Another Hot Shoe May Drop

Certainly, the Bush administration recently contradicting the president’s position, adopting to a great extent global warming alarmism in report to the United Nations, was curious. Compounding this curiosity was this submission, the “Climate Action Report 2002” (CAR), relying on two scientific documents already widely discredited, including in writing by this administration.

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The first, the U.N.’s own “IPCC” report, received a fairly thorough expose’ of its flaws in an August 2001 State Department filing with the U.N. Most disturbing, however, was the complete reversal regarding a second study, the “National Assessment on Climate Change,” submitted as the U.S. position on the science of climate change.

Through this report the White House abrogated a written agreement struck with a U.S. senator, two representatives, and advocacy groups including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), in order to escape a lawsuit those parties filed exposing the “National Assessment” as junk, political science. The White House promised that the “National Assessment” was “not policy positions or official statements of the U.S. government.” So much for your promises, the song goes.

Yet believe it or not, the lack of coordination, incompetence or even internal sabotage by remnants of the Gore team actually appear set to make the White House’s problems worse. Maybe it was the hunkering down out of hope the issue would pass without having to rescind the report, or possibly the absence of any heads rolling, but something has apparently only encouraged those whose actions created this debacle.

The other “climate” shoe is being buffed and polished to drop in the near future. This draft document, say informed sources, includes even more alarmist hyperbole and, hard to imagine, an even greater display of junk science than the CAR. The document not being finalized at the White House offers scary stories on a scale even more specific, and therefore even more scientifically dishonest, than the CAR’s. Recall how those predictions, such as Colorado Alpine meadows disappearing, were lapped up by establishment press giddy to adopt man-as-agent-of-doom prophesies.

The author of this pending horror story, to no one’s surprise, is the same entity responsible for the Clinton-Gore report the Bush White House was forced to withdraw – temporarily, apparently, – from being a formal government product. The United States Global Change Research Program (USCGRP) was created in 1990 with two main functions. The first was the discredited “National Assessment.” The second function, a “National Global Change Research Plan,” now looms and appears to be as credible as its useless counterpart.

Despite the sterile-sounding title, this purported “Research Plan” illogically includes more scary “micro-climatic” (local) predictions, that even the alarmist U.N. IPCC admits are simply not possible given existing technology. Ideology, however, knows no scientific or technological bounds and word has it that those would-be rock stars, currently toiling as government weathermen, have cooked up some whoppers.

Yet given recent experience, certainly the White House has deployed its crack team of experts trained to sniff out political and other junk science? Not exactly, at least not yet. To date the White House merely intends to make the plan “presidential.” That means they will take a cut at editing the “preamble,” and add some pictures (presumably not more ridiculous shots of storm development as accompanied the CAR).

Scrubbing the preamble makes sense, given that the “summary” is where most often the mischief is done – it’s what the press reads. For example, the previous U.N. “IPCC” bureaucrats reprehensibly inserted “[t]he balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate,” but only after scientists had reviewed the report. The scientists did not say this. The media sure did.

One wonders, if the same people who created this mess for the White House at the beginning of June spend the rest of the summer developing the next “climate science” shoe to drop, should we expect anything different? Let’s review the current bidding. White House staff plan approval of a scary “climate change” document citing “microclimate” impacts impossible to attain through science or technology. This supposed call for research into uncertainty nonetheless reportedly trumpets “ecological and human impacts,” more hyperbolically than that just submitted to the U.N. The White House is considering toning down some of the hysteria. Why is this even a question?

This White House is known for its loyalty test and enforcement squad, above all others in recent memory. The irony, of course, is that these enforcers include among them those who keep getting the president in hot water through poorly serving him. But they are crackerjack at coming down on others who dare criticize these missteps, as being apparently disloyal to President Bush. Why not instead change this particular climate, drawing a line at this last, monumental staff misstep on environmental policy matters. Certainly, these internal global-warming alarmists understand the concept that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.