Based solely on a far-Left agenda that includes a plan to control worldwide energy production, the climate change hysteria movement has jumped the shark. Now our leaders need to start asking tough questions of Al Gore, the United Nations IPCC and other alarmists.

Reducing your carbon footprint in the wake of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was the hottest thing for liberal elites and celebrities alike, but their sell to the American people seems to have gotten stale.

It appears that politicians haven’t lost interest, though. Even though global temperatures stopped rising in 2001 and despite the almost total failure of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the European Union, President-elect Obama continues to make green energy and a new green economy one of his top agenda items. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision that carbon dioxide is indeed a “pollutant”— and its instruction to the EPA that it must decide whether to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act—offers Obama the opportunity to force new and costly carbon emissions regulations on businesses large and small.

Even if the EPA decides not to regulate CO2, the Democrat-controlled Congress will at some point in the next two years be debating legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions and set up a mechanism for the trading of carbon emission permits between companies. A massive new government bureaucracy will be formed, and when it comes to something as ethereal as trying to document and limit the amount of carbon dioxide a company is allowed to emit, the opportunities for fraud and gaming the system will be limited only by one’s imagination.

Yet even as our country careens toward government-mandated reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, the scientifi c basis for doing so is gradually eroding away. Our new understanding of how the climate system operates will eventually lead to the realization that what Al Gore likes to call the “climate crisis” has been based upon the greatest scientifi c faux pas in history.

There are two new scientifi c fi ndings that will have a huge impact on the global warming debate—if they are allowed to see the light of day. The fi rst is compelling new evidence that suggests that global warming has been mostly natural, the result of an internally generated climate fl uctuation called the Pacifi c Decadal Oscillation. The second is the increasing amount of observational evidence that the climate system is largely insensitive to our greenhouse gas emissions.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

What all of this would mean is that Mother Nature doesn’t really care how big your carbon footprint is and that she is going to cause chaotic changes in climate whether or not we humans are around to blame it on ourselves.

But let’s fi rst examine how we got to the point where Western civilization now believes that the tailpipe emissions from SUVs are cooking the planet. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas that is essential for life on Earth—it is required for a process called photosynthesis. And without photosynthesis, life on Earth is pretty much done for.

Despite its central role as an elixir of life, there is surprisingly little CO2 around us: only 39 CO2 molecules out of every 100,000 molecules of air. And it takes humanity fi ve years to increase that concentration by one more molecule of CO2 per 100,000 molecules of air.

So how did such a natural—indeed, essential—component of life get such a bad rap? Because the leadership of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been working for 20 years to build a scientifi c case for the view that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has caused the global warming we have experienced over the last 50 to 100 years and that warming is going to get much worse in the future. That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas is indisputable— that it has caused global warming, though, is not.

The fear of global warming has resonated with a number of politicians and entertainers who needed something to worry about, something to fi ght for and to give their lives meaning—and to make lots of money on, too. Some climate scientists have even made statements to the effect that “reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the right thing to do anyway, no matter what the science says”.

But what is the basis for such a belief? It is bothersome that the debate over whether more CO2 in the atmosphere might actually be a good thing was never allowed to occur.

The belief that everything that mankind does is bad for the environment is arbitrary and religious. Change in nature is ubiquitous, and the idea that nature cannot handle human-induced change is a romantic notion that even scientists hold on to. When nature changes all by itself, there are always winners and losers. The existence of trees on the Earth no doubt changes the climate system; why should it be any different for the existence of humans?

Given the importance of carbon dioxide to life on Earth, I would never have imagined that we would see the day when the United States Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant,” but here we are anyway. Gore claims we dump 70 millions tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day as if it was an “open sewer.” I say we are enhancing the productivity of life on Earth, allowing it to breathe more freely than it has been able to since prehistoric times.