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Anyone who has even casually encountered the global warming industry knows that this crowd's first response to any challenge, of any sort, from any source, is to go ad hominem. Ad hom is a way to change the subject by people for whom the facts are not helpful. As we also see in the case of EPA getting caught suppressing the sole substantive report submitted as part of its "internal deliberation" over whether to seize the energy sector of the economy, it also reveals staggering ignorance about the issue on a par with President Obama's recent claim that carbon dioxide, eh, "contaminate[s] the water we drink and pollute[s] the air we breathe." He said, opening a Perrier and exhaling a sigh...

They know what they need to know, and that is that it has been decided that this is the vehicle for long-desired "social change", and whatever means that are necessary will be employed. Facts and logic are, to these people, for losers.

We see it again today, in a Washington Times story about the suppressed report. There we read that a spokeswoman for EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson, who made the determination that CO2 threatens the world, "noted that the memo's author, Alan Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist". Funny how people tasked with certain jobs become unqualified only when they are inconvenient.

Carlin is, indeed, a PhD economist from MIT, which he obtained after earning a degree in physics from Cal Tech. Both of which probably explain why he holds the job he holds, to review such proposals. But this reflexive ad hom begs several obvious questions, none more obvious than what makes Lisa P. Jackson a climate scientist? [she's a chemical engineer]

For that matter, who the hell are Barack Obama, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, Nancy Pelosi...need I continue? They all apparently are perfectly suited to reach informed judgment on the issue. Waxman is a scientist (bachelor's in political science, UCLA ‘61) like Batman's a scientist. Freeman Dyson, meanwhile, is "just a physicist". Clearly, our governmental Solons are qualified by means of agreeing that this issue must be ridden to achieve the desired "change".

As I detail in Red Hot Lies, this ad hom addiction doesn't serve the alarmists well. For example, when assailing critics of the IPCC report to which EPA admittedly outsourced its decision making and which was written by 52 government representatives as part of a process expressly chartered to support a future global warming treaty and not, as EPA claims, peer-reviewed (many peers did review it, and we learned through a FOIA threat that just like EPA's reviewer they rejected it, only to be ignored. That's a lot of things, but peer review isn't one of them).

Naturally, some of us wondered about the amazing qualifications which must attach to these "world's leading climate scientists" behind the IPCC who are not to be challenged  -- what it must take to become qualified to speak! -- only to discover they were no such thing, but did include some anthropology teaching assistants and the like (really).

Team Soros were particularly adamant about an economist daring to opine - as with EPA today, as part of its deferring instead to the IPCC (remember that) - sniveling "since when have economists, who are pervasive on this list, become scientists, and why should we care what they think about climate science?" Hmmm.

The fellow posing as the IPCC's chief "climatologist" (New York Times andUSA Today), or the UN's "chief climate scientist" (AP)? Oh. Right. He's an economist.

The alarmists, and now the Obama Administration through-and-through, are bullying, sneaking, dissembling and on occasion openly lying to the public to get their way. You've got a little bit of time left to be outraged. I and my colleagues are flattered that so many people just assume we're handling these things, and the public can go about their lives. I have a life on the outside, too, with a wife and children. So, please, when this comes down, don't call me. We told you.