The Washington Times today delivers all the wailing from the Left over House Republicans’ decision to eliminate the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which Democrat leaders launched in 2007 as a tool that was toothless to advance legislation, but worked wonders to promote climate environoia. The GOP estimates the shutdown will save taxpayers $2 million per year, and “deny Democrats a key bully pulpit for advancing their environmental agenda.”
From the article of Lamentations:
“Disbanding the select committee does not diminish the urgent need to act on these very critical issues,” (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said…..
“We’re one of the only countries of the world where leading government officials deny settled science,” said Daniel J. Weiss, a climate specialist with the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “There couldn’t be a more important time to have a select committee on energy independence and global warming.”
Panel supporters say they worry that the dozens of new “tea-party”-supported conservatives in the House will further push the House away from addressing energy and climate issues.
“Unfortunately, many of the new members elected to the House have expressed opinions ranging from skepticism to outright denial about the facts regarding climate change,” Dan Lashof, director of the climate center at the National Resources Defense Council, said in an interview last week with CBS News. “As more senior members jockey for positions to be committee chairmen, they’re suggesting a highly obstructionist agenda.”
We can only hope. Meanwhile, here’s the latest in “settled science” reported by The Daily Mail in London:
A year ago tomorrow, just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, ‘is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record’ – a deeply worrying 0.58C above the 1961-1990 average.
World temperatures, it went on, were locked inexorably into an ever-rising trend: ‘Our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far – 1998….’
Last week, halfway through yet another giant, 15,000-delegate UN climate jamboree, being held this time in the tropical splendour of Cancun in Mexico, the Met Office was at it again. Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.
But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications – not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole. Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US Vice President Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.
More details in the Mail. Maybe George Soros can finance new fact-finding missions for Mr. Weiss and Mr. Lashof, those denial-ridden climate experts cited above.
