Something's Still Rotten in Denmark

Something's Still Rotten in Denmark
Ken Blackwell
Wednesday, December 16, 2009

President Barack Obama has completed his months-long “deliberations” over his latest Afghanistan policy. He got more applause from Republicans than from Democrats after his long-running Hamlet act. The Prince of Denmark was famous for his indecision: “To be or not to be…”

Obama was much more decisive about climate change, however. He promised hope and change, but when it comes to climate change, we have to hope we can arrest the lethal cycles of mercury readings up and down. “Climate change” is now the new buzzword. It used to be “global warming.” All warming all the time. But when earth’s atmosphere stubbornly declined to heat up, the warm-mongers had to find a new term. So now it’s climate change. You really can’t miss with that one. For sure, the climate will be changing somewhere. Now, references to global warming tend to be buried in the second paragraphs, or better yet, abbreviated as AGW. That’s short for anthropogenic global warming. AGW is also short for “it’s your fault.”

That’s because Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency recently declared that carbon dioxide is a toxic chemical and it does threaten the planet. Here’s another hint: whenever you hear “planet,” reach for your wallet. They’re coming after you. We used to talk about the world and the earth, as in “for God so loved the world,” and, especially at Christmas time, “peace on earth, good will to men.”

But singling out our own planet would be not racist, or sexist, or “speciesist,” but impermissibly earth-centric. Why, if you care about earth first, you’ll be called a “denier” as quick as you can say Copernicus.

Fred Thompson last year did a radio commentary on the receding of the polar ice caps. He didn’t invoke the horrid specter of polar bears drowning, or penguins molting. Thompson simply asked about a NASA study that said the polar ice caps are receding—on Mars. If Martian ice caps are receding, does that call into question AGW? Does it mean that climate change on earth might be a result of solar activity?

We don’t know. It may mean nothing of the kind. But the release of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit shows a mindset among the climate scientists that should give us all a chill. Corresponding with Penn State researchers, the East Anglians fed all their data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s high commission of environmental pooh-bahs.

Well, maybe not all their data. We may not have the baseline data on temperatures, but we do have the data that has been massaged, manipulated, and worked over by East Anglians applying serious scientific methods they refer to in their emails as “tricks,” as ways to “hide the decline.”

These East Anglians also tell us they know how to eject from their “community” any doubters, any scientists who are not playing ball. If these skeptics get their articles published in “peer-reviewed” journals, then we just blackball the journal.

That was easy.

Thomas Jefferson was our first Democratic President. Our first man of science in the White House, Jefferson was also a founder of the American Philosophical Society. After his Presidency, he founded the University of Virginia. Mr. Jefferson described his university. “Here we are not afraid to follow truth, wherever it may lead, or to tolerate error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

That open-mindedness is alien to the East Anglians. Also alien to them is the idea of a deity. Jefferson took many of his philosophical ideas from the French Enlightenment, but he rejected their atheism. You could tell the world was created, Jefferson said; it was obvious from the “intelligence in the design.”

To the East Anglians and all those leaders who are gathering in Copenhagen, the underlying assumption is that we’ve got the whole world in our hands—sorry, planet-- that we are the ones heating its atmosphere, or at least changing it, and that we are the ones who can and must stop what we are doing. Any resistance to their plans for global governance must be crushed—just as you run neo-Nazis out of the public square.

The East Anglians would also be appalled by Mr. Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address. He concluded with a prayer: “May that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.”

To acknowledge that there is a God above us who has infinite power, who rules the destinies of the universe, who leads in our councils, is something you will never see in a Copenhagen summit. It’s why I think there’s something rotten in Denmark.