THOMAS: Consensus or censorship?

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By Cal Thomas

COMMENTARY:

The Environmental Protection Agency has submitted a "finding" to the White House Office of Management and Budget that will force the Obama administration to decide whether to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. If adopted, new laws and regulations will likely follow that have the potential to change our lifestyles and limit our freedoms.

None of these laws and regulations will be preceded by debate. They will be imposed on us by fundamentalist politicians and scientists who have swallowed the Kool-Aid and declared global warming as fact - end of discussion.

On the Discovery Channel last week, Tom Brokaw hosted a special called "Global Warming: The New Challenge." While promoting the piece, Mr. Brokaw declared: "There is a growing consensus that global warming is real and getting worse." Actually, there is a growing body of opinion that global warming is a fraud perpetrated by liberal politicians and their scientific acolytes who want more control over our lives.

Whenever politicians declare a crisis, or an emergency, watch out. Chances are this means they want to impose something before the public discovers the truth.

One of the definitions of consensus is "general agreement or concord; harmony." Any honest assessment of scientific opinion leads to the conclusion that there is significant disagreement on global warming within the scientific community among those with expertise in climatology and related fields.

Yet many politicians want us to believe all of science is onboard with man-made global warming and that we must act now to save the planet and ourselves from catastrophe (catastrophe is another word politicians like to use when imposing their agendas).

You know something is up when prominent apostles of global warming, especially former Vice President and Nobel laureate Al Gore, refuse to debate or discuss the issue with any scientist who takes a contrary view.

Some religious fundamentalists impose various codes of behavior and dress on their adherents and threaten expulsion (if not death) for those who fail to acquiesce to their dictates. Is it not fundamentalist science to ignore any evidence that casts doubt on global warming? For a treasure trove of information that debunks the "science" of global warming, visit www.globalwarminghoax.com.

For global warming fundamentalists, no amount of contradictory information will dilute their faith. Science makes mistakes, as did NASA when it published data on global warming trends in an effort to gauge the warmest years in U.S. history. Their temperature statistics were flawed. The year 1998 was not the hottest year on record, as NASA originally stated, it was 1934 - the year Wiley Post discovered the jet stream.

In New York earlier this month, more than 600 scientists, economists, legislators and journalists from many nations met for the second International Conference on Climate Change. Numerous presentations debunked with documentation what they called the pseudoscience and dictatorial intentions promoted by the United Nations, the European Union and the Obama administration. If there was media coverage of the event, I missed it.

The keynote speaker at the gathering was Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and the European Union. Mr. Klaus described environmentalism as a new collectivist religion that doesn't just want to change the climate, but us as well. Mr. Klaus rejected the executive summary published by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as all politics and environmental activism, "not science."

The newspaper the Weekend Australian recently reported on "three senior Japanese scientists who separately engaged in climate-change research and have strongly questioned the validity of the manmade global warming model that underpins the drive by the U.N. and most developed-nation governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions." One of the scientists, Kanya Kusano, told the newspaper, "I believe the anthropogenic [man-made] effect for climate change is still only one of the hypotheses to explain the variability of climate."

Shunichi Akasofu, founding director of the University of Alaska's International Arctic Research Centre added, "Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth."

Truth is sometimes inconvenient, as Al Gore likes to say. But that cuts both ways. Truth can also be inconvenient when it shines light on propaganda. Not to allow for a full-fledged debate on global warming is censorship, a popular practice in totalitarian societies and many fundamentalist religions and cults.

Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist.