Is 'Global Warming' the Greenie Weenies' WMDs?

Remember in 2003 when Secretary of State Colin Powell dramatically held up the vial of anthrax before the United Nations Security Council and exclaimed, “there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more?”

It was that argument – that Saddam Hussein was attempting to increase his capability for Weapons of Mass Destruction – on which the Bush Administration hung its credibility and sought to build the public support for an invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As American forces swept across Iraq in an impressive fashion, the cold hard evidence of Powell’s assertions was difficult to find. And in the following years, the Bush administration’s credibility for its reason to go to war suffered.

As the old saying goes, I always felt the Bush administration put too many of its eggs in the WMD basket. We have always been a country that defends a people’s right to freedom. “The cause of freedom” actually means something to Americans and is a reasonable justification for spilling our blood. We value freedom and will fight so that others can prosper under it. Just consider World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and Afghanistan. All involved affronts to liberty that America sought to rectify.

But the ultimate downfall is that the administration hung its reasoning on something that arguably was disproven.

The same appears to be happening with the ‘Green Movement.’

Former Vice President Al Gore, President Barack Obama, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and others have been running around the world with their hair on fire yelling that if the world does not tackle man-made global warming, we’ll be on an irreversible path of destruction. For all intents and purposes, world leaders have hung their credibility on the idea that the earth is warming and if we do nothing to stop it, we’ll be instigating Day After Tomorrow-type horrors.

First came a fairly steady drip of news that the earth may, in fact, be experiencing a cooling pattern. This past summer, Chicago never once saw a day above 90 degrees. Other stories made skeptics scratch their heads and wonder what was really going on.

Then the leaked e-mails surfaced, in which global warming “scientists,” including one lauded by Al Gore, are caught manipulating the facts. As Stephen Glover, a columnist in London’s Daily Mail, noted,

These and other emails do not give an impression of relentless seeking after truth, or of constant fair-mindedness.

Rather, they hint at a tendency to conceal inconvenient facts in their own research and to suppress them in others.

I am a consumer that likes to watch his wallet. The only portion of the Greenie Weenies’ argument I have bought in to is energy efficiency and it’s not because if we don’t do it, the earth will turn into Hades. I do it because it saves me money. Period.

So when they continue to plead the case that the earth is warming but research they’d prefer to suppress says otherwise – and they’re caught saying as much – their credibility is shot in the pants. Because like Iraq, the Green movement has staked is credibility almost solely on global warming and like Colin Powell’s impressive rhetoric over WMDs, Greenie Weenies are beginning to look a little foolish.