Standing Firm Against a Hurricane of Lies

By Alan Caruba

It takes a substantial amount of courage to stand against the lies about global warming, carbon dioxide’s (CO2) role in climate change, and whether humans are causing unusual weather events, but Dr. William Gray has been doing that ever since the global warming hoax was unleashed on the world in the 1980s.

In January 2010, after having been a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) for more than fifty years, Dr. Gray, a Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University, wrote a stinging denunciation when the society gave its highest award to James Hansen, the NASA official generally credited with getting the global warming hoax rolling in 1988 with testimony before Congress.

“I am appalled at the selection of James Hansen as this year’s recipient of the AMS’s highest award—the Rossby Research Medal. James Hansen has not been trained as a meteorologist. His formal education has been in astronomy. His long records of faulty global climate predictions and alarmist public pronouncements have become increasingly hollow and at odds with reality.”

At an age when most men might be expected to rest on their laurels, Dr. Gray has not shrunk from the battle. Slapping down Hansen, he said, “He cannot explain why there has been no significant global warming over the last ten years and why there has been a weak global cooling between 2001 and 2008.”

What is generally unknown and unseen by the public is that in the world of science there are fierce battles waged within its many cohorts as both sides of an issue lay out their data and submit themselves to the scrutiny of other scientists. These battles often last for decades. Darwin’s theory, though widely accepted by the public, is still being debated with the likelihood that it too will be upended by the study of magnetic reversals.

I am pleased to call Dr. Gray a friend. I first took notice of him for his annual predictions of hurricane activity. I suspect that professional poker players, for whom the odds are weighed hand by hand, would stand in awe of anyone prognosticating on the number of hurricanes that would hit the east coast in any given year.

World Climate Report recently asked, “How much evidence will it take to quiet the claim that hurricanes are increasing in frequency due to global warming?” They found “scant evidence to support a strong link”, something that Dr. Gray has been saying for decades.

In 2006 The Wall Street Journal took notice in a page one article titled, “Hurricane Debate Shatters Civility of Weather Service.” Dr. Gray had been disinvited from being on a panel to discuss the storms, several of whose members were still arguing the idiotic notion that human activity has anything to do with these powerful climate events.

The lesson here is that major science-based organizations such as the AMS, along with government weather service agencies such as NASA, have been deliberately misleading Americans for years.

Dr. Gray has been indefatigable in his resistance to the torrent of misinformation. To those government scientists putting forth the global warming alarmism, Dr. Gray has written that “Rising levels of CO2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be an honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO2’s influence on global temperature.”

“The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.”

It is climate policy that is driving the Obama administration’s effort to pass the Cap-and-Trade Act, a huge tax on all energy use. It is climate policy that is driving the Environmental Protection Agency’s crude, thuggish effort to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) and when the President speaks of climate change as related to human activity he is lying.

I trust Dr. Gray’s half century of research and analysis. You should, too.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Hurricane Humility

By Alan Caruba

Who among us can remember back, oh so long ago, when Hurricane Earl was a Category 4, just one degree shy of the Katrina’s astonishing destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast States of Mississippi and Alabama?

Those of us on the East Coast were assured that Earl would smash into North Carolina’s the barrier islands, dash up toward Newark, New Jersey, and then onward to Nantucket and pretty much anywhere else Earl wanted to go. The predictions were ominous.

I live in New Jersey and it is late afternoon on Friday as this is being written. Not a drop of rain in sight. No doubt some will arrive later tonight, but Earl has veered out into the Atlantic and is just barely holding on to a Category 1 status.

How many hours did Fox News, the Weather Channel, and all the others devote to sensational satellite pictures of the Mighty Earl until, over the hours, it became apparent that those intrepid reporters waiting for it to come ashore were reduced to interviewing disgruntled surfers unhappy that they could not commit suicide in Earl’s surging waves?

This is what I keep telling people over and over again. The weather is the perfect definition of chaos. It will do what it wants to do and not what the geniuses sweating over “computer models” say it will do.

