUTHFULLY YOURS

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

ALLISON SHELLEY/THE WASHINGTON TIMES SOMETHING TO SAY: Former Vice President Al Gore testifies on climate change before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday. He threw his support behind the pending climate-change-prevention bill.

Former Vice President Al Gore was at his peak when the film “An Inconvenient Truth” made its initial Hollywood splash. Faith in man-made global warming had never been more widespread, with liberal academics and media subjecting to ridicule any who dared question the “settled science.” Only a fool could deny that elevated carbon-dioxide levels had melted ice caps and stranded polar bears on rapidly diminishing ice floes.

How the tables have turned in a short time. On May 20, Oxford Union, the prestigious 187-year-old English debating society, formally considered the question of whether it was more important to focus on growing the economy or solving global warming. Climate realism won the day, 135 to 110. It’s no wonder, considering how the purportedly scientific arguments advanced in support of the scaremongering conclusions have fallen apart since the Climategate scandal invited verification of the left’s previously unexamined claims.

During the debate, Lord Whitty, former environment minister under the Labor government, claimed 95 percent of scientists were in agreement that man was responsible for a coming climatic cataclysm. Lord Monckton, representing climate realists, asked him to provide a reference backing up the claim. The audience jeered Lord Whitty for having none beyond, “Everyone knows it’s true.”

When the best the warmists can come up with is an appeal to authority, their case is lost for good. That’s why, just a few days earlier, climate realists gathered in triumph on this side of the pondat a Heartland Institute climate-change conference in Chicago. Eminent scientists presented a wealth of evidence suggesting nature is, in fact, a much more powerful factor affecting the climate than man. That realism suggests the need for moderation when it comes to political action based on climate data.

“We think we need public policy that’s based in facts, rather than facts that are based on a public agenda,” Colorado State University professor Scott Denning said.

Once outcasts on the fringe of the scientific community, these individuals braved the ridicule of the self-appointed “enlightened” members of society to dismantle systematically the hockey sticks and other frauds crafted by leftists over the years.

In 1895, the New York Times suggested the Earth was headed toward a “second glacial period” in which “countries now basking in the fostering warmth of the tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.” By 1923, the Gray Lady had decided, “The Arctic seems to be warming up” as “so little ice has never before been noted.” By the 1970s, schoolchildren were indoctrinated by textbooks blaming a new ice age on man’s Earth abuse.

All this begs the question of how long it will take the warmist crew to readjust their scare story to win back the public. The majority firmly rejects their socialist prescription to solve an imaginary problem.

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