Posted on 02/18/2005 6:42:41 PM PST by coffee260
One of the busiest guys on Capitol for the next six months will be Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), whom House International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay have put in charge of the new subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.
Dana’s assignment: Expose the entire slimy mess of the UN Oil-for-Food scandal and feed it to the fishes. Saddam Hussein demanded that all the monies of the UN program be run through one particular obscure French bank, the Banque Nationale de Paris-Paribas. What he forgot was that the UN is in New York, so the whole $64 billion of Oil-for-Food went through the BNP-Paribas branch in Manhattan.
That means Dana gets to subpoena every bank record BNP-Paribas has. And that just gets him warmed up. “Kofi Annan said he was ‘shocked’ by the Volker report,” he told me. “Right – just as shocked as Claude Rains in Casablanca.” Kofi should stop worrying about how he can keep his Secretary-General job, and start worrying about whether he’s going to do time. His son Kojo is headed for the slammer, and Kofi seems eager to toss in the crook who administered Oil-for-Food, Benon Sevon, in with him to save his oily hide.
No dice. For Kofi doesn’t understand he’s only a milestone on the way to the ultimate goal – destroying the moral legitimacy of the United Nations, which the Left uses to compromise America’s sovereignty. “Ever since the UN was founded, the Left has waged a never-ending struggle to turn over our sovereignty to it,” said Dana. “John Kerry became the poster boy for this effort. Well, we’re going to put an end to their struggle.”
Doing so will be rewarding for Dana – and frustrating at the same time. For only when his committee is finished gutting Oil-for-Food can he turn to a scandal that leaves it in the dust – the multi-trillion dollar scam of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty.
Taking effect yesterday, February 16, the treaty has been signed by 141 countries – but only 30 of them are legally bound to it, forcing them to masochistically damage their economies by reducing their CO2 emissions to several percent below 1990 levels. These 30 countries (mostly Old Europe plus Japan – and not the US – account for only 10% of the world’s population and 25% of emissions. China, India, and the entire Third World are exempt.
To give you an idea of the lunacy of “Man-Made Global Warming,” take a look at this:
I took this picture in northeastern Niger, the heart of the Sahara Desert. 8,000 years ago, Paleolithic tribesmen carved figures of elephants on this rock face – for the Sahara abounded with them back then. During the Holocene Maximum thousands of years ago, global temperatures were about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today, and much of the Sahara was forested. Here is an ancient remnant of those forests, high in a plateau called the Tassili n’Ajer. I took this two years ago:
Ever since the end of the last Ice Age about 11,000 years ago, the earth’s climate has swung between warmer and colder periods. During the Medieval Climactic Optimum between 1000 and 1300 AD, farmers grew wine grapes in northern England and raised sheep and dairy cattle in Greenland – it was warmer then than now.
About 1450, global temperatures started dropping, all the way to a “Little Ice Age” that lasted for centuries. The Thames River in London would freeze almost solid, and New Yorkers could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in the winter. The Little Ice Age ended little more than 100 years ago, so we’re getting warmer – that is back to normal.
Yet these swings for the last 1,000 years are ignored by proponents of Man-Made Global Warming (MMGW) so they can argue that an alleged spike in global temperatures since 1900 coincides with a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by human activity (such as burning fossil fuels). This spike, known as the “Hockey Stick,” is the primary argument for the Kyoto Treaty. On February 14, The Wall Street Journal exposed the Hockey Stick as a fraud.
The Hockey Stick was invented by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia. Mathematicians have now shown they can reproduce it with random “red noise” data just as easily as with Mann’s data. Michael Mann’s problem, however, goes way beyond the mathematical flaws in his study exposed by the Wall Street Journal. He may be guilty of criminal research fraud.
It turns out that Mann’s Hockey Stick is derived from an algorithm – a secret algorithm that he claims to have invented himself and which he refuses to disclose. “Giving them (his critics) the algorithm,” Mann declared, “would be giving in to their intimidation tactics.”
Get ahold of this. The scientific research most cited as justification for the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty – a treaty which, if the US signed would cause, according to James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the loss of five million jobs and $400 billion a year to the US economy – is based on a secret mathematical formula that nobody knows is true or false.
How can the depth of this insanity be described? I don’t have the words for it, except that the secular religion of global warming has damaged the brains of a significant fraction of the world’s scientists. Of course, the billions of dollars governments pay to these scientists to believe in global warming (they call it “research” – research which won’t get funded unless it “proves” global warming and evil humans are responsible) could be a cause of such brain damage.
At least Dana will put those government dollars to use when he calls Michael Mann to testify at a hearing. The University of Virginia is a tax-supported institution and Mann’s research was funded by taxpayer dollars. That means Congressional subpoena power can be used to force Mann to reveal his algorithm, its source code, and all the data sets.
This will show if Mann “dry-labbed” (faked) his research. Was the data set on higher temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula played up while the set on colder temps in the rest of the Antarctic continent dismissed? Was there a focus on reports from weather stations near airports which used to be out in the toolies but are now in urbanized heat sinks? Just how could the Medieval Climactic Optimum and the Little Ice Age be smoothed over to produce the 20th century hockey stick spike?
In other words, by refusing to disclose his math, Mann can be suspected not just of making mistakes, but making them on purpose. This is criminally-prosecutable research fraud. This fraud has been used to try and scam hundreds of billions of dollars a year from you and me and all Americans, to try and irreparably damage our economy. The global warming industry is a criminal enterprise, and criminally insane to boot.
The good news is that the Kyoto Treaty may have been still-born. What allowed it to take effect on Wednesday was Russia’s ratification last fall. Yet on that day, Andrei Illarionov, Russian President Putin’s economics advisor, announced to reporters that Russia will eventually withdraw from the treaty. Illarionov denounced Kyoto as “an anti-human document restricting economic growth,” and hoped that “common sense will prevail, and our country, together with other nations, will abandon this crazy idea.”
Sanity may be too much to ask for from all the politicians who signed on to Kyoto – but it is not too much to ask from the scientists who did. Perhaps they will regain it when they see that Kojo Annan’s cell mate is Michael Mann.
Increasing energy efficiency, use of renewables, and decreasing pollution are things we should all strive for - in a cost-effective and logical manner, which the Kyoto Accord is not.
I am afraid that Bush ows favors to Blair for backing him on The Iraq invasion. Now Blair wants to cash in by pushing Bush into the Kyoto sham.
Worth sharing.
“Ever since the UN was founded, the Left has waged a never-ending struggle to turn over our sovereignty to it,” said Dana. “John Kerry became the poster boy for this effort. Well, we’re going to put an end to their struggle.”
Love it. . .the truth is a beautiful thing. . .
Perhaps, Dr. Wheeler could talk to Mr. Blair. . .
As an environmental engineer, with intimate experience in the global warming issue, I have to admit that the science of extrapolating data was never considered accurate. The old story of the end justifies the mean, comes to play here, the liberals have adopted that cause and will push to accept faulty data if it advances their cause. Similarly, the conservatives adopted the Iraq invasion, and now that it has been pr oven that the WMD was a wrong intelligence info, and the elected government is essentially fanatic Islamist waiting to impose the Sharia, which Saddam never allowed during his secular dictatorship. At this point rational conservatives need to admit that it was a mistake in one letter "N"! we should have invaded IraN instead of IraQ!
You may want to read this and re-think your thesis:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1346235/posts
points one and two are determined by the market; when something is scarce enough that it becomes impractical, the spectrum of practical alternatives changes.
the pollution issue is debatable at best. the evaporation/precipitation cycle but a huge distillation process; the very same process industry uses to purify the most dangerous of chemical solvents.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.