We humans in our suburbs and great cities are like tiny insects in its path. People that keep telling you that humans are altering the climate are lying to you.

That’s why we have to ask ourselves, if the meteorologists cannot predict what a Category 4 hurricane will do with more than a wisp of certainty, why should anyone listen to those charlatans who insist they know what the weather will be in five, ten, twenty or fifty years?

I’m not talking about legitimate climatologists who study trends over centuries, but the one’s that insist on transforming the economy and society out of their conceit that they know that “global warming” is coming and it’s going to be bad.

It’s not coming; the Earth has been cooling for the past decade. It is a perfectly natural and well-known cycle. It could stick around a few years. Or it could mutate into the next Ice Age.

Today my local daily newspaper had an editorial about global warming and why the skeptics are wrong. That is a level of denial and flat-out ignorance that defies reality.

The reality is that the most sophisticated weather forecasting computer models, along with weather satellites, did not know with any certainty what Hurricane Earl was going to do or go. It largely spared the East Coast and piddled off into the Atlantic. News at eleven.

I am glad the radio and television meteorologists tried to warn us and I am glad that the hurricane turned out to be far less destructive than anticipated, but I know they had no more idea than I what would occur.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Global Warming Meltdown: Climategate!

By Alan Caruba

For those of us “skeptics” and “deniers” who have been jumping up and down, pointing at the Sun, and saying, “See, it’s the Sun that determines how warm or cool the Earth is. See it? Up there in the sky?” The truth about some of the scientists behind the global warming hoax has finally arrived.

The hoax has its roots in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an instrument of the United Nations Environmental Program, for whom global warming was the open sesame to achieving a one-world-government by scaring nations into signing a treaty that would control their use of energy, the means of producing it, and require vast billions to be sent to less developed nations in exchange for “emitting” greenhouse gases.

Energy is called “the master resource” because, if you have lots of it, you can call your own shots. If you don’t, you are condemned to live in the dark and keeping people in the dark about the global warming hoax was essential.

For years the IPCC has been controlled by a handful of the worst liars in the world, utterly devoted to taking actual climate data and twisting it to confirm the assertion that the Earth was not only warming dramatically, but that humanity was in peril of rising oceans, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, more hurricanes, the die-off of countless animal species, and every other calamity that could possibly be attributed to “global warming”, including acne.

So, around November 20, when some enterprising individual hacked into the computers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), making off with thousands of emails and documents that demonstrate the level of collusion and deception being practiced by its scientists.

It’s a climate hoax expose that some are calling the revelations a “little blue dress” while others are comparing it to the Pentagon Papers. It has also been dubbed “climategate.”

As James Delingpole wrote in the Telegraph, one of England’s leading newspapers, “Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more” was revealed in the 61 megabites of confidential files released on the Internet for anyone to read.

The conspirators had a visceral hatred for scientists who challenged their phony statistics and climate data, but they also agonized over the difficulties of hiding a long established climate cycle such as the Medieval Warm Period. At one point it was left out of a graph that famously became known as “the hockey stick” because it depicted a ludicrous sudden rise in warming, ignoring the previous natural cycle.

At the heart of the revelations were the intense efforts to ensure that no legitimate scientist, particularly those dissenting from the various IPCC reports, would be allowed to participate in the peer review process. Peer review is an essential element in science as it permits other scientists to examine and test the data being put forth to substantiate a new interpretation or discovery.

The IPCC reports were the basis by which popular media such as National Geographic, Time and Newsweek magazines could spread the lies about a dramatic “global warming”, passing them off to an unsuspecting and scientifically illiterate general public. At the same time, the lies were integrated them into school curriculums and maintained by Hollywood celebrities, politicians and others, duped or deliberately ignorant.

To this day, otherwise legitimate news media outlets continue to trumpet and repeat absolute nonsense about “global warming” like brain-dead parrots.

Now that Hadley CRU and its conspirators have been exposed, there truly is no need to hold a December UN climate change conference in Copenhagen; one in which nations would be required to put limits on “greenhouse gas emissions” even though such gases, primarily carbon dioxide, have nothing to do with altering the Earth’s climate.

