RUTHFULLY YOURS

In case you missed it, yesterday was Earth Day, the high holy day of Earth-worshipers.  So it was quite appropriate for Mother Earth’s true believers, acolytes, and clueless subservients to trek en masse to the holiest city on the planet, Washington, D.C., for obeisance, especially when the present administration is threatening to cut back on government tithing to insatiable Gaia groupies, particularly in the area of global warming hysteria.

The reason for this year’s pilgrimage is more than a bit hypocritical, however.

The pretense for self-righteous indignation this time is that somehow activist snowflakes just discovered that climate science is manipulated by politics.  They already know that such science is influenced by money, thus a reason for stomping through the streets of Capital City.

But political influence?  Big surprise.

After all, for at least the past eight years, atmospheric science in the form of “carbon pollution” is causing caustic chaos across the climate cosmos, has been practically front and center on the previous administration’s agenda.  And the previous administration, like so many before it, was all about pure objectivity in science.

Except that it wasn’t.  Nor were earlier administrations.

Politics influenced past scientific practice.  Consider the roots of the global warming issue.  Skipping the fact that the fear of the 1970s during the era of the first Earth Day – which began on April 22, 1970 – was the coming of the next ice age, the global warming frenzy began in earnest on June 23, 1988.  On that day, Senator Timothy Wirth had organized congressional hearings on climate change, staging the event on one of the hottest days of the year.  Senator Wirth and his staff left the windows of the hearing room open all the sweltering night before the meeting to ensure an uncomfortable event the next day.

Furthermore, as noted in a recent commentary for The Washington Times, the year 1988 “also saw the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The IPCC’s stated role is to assess the ‘risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation[.]”  Typically, scientific investigation is not directed to find a preordained conclusion.  There is a tendency, rather, to heed what Upton Sinclair cautioned: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

And the championing of the climate craze by political scientist Al Gore is legendary, as is his An Inconvenient Truth film and his anticipated to be equally mythical movie opening this summer, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.

So, with politics already clouding climate science, is a dissipating of the political fog necessary by the current administration?