Henny-Penny’s call came as a surprise. I hadn’t heard from her in months. More surprising was what she had so say:

H-P: I’ve resigned as secretary of The Holy Order of The Sky Is Falling because I’ve learned that it was based on a faulty premise.

Me: That’s breathtaking. What’s happened to change your life.

H-P: Last spring I was promoted to production chief here at the egg ranch. I now oversee all the hens to make sure they meet their daily egg quotas, but I no longer have to meet one myself. That gave me some time to study. I read what skeptical scientists have to say about the long-range effects of the slight average warming of temperatures on Earth over the last century.

Me: What did you conclude?

H-P: That the global warming campaign is based on politics. Many of the delegates to those biennial International Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) conferences are political appointees from governments that want to redistribute income and resources from industrialized countries to ones that aren’t. 

Me: What about the scientists who claim the glaciers will melt, the oceans will rise and crops will fail?

H-P: Their dire predictions are based upon computer models which are only as good as the assumptions put into them. When they announce their results, they should say, “If present trends continue thus-and-so may occur,” but they never do. They insist their predictions will come true. Then political appointees in various countries pick up the refrain — along with ecosocialists and gullible media people — and it reverberates around the world.

Me: That refrain has become the theme song of your “pontiff” Al Gore for years now. Have you stopped believing him?

H-P: I now see that my theory that the sky was falling was only that, a theory. In fact, in the years since I first announced it, the sky has not fallen so much as one inch. Al Gore liked the theory and treated is “settled science.” As for “global warming,” his only evidence is that he’s full of hot air.

Me: Aren’t the ecosocialists planning another giant conference?

H-P: Yes, it’s called COP17 and will begin in Durban South Africa on November 28.

Me: The ones in Copenhagen and Cancun were duds. What will they try to do this time?

H-P: The World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam will propose a new global tax of $25 a ton on all shipping. They say it will curtail carbon emissions. The real purpose is to ratchet down the world’s industrial production.

Venezuela and five other leftist-led Western Hemisphere nations will propose a worldwide tax on all financial transactions, and they want “Mother Earth” to have rights as if the planet were a person.

Me: The Kyoto Protocol was rejected by Congress several years ago. Will this conference try to resurrect it?

H-P: Yes, but under the guise of a new “sustainability” treaty which, if it became law, could result in ruinous cap-and-trade legislation here.

If China and India refuse to sign on to all this, the conference won’t succeed. That won’t stop the ecosocialists from trying again and again. In fact, just the media focus on the conference alone would embolden Obama’s EPA to push forward with the drastic regulations it has proposed on carbon dioxide.

Me: Will the pressure grow for the U.S. to cave in these various anti-industrial pacts?

H-P: You can bet the ranch on it. Even though a big treaty did not come out of Copenhagen in 2009, the U.S. signed on to an agreement that pays $30 billion annually to developing countries.

That stipend is set to go up to $100 billon annually by 2020. The stated goal for the Durban conference is to get the U.S. to agree to $400 billion a year!

Bear in mind that the underlying goal of this conference and the earlier ones is global redistribution of wealth and concentration of power in the hands of the UN and other international bodies.

Me: What can individual Americans do about this?

H-P: Support organizations opposed to the ecosocialist agenda. Also, write to President Obama, your members of Congress, pointing out these initiatives would have serious negative consequences on our economy. As for me, I’m taking vacation time to go to Durban to picket the conference.

Peter Hannaford first met Henny-Penny several years ago when she announced her theory that the sky is falling.