And that is why you are going to hear more about “climate change” and far less about “global warming.” Hidden in such discussions, intended to justify legislation and regulation, is that the Earth’s climate has always and will always change.

It is, for example, shameful and deceitful for the EPA to claim carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that should be regulated. The same applies to “cap-and-trade” legislation with the same purpose.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on studies of global warming and poured into agencies such as NASA that have lent credence to the global warming hoax.

“The U.S. taxpayer has much exposure here in the joint projects and collaborations which operated in reliance upon what the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was doing,” says Christopher C. Horner, a longtime global warming skeptic. “There are U.S. taxpayer-funded offices and individuals involved in the machinations addressed in the emails, and in the emails themselves.”

Horner, the author of “Red Hot Lies”, said that the initial revelations “give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides.”

The climate, defined as long term trends, and the weather has nothing whatever to do with human activity and suggesting it does reveals the depth of contempt that people like Al Gore and his ilk have for humanity and those fleeced by purchasing “carbon credits” or paying more for electricity when their utility does.

The East Anglia CRU charlatans have been exposed. Most certainly, the United Nations IPCC should be disbanded in disgrace. It belongs in a museum of hoaxes right beside the Piltdown Man and the Loch Ness Monster.

Reasons to Distrust Your Government

By Alan Caruba

In the normal course of events, when voters no longer have confidence in the President, their Senators and their Representatives, they vote them out of office, but there are whole agencies of government that continue on no matter who is in office and, since their budgets and existence depend on the politics of whoever holds power, they bend to serve their policies.

A democracy is most in peril when citizens conclude they can no longer trust their government and there is no better example of that than a recent report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States”, issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is sheer rubbish.

It is typical of the deliberate distortions and outright lies that have been put forth to an increasingly doubting public regarding “global warming.” It is part and parcel of the deceptions perpetrated for decades now by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all of which feature tortured data of dubious quality and, since 1998, have ignored the Earth’s cooling trend.

The increasing reports from around the nation of “freaky” weather, of snow in June, and other anomalies are, in fact, a reflection of this cooling trend and it is likely to last at least thirty years or more.

John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President on Science and Technology, and a man who holds some of the most outlandish and baseless views on climate change, said “This new report integrates the most up-to-date scientific findings into a comprehensive picture of ongoing as well as expected future impacts of heat-trapping pollution on the climate experience of Americans, region by region and sector by sector.”

No it doesn’t. For one thing, the “heat-trapping pollution” to which he obliquely refers is mostly carbon dioxide, a gas vital to all life on Earth and a gas which, in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, could be found in concentrations five times or more higher than today. If CO2 was the great Earth destroyer that Holden, Gore, and others insist, there should be no Earth at all as we know it today.

To call CO2 “pollution” is to immediately invalidate the entire report, but to further insist, as the report does, that it is “primarily human-induced” is not just quite wrong, but a great big LIE. Human activity plays virtually no role whatever in the production of CO2.

This product of the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program is a 190-page piece of loathsome propaganda that predicts more frequent heat waves, more flooding and waterborne diseases, rising water temperatures, more insect infestations and wildfires, and that old standby, rising sea levels with coastal flooding that will no doubt drown Manhattan and other coastal cities.

Hollywood does a better job with such fantasy than the minions of Washington, D.C.

Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, said of the NOAA report “This is not a work of science, but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA.”

This report and the hours of effort that went into it is pure science fiction, predicting outcomes, as all such “global warming” does (now called “climate change”), fifty to a hundred years from now.

Global warming propagandists always focus on a distant and unknowable far horizon, safe in the knowledge that only a future generation will discover their lies. By then, the horrid “environmental” legislation they wish to impose on America will have destroyed its economy and ruined our lives.

It is no accident this report has arrived just in time for a debate on the “Cap-and-Trade” legislation that is nothing more than a huge TAX on all energy use and one that will increase the cost of all energy to everyone by thousands of dollars individually. It will drive industries dependent on large quantities of energy to foreign nations. It is a huge job-killer.

