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By California Yankee Posted in Al Gore | Bill Clinton | Climate Change | Consensus | Enviroment | Miscellanea — Comments (19) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (minority report), debunks the man-made global warming "consensus" mantra. The report found more than 400 prominent scientists, including several former members of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, disputed man-made global warming claims in 2007:

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

[. . .]

This blockbuster Senate report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007. This new "consensus busters" report is poised to redefine the debate.

Randall Hoven makes the point that the United States is accomplishing a lot more to reduce carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels than the mainstream media or the rest of the world would have you believe. Read on.

The U.S. government lists the carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels by various countries. Hoven used those statistics, crunched the numbers and discovered a secret - the U.S. is doing more than most nations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions:

If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.

* Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
* Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
* Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
* Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of more than 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto.

Now that China leads the word in carbon dioxide emissions, why is the United States portrayed as the world's evil pariah when it comes to global climate change?

The answer lies in Clintonian politics.

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, by a margin of 95-0.

The Resolution stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States."

One of the cosponsors of the Byrd-Hagel resolution, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, explained in an interview with PBS that the purpose of the resolution was intended to make it clear that the Senate would not ratify an environmental treaty as unfair to the U.S. as the Kyoto agreement:

PBS: Back in 1997, you were a co-sponsor of a nonbinding resolution in the Senate. Did you mean, then, to kill the Kyoto climate treaty, or did you mean to change it?

HAGEL: Well, if you go back to that time when Sen. [Robert] Byrd [D-W. Va.] and I introduced the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, it was to put the Senate on record as to what kind of environmental treaty the Senate would ratify and what kind of an environmental treaty we would not ratify. It's a very simple, straightforward resolution. It says the Senate will not ratify an environmental treaty ... if it does not include all the nations of the world in some way, and second, if it does economic damage ... to our country. Those are the two guidelines.

I don't think that [Kyoto] was in the interest of our country. I don't think it was in the interest of the world.

It was not set out to specifically kill Kyoto. Most of us knew at the time that Kyoto was headed in a different direction. Some of us worked hard to try to maneuver that ... in a way that we could, in the Senate, come to some resolution where we could support it. But this was, I think, in July of 1997; Kyoto was signed in December of 1997. I was there at Kyoto and recall it rather vividly. And then you might recall that after that protocol was signed by Vice President [Al] Gore, of course then-President Clinton never brought it before the Senate, knowing that he would lose. ...

PBS: Do you think that Clinton should've brought it to Congress? Do you think there should've been a debate?

HAGEL: Well, that was up to the president, but I thought it was a little disingenuous to try to score political points and go sign the treaty and never bring it before the Senate or even fight for it or even push it on us. ...

PBS: Why didn't he do that? Why do you think he didn't come back and make the argument?

HAGEL: Well, I don't know why he didn't come before the Senate to make the argument. I do know that the following year, 1998, Sen. [John] Kerry from Massachusetts attempted to work on some kind of an alternative to Byrd-Hagel that would essentially rescind the Byrd-Hagel Resolution. And I do know that President Clinton worked quietly with a number of Democrats in the Senate to try to enlist their support to find an alternative to Byrd-Hagel.

But there were a number of senior Democrats -- starting with the most senior of the Democrats, Sen. Byrd from West Virginia -- who would not agree to that, as well as others like Sen. [Fritz] Hollings from South Carolina, who was very senior at the time. The president and Sen. Kerry and others just could not find a way to undermine or rescind Byrd-Hagel.

Then-President Clinton knew that he could not bring that treaty before the Senate, because it would suffer a rather humiliating defeat, after we had passed Byrd-Hagel in 1997 with the specific mandates that it addressed. And we had passed it, I believe, with a vote of 95-0.

Out of sync with the rest of the country on global climate change, the Clinton-Gore administration set up an international public opinion ambush for the U.S. and smugly walked the country right into it.

On November 12, 1998, less than four months after the Senate sent then President Clinton the Byrd-Hagle message, Clinton arrogantly had vice president Al Gore symbolically sign the protocol while a Deputy U.S. Ambassador did the official signing at the United Nations.

Even though Clinton caused the Kyoto treaty to be signed on behalf of the United States, Clinton had no intention of seeking ratification:

MARGARET WARNER: But Gore said the White House would not ask the Senate to ratify the agreement as it now stands.

VICE PRESIDENT GORE: As we've said from the very beginning, we will not submit this for ratification until there's meaningful participation by key developing nations.

You can watch Gore deny the Clinton administration intended to even try to ratify the treaty in the following video:

Even though Gore and the mainstream media have tried to convince the world that only a lunatic would dare to question the “consensus” that the global warming debate is “settled,” facts are still stubborn things.

A recent study found art of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed:

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate "models" — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth's surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.

"Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no," said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester.

Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years. The trouble is, no one can decide whether we face global warming or global cooling. Which way will the climate change pendulum swing in 2025?

Cartoon courtesy of Michael Van Winkle.