It Doesn't Matter What You Do, You Just Caused Global Warming

This column isn’t just brought to you by global warming. It was caused by global warming.

Why not? Everything else is. For years, Americans have been told global warming causes pretty much everything. Al Gore, the patron saint of all things toasty, blamed Hurricane Katrina on global warming. Lefty actor Danny Glover blamed it for the Haitian earthquake in January. After lamenting the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, Glover talked about the earthquake and said “this is what happens.” Climate: the ultimate “Lethal Weapon.”

He’s not even an outlier. Joseph Romm, a former Clinton official, raised the issue of global warming after the Minnesota bridge collapse of 2007. Go to Dr. John Brignell’s site Numberwatch.co.uk [1] and you’ll find at least 600 random things from sharks moving north to a rise in allergies to a rise in HIV – all blamed on global warming.

Now, the mid-Atlantic gets pounded by consecutive blizzards – five feet of snow in areas I shoveled. That led to some natural mockery. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said on Twitter: “It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’” Grandchildren of Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., put the snow to good use. They built an igloo on the National Mall, naming it “Al Gore’s New Home.”

Conservatives also made fun of global warming alarmist Robert Kennedy Jr. who just a year and a half before had complained about warming around D.C. and “today’s anemic winters.” Kennedy didn’t realize his heart-felt plea would be used as an icebreaker against global warming alarmism, not for it.

The liberal response was a blizzard of BS. First they were appalled. Once again, evil conservatives made them look bad. Liberals then tried another tack. Weather wasn’t climate, they bellowed, clueless that conservatives had been making that very point all along.

But liberals weren’t done. Next they said, while weather wasn’t climate, the blizzards were, drum roll please, because of global warming. On Valentine’s Day, The Washington Post ran its latest impassioned pro-alarmist opinion piece. This one was written by Bill McKibben, another lefty making a career out of climate scare tactics.

McKibben, a carbon dioxide warrior and co-founder of the group 350.org, tried to dig out his flailing comrades. “Instead, the weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms,” he wrote.

One-time rational human turned MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan told viewers the same thing Feb. 9. “Here's the problem – these ‘snowpocalypses’ that have been going through D.C. and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming.”

Meanwhile, the case for such claims was falling faster than the Washington snow. Britain’s Daily Mail reported that Climate Gate villain Dr. Phil Jones had undermined his own work in a new BBC interview.

According to the Feb. 14 article, Jones admitted his recordkeeping was “not as good as it should be” and that he might have misplaced a lot of the data integral to the famous hockey stick graph. That graph, a bulwark of climate alarmism, claimed to show the earth had been warming in an unprecedented way for many years.

Now Jones wasn’t sure whether the Medieval Warming Period was warmer or not and, even more, he admitted “that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.’”

So he owned up that he might have been wrong about history.  He said the earth wasn’t warming. And he said he doesn’t have data to back up his prior claims. That is the academic equivalent of the dog ate my homework. I’m surprised he didn’t blame his lost data on global warming. And on his advice we’re going to spend trillions of dollars remaking the world?

This came on the heels of Climate Gate and the embarrassment of the UN climate panel that admitted it was entirely wrong about Himalayan glaciers melting. And the Feb. 15 Washington Post pointed out even more errors and sloppy work in the UN report. Desperate scientists have played 6.7 billion people for fools. Maybe the earth is warming. Maybe it isn’t. That’s not science. That’s the toss of a coin. Sloppy research, manipulated data and propagandizing scientists don’t disprove global warming theory. They just discredit those who support it.

Yet, even now, President Obama and congressional Democrats are trying to limit U.S. emissions based on this very “science.” If we let them, they’ll wreck our economy. At least then we’ll be sure global warming caused something – the decline of the United States.

Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business [2]and Culture [3]. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum and he can be seen on Foxnews.com’s “Strategy Room.” He can also be contacted on FaceBook and Twitter as dangainor.