Duke Energy of North Carolina, based on the spurious science of global warming, has asked the regulators of that State for permission to raise electricity prices 12.6 percent. The requested price hike would cost North Carolina ratepayers $496 million. They should change their name to Enron. It’s not being used any more.

Utilities required to include a mix of solar and wind energy, the least efficient and most impractical producers of energy because of Renewable Energy Mandates will be forced to ask for similar increases. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. It is the most affordable way of generating energy. More coal-fired and nuclear plants would ensure that rates would remain stable for many decades to come.

Naturally “Crazy Eyes” Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, was quick to weigh in on news of the NOAA report. “The impact of the climate crisis on the United states and around the world is becoming increasingly severe.” Nonsense! More lies from the Speaker.

The climate is always in a state of change and that change is determine primarily by the Sun, as well as other natural factures such as the oceans, volcanic activity, and the greatest meteorological mystery of all, why clouds behave the way clouds do.

The NOAA report has already been torn to shreds by many of the leading meteorologists and climatologists throughout the nation. It is pure scaremongering and it is intended to further an environmental agenda that is determined to deprive Americans of the energy sources we will need to power our way out of this government-induced Recession and meet the needs of an expanding population.

It is yet another Obama-driven “crisis” and Americans have good and grave reasons to reject the massive global warming deception, “Cap-and-Trade”, and all those seeking to drive us like lemmings over the cliff of an insolvent, bankrupt nation.

Weather Malarkey

By Alan Caruba

I have never been able to figure out why people who know that the forecast for the local weather is likely to be wrong by the afternoon of the same day or within 48 hours still believe that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can accurately predict what it will be ten, twenty or fifty years from now.

At the third Conference on Climate Change held last week in Washington, DC., an event sponsored by the non-profit, free market think tank, The Heartland Institute, “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC) was announced. It offers a very different picture from the endless scare campaigns of the leading environmental organizations or, for that matter, from the White House and Congress.

Edited by Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer, two climatologists, it runs a whopping 900 pages that includes 35 contributors and reviewers of climate data. Its final 200 pages are mostly appendices, including a directory of all scientists who signed the Global Warming Petition that, in March, numbered 31,478 of them.

The Petition urged the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. One of those proposals is a nation-destroying epic “climate” bill intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, with an absurd “cap-and-trade” program that is little more than a huge tax on all use of energy by Americans.

Suffice it to say that the original Kyoto Protocols were rejected unanimously by a former Senate when they were first announced and, since they are allegedly directed at saving the Earth from “global warming”, the threat of this calamity ended around 1998 when the Earth began to cool. It has been in a cooling cycle ever since.

Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?

Neither the protocols, nor the current “climate” bill have any merit whatever. Both are based on falsified “scientific” data courtesy of the UN Panel. Bad, inaccurate weather information seems to be the stock-in-trade of environmental organizations and thanks to Anthony Watts, a meteorologist with some 25 years in the forecasting business and chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio, a publication, “Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?” is available from The Heartland Institute ($12.99 per copy for 1-10 copies.)

As Watts points out, “The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”

Until now, however, “no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.” Watts recruited 650 volunteers and their findings are astounding and disturbing.

“We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.”

The report found that 89 percent of the stations, nearly 9 out of 10, failed to meet the National Weather Service’s own requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.

So, based on these monitoring stations, very little of the temperatures reported by the U.S. Weather Service are accurate and, more importantly, provide false data which has been used to underwrite the “global warming” hoax.

Filled with photos of the stations and charts of the data they produce, the conclusion is inescapable: “The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.”

When one considers that during the course of a single day and night, the temperature anywhere can vary widely, the notion that anyone can determine the nation’s or entire Earth’s average temperature based on such stations around the world is literally impossible.

Weather satellites provide a better gauge and, as noted, they have been reporting a cooling Earth since 1998.

The Greens aren’t the only ones who can make predictions, albeit for the purpose of scaring people into believing the bogus “global warming” hoax, I can do that too. I predict that the Greens will unleash an unholy attack on The Heartland Institute’s NIPCC report in order to discredit it.

