Gibbs: Don’t Confuse Copenhagen-bound Obama With Global Warming Facts

Despite the unfolding international “climate change” scandal involving the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, President Barack Obama’s ideological presuppositions on global warming remain unshaken, and he will still happily attend the Copenhagen global warming conference.

This unprecedented fraud by a “team” of politicized scientists whose research has generated some $20 million in research grants for the CRU hasn’t deterred Obama from his energy- and economy-destroying agenda any more than double-digit unemployment figures have dissuaded him from his failed Keynesian policies. Nor is Obama bothered by the incestuous relationship among the CRU, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Copenhagen summit.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs sniffed that corruption at the highest levels of climate change intelligentsia — corruption, mind you, that bears directly on the underlying science — doesn’t alter the president’s firm opinion that “climate change is happening.”

“I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore,” said Gibbs. “I think there’s no real scientific basis for the dispute of this.”

Oh? Is this administration so myopic as to be dangerously ignorant? So arrogant that it deems dissenting opinions unworthy of acknowledgment? Or just old-fashioned liars?

The intellectually honest can’t deny there is widespread debate over the existence of man-made catastrophic global warming. More than 31,000 scientists, 9,000 of whom have Ph.D.s, signed a petition urging our government to reject the Kyoto Protocol, and 100 more endorsed an ad by the Cato Institute disputing the president’s “facts” on global warming. Also, countless books have been written refuting the exaggerated, distorted claims of the warming lobby.

Just this week, Australian professor Ian Plimer, author of “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science,” skewered the global warming movement for treating the public like “fools” and using climate change fears to increase taxes. The “climate lobby,” he said, is committed to keeping the “gravy train” going. Plimer told his London audience: “Climates always change. They always have, and they always will. They are driven by a number of factors that are random and cyclical.”

Plimer dismissed the notion that man-made increases in CO2 levels are the driving force behind temperature changes, saying they are instead caused by natural events, such as the shifting of the Earth’s orbit, cosmic radiation and volcanic eruptions. “Carbon dioxide levels have been up to 1,000 times higher in the past,” he said. “CO2 cannot be driving global warming now.”

Also contradicting Gibbs’ pronouncement are Craig Idso, S. Fred Singer and dozens of their scientific colleagues, who authored the scholarly 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change Reconsidered.”

The NIPCC was established “to examine the same climate data used by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” in support of its three-volume report alleging the catastrophic effects of global warming.

The NIPCC rejected the IPCC’s finding that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” The NIPCC, like professor Plimer, concluded just the opposite — that “natural causes are very likely to be the dominant cause.”

None of this would be that newsworthy but for the fact that the left, including the Obama administration, is trying to make fundamental changes to our political system and our economy based on this highly disputed, secular, faith-based alarmist “science.”

Indeed, the Copenhagen summit seeks to secure what the Kyoto treaty could not: a binding commitment of the United States to forfeit and delegate its sovereignty through international treaties that would require us to radically reduce our CO2 emissions and damage our economy more than Kyoto would have while exempting major developing countries and producing negligible environmental benefits. (The Heritage Foundation reports that an Energy Information Administration study projected costs of U.S. compliance with Kyoto to be between $100 billion and $397 billion annually. Heritage also reveals that since Kyoto in 1997, its signatory countries have increased their emissions faster than the U.S., which declined to ratify it.)

In light of ClimateGate, serious people studying the global warming issue and the staggering consequences of political decisions based on it should consider the relative credibility of the opposing sides of this debate. Which of the two sides insists, despite vigorous dissent, that there is no debate; uses intimidation and ridicule to suppress and discredit this dissent; refuses to hold itself accountable for repeated false alarms (e.g., Paul Ehrlich, Ted Danson, Al Gore, etc.); has often been caught manufacturing data to fit its predetermined conclusions; has an economic and political agenda driving its science; has been tainted by millions of dollars in corrupting research grants; and is recommending policies that are objectively imprudent and to the manifest detriment of the United States?

Which side do you trust?