Doctored to justify latest power grab?

Too many "are still calling climate change a liberal hoax," declared U.S. Sen. Harry Reid as he opened his fifth annual National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas on Aug. 7. "They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet."

"This year alone, the United States has seen unparalleled extreme weather events - events scientists say are exactly what is expected as the Earth's climate changes. The Midwest is experiencing its most crushing drought in more than half a century - or maybe ever. ... Corn crops are withering and livestock are dying. ...

"Our nation's infrastructure is literally falling apart because it wasn't designed to withstand these conditions," Sen. Reid continued, just getting warmed up. "Runways are melting, trapping planes. Train tracks are bending, derailing subways. Highways are cracking, buckling and breaking open. ... Yet despite having overwhelming evidence and public opinion on our side, deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits. These people aren't just on the other side of this debate. They're on the other side of reality."

Good heavens. And I've even left out Harry's chilling account of the monsoons of Bangladesh. Who ever heard of a monsoon hitting Bangladesh before?

"In the words of one respected climate scientist: 'This is what global warming looks like,' " the senator reported. "Dozens of new reports from scientists around the globe link extreme weather to climate change."

Responding to this rhetorical version of a Godzilla movie, Norman Rogers, Ph.D. in physics from the University of Hawaii, member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, and senior policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, posted the following Friday:

"The advocates of global warming are beginning to have the classic doomsday cult problem. The Earth hasn't been warming for 16 years, and that's starting to get very embarrassing. The first adjustment to the dogma was to stop talking about global warming and start talking about climate change. The latest version of the party line is that we are going to have more extreme weather. The reality is that the weather is not any more variable or extreme than in the past. But with suitable fishing in the data, it is easy to make a case that this or that weather phenomenon has become more extreme.

"The scientist Richard Lindzen has pointed out that the extreme weather theme is inconsistent with the global warmers' own theories," Mr. Rogers continues. "The global warmers have long claimed that the poles will warm faster than the tropics. One of their key scary claims is that vast amounts of ice at the poles will melt and raise sea level. So, according to warmer theory, the temperature difference between the poles and the equator will lessen. But it is that very temperature difference that drives weather, particularly extreme weather. ... So the warmers' claims are fundamentally contradictory."

Sen. Reid insists "The time to act is now."

In fact, it would be foolish to a degree which would rival the dietary preferences of the Norse settlers of Greenland (who appear to have starved rather than eat fish) to further cripple our economy by continuing down this road, when even the patron saints of global warming are falling out along the route of march in droves.

On April 23 of this year, London's Daily Mail reported: " 'I made a mistake': Environmental scientist James Lovelock, renowned for his terrifying predictions of climate change's deadly impact on the planet, has gone back on his previous claims, admitting they were 'alarmist.' ... He added that other environmental commentators, such as former Vice President Al Gore, are also guilty of exaggerating their arguments.

"The admission comes as a devastating blow to proponents of climate change who regard Lovelock as a powerful figurehead," the Mail reported.

"Five years ago, he had claimed: 'Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.' But in an interview with msnbc.com, he admitted: 'I made a mistake.' "

And it's only been a couple of years since, on Feb. 14, 2010, the Daily Mail reported: "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.

"Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now - suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no 'statistically significant' warming," The Mail reported.

"The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made."

Professor Phil Jones is the guy who stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit "after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data," the Mail reports.

In fact, they were making stuff up.

Science has been held in extremely high esteem for two full centuries, to our enormous benefit. But now imagine a culture in which the majority declare: "Scientists? They'll rig their results to please whoever's footing the bills. If a 'scientist' tells me something, I believe just the opposite."

What could be the long-term costs of such a shift in public esteem?

Yet scientists increasingly run this risk. When initial studies of secondhand tobacco smoke failed to show the correlation with disease desired by the sponsors, the required degree of probability was cut in half to make the study "come out right." (http://tinyurl.com/7pjpnfc.) Yet the radio is now full of public service ads proclaiming "There is no proven safe level of secondhand smoke," when it would be more accurate to say "There is no proven unsafe level of secondhand smoke."

And what will become of the reverence in which science is now held if, 20 years from now, scientists are forced to concede we're facing another ice age?

Will they then agree the answer is to generate all the greenhouse gases we can? Or is the real goal here to bring the economies of Europe and America to their knees while allowing the Third World to "catch up" by bringing a new coal-fired power plant online every week? And a priori agenda - crippling the West, with the secondary benefit of handing them a level of bureaucratic power unknown since the days of Stalin - that has simply latched onto "global warming" as the handiest convenient justification?

Vin Suprynowicz is author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.