Now, who are you going to believe? The thermometer your home or apartment uses to determine the temperature outside or the Greens? As for your local weather report, it is useful for perhaps a day, maybe two. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.

For more information, visit www.surfacestations.org.

Paddling Furiously Against a Tide of Climate Lies

By Alan Caruba

The whole notion of “global warming”, a dramatic increase in the overall temperature of the Earth, always struck me as the most absurd nonsense.

I knew enough about climate trends to know that they are subject to cycles ranging from a full-fledged ice age to the interglacial period of the past 11,000 or more years. I confess I have no idea how early hominids survived the last ice age unless most were in the warmer climes of Africa and Asia, but those in North America and Europe surely faced enormous odds.

The way the “global warming” advocates claimed daily that everything, just everything, was the result or proof of this enormous hoax always seemed to me sufficient proof that (a) they had no idea what they were talking about, (b) they were making lots of money telling these lies, or (c) had climbed on the “global warming” wagon in order to enhance their careers in some fashion.

A small group of climatologists and meteorologists waged war on the lies and they did so for a very long time. Global warming is the invention of the United Nations which launched it with the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 via its Environment Program in association with its World Meteorological Organization.

Al Gore climbed on board around 1992 with his farcical book, “Earth in the Balance” in which he advocated an end to the internal combustion engine among other absurd ideas. Apparently, stupidity is no obstacle to receiving a Nobel Peace Prize as he did in 2007, sharing it with the IPCC.

One non-profit, free market think tank, The Heartland Institute, took up the challenge of debunking “global warming” despite the animus of the mainstream media and various environmental organizations that exist for no other purpose than to smear those courageous enough to challenge the hoax. The Institute is headquartered in Chicago and led by Joe Bast.

In 2008, it sponsored for the first International Conference on Climate Change, a two-day marathon of seminars led by some of the world’s leading authorities on climate, all of whom offerred scientific papers demonstrating that the IPCC and others had simply fabricated the “evidence” for “global warming.” I attended and I did so again in March of this year for the second Conference. Those newspapers and other media that covered the event devoted most of their time trying to make it look like a gathering of screwballs.

By then, however, the public had long grown weary of the many “solutions” to “global warming”, the primary one of which involved the UN Kyoto Protocol that demanded that industrial nations like America, the United Kingdom and European nations all severely limit the use of energy on the grounds that “greenhouse gas” emissions such as carbon dioxide, were causing “global warming.” The great lie of the Protocol is demonstrated in the way it exempts China, India and third world nations from participating. The other lie is that C02 plays any role in climate change. It doesn’t.

People all over the world had begun to notice that, since 1998, the world had grown cooler and, in fact, it has been in a cooling cycle. Snow fell in desert kingdoms where it never had been seen before. Glaciers were expanding along with the ice in both the Arctic and Antartcic. Polling organizations in the United States began to report that Americans increasingly felt that “global warming” wasn’t happening despite the torrent of desperate propaganda to prop up this vast deception.

On June 2nd in Washington, D.C., The Heartland Institute is sponsoring another international conference because it knows that “global warming” is being used to impose a huge tax on Americans in the form of the “Cap-and-Trade” 900-plus-page bill just voted out of a House committee. This bill requires the same limits on energy use as the UN Kyoto Protocol.

In 1997 the U.S. Senate voted unanimously against signing on to this villainous treaty, but now we have a Congress and White House controlled by Democrats who, like Al Gore, continue to lie to Americans about “global warming.”

Prepare to read and hear it slandered by the craven “journalists” who continue to report that a warming that is not happening is happening.

Among those participating will be Harrison Schmitt, PhD, a former U.S. Senator and NASA astronaut. The indominable S. Fred Singer, PhD, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project will speak as will Willie Soon, PhD, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Courageous men like Richard S. Lindzen, PhD, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Patrick Michaels, PhD, a senior fellow on Environmental Studies with the Cato Institute, will speak as well as Roy W. Spencer, PhD, the Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

This is not a full account of the distinguished speakers, but it is absolutely necessary that those in Congress hear what they have to say regarding the “global warming” hoax. If they do not, the continued destruction of our nation’s economy will continue apace and more millions in our nation’s schools will continue to be taught lies about the Earth’s climate.

It costs lots of money to underwrite the costs of these conferences and, if you have some to spare, you should donate at http://www.heartland.org/donate/index.html and become a member and supporter of this brave think tank.

In the interest of full disclosure, Heartland has in the past provided me with a small grant to continue my own work on behalf of my clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns”, The National Anxiety Center. We too are dependent on donations to continue our work. If you know anyone who can provide a grant let them know about the Center.

We are all at a critical moment in the history of the greatest hoax of the modern era, masterminded by the United Nations and designed to do as much harm as possible to freedom-loving, industrialized nations like America.

On Whom Can We Blame the Hurricane?

By Alan Caruba

I am waiting for some moron in Obama’s campaign team to announce that the devastation of Hurricane Ike is the fault of the Bush administration.

Worse yet, I am waiting for some moron in McCain’s campaign team to say something stupid about “global warming” as the reason for the hurricane. Since the Earth has been in a cooling cycle now for the passed ten years, you can be fairly certain that (a) there is no global warming and (b) there’s no connection to the recent hurricanes.

As to what is “causing” them, the answer is the same thing that has been causing them for millions of years, Mother Nature. Those of us on the East Coast and in the Gulf area are now in a “hurricane season” and it will remain in it through October.

What is most evident, however, is that, with the advent of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, these storms are getting larger and more devastating. Anyone who lives in Florida is accustomed to hurricanes blowing through. Once in a decade or so, they get one like Hurricane Andrew that does some real damage, but most just rearrange the patio furniture. Further up the coast in the Carolinas they got a nasty Hurricane Hugo some years ago.

This new century has begun with a bang. Two monster storms in the first eight years suggests that these are not random events, but likely to occur with more frequency. This is very bad news for the Gulf States, but it is really bad news for Americans who depend on refineries in Texas and Louisiana for the bulk of the gasoline and other petroleum distillates they produce.

Now I have a confession to make. For some time now I have been making fun of those meteorologists who have been forecasting how many hurricanes will occur. The reason for this is that they have been mostly wrong for the last two or three years.

In April 2008, however, the Colorado State University team trained and put together by Dr. William Gray predicted at least 15 named storms that would grow into hurricanes, including “four intense hurricanes with winds about 110 mph.” In May I was poking fun at AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi who had a comparable hurricane forecast. Bastardi has forgotten more about meteorology than I will ever know. I should have listened.

We should all listen when Dr. Gray, now an emeritus professor, tells us that those scientists still claiming that global warming is real are “brainwashing our children.” They brainwashed a jury of British morons who last week delivered a verdict that said it is perfectly okay for environmental activists to vandalize and destroy property in the name of global warming.

Simply stated, there’s no one to blame for Hurricane Ike or any other weather event.

It’s what planet Earth does and if you are still thinking that human beings have the slightest impact or effect on the weather, I have some lovely oceanfront property to sell you in Galveston, Texas. Or New Orleans. Or Biloxi.

The next person who says it’s all because of “climate change” should be dragged out into the street and told not to come back until they grow up.

That’s what the climate does all the time. It changes! Most of the time it’s seasonal. Other times it’s multidecadel. Barely 15,000 years ago, most of the northern continent lay beneath huge glaciers thanks to the most recent ice age.

When winter arrives, I’m betting that the same ferocity we’re seeing this hurricane season will translate into some horrendous blizzards, the likes of which we have not seen with frequency in passed years.

Is it time to build more refineries someplace where hurricanes do not occur with regularity? Yes.

It is time to build more coal-fired and nuclear plants to generate the doubling of electricity we will need by 2030? Yes.

Is it time to explore and extract the vast reserves of oil and natural gas off the coasts of America? Yes.

Can we depend on Congress to do the right thing? No. Not unless and until we begin to elect people to office who understand these very simple facts will we have any hope at all.