Vin Suprynowicz

By now, you doubtless know a dastardly hacker broke into the e-mail system at the Climate “Research” Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain late last month, grabbing and making public more than 1,000 e-mails that expose how these “scientific experts,” cited so often to confirm “man-made global warming,” have been fudging their data, conspiring to remove global warming skeptics from the teams that “peer-review” their doctored data for publication, and advising each other to delete incriminating e-mails beings sought under the Freedom Of Information Act — which happens to be a criminal offense in Britain.

Wow. I’m about as shocked as Claude Rains’ character, Captain Renault, when he found out there was gambling going on at Rick’s Place in Casablanca. Aren’t you?

East Anglia is not some cowtown community college. The Climate “Research” Unit there is one of the world’s four major collators and repositories of “global warming” piffle. This is Ground Zero for the global warming fraud.

The next obvious question is why such great gray ladies of mainstream journalism as the New York Times and the Washington Post — who are simply thrilled to publish memos and transcripts “which the authors intended to remain secret” when they tend to destroy the careers of people they HATE, including Richard Nixon and any other marginal conservative — now discover in themselves a curious reticence to further probe and play up the details of THIS story of government-funded chicanery and fraud.

(“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here,” sayeth The New York Times “environmental reporter” and Green press agent Andrew Revkin — though Mr. Revkin did report some of the scientists have admitted the e-mails are real, in the process of arguing there’s nothing wrong with the doctoring-up methods therein prescribed.)

Why? This is like asking why the Vatican’s daily L’Osservatore Romano might play down new scholarly evidence that Jesus of Nazarene survived the crucifixion and lived out the rest of a peaceful life under an assumed name in some village on the Sea of Galilee, building fishing boats and raising a large brood with Mary Magdalene.

These mainstream “news” sources are nailing the final nails into their own coffins — coffins crafted by a Bush-Obama Depression, caused by the very statist/socialist policies these newspapers have been promoting for 60 years, in company with the rise of that uncontrollable alternative news source, the Internet — because they can’t bring themselves to report this stuff, because they’re all adherents of the Green Religion, and this blows the Green Religion out of the water like a 1941 battleship that just discovered those pesky Japanese planes carry TORPEDOES.

The cover-up is failing. On Monday, Pennsylvania State University announced it was launching an investigation into the academic conduct of Michael Mann, director of the school’s Earth System “Science” Center, one of the exposed e-mailers. Tuesday, Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic “Research” Unit at the University of East Anglia, announcedÊhe would stand aside as director while his university conducted an investigation, reports John Lott at Fox News.

The sound you hear is that of tents being folded in the night.

Others, so inclined, may trace the theological roots of the Green Religion, and give it a proper name. I content myself with summarizing its pernicious doctrines:

WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES

Mankind is evil. He pollutes the earth. Every other species may pee in the creek and drop its dung upon the ground, while modern man makes substantial and increasing efforts to treat his sewage so as not to poison those who live downstream. But citations of fact and logical argument have no place in a summary of the doctrines of a religion.

Mankind is a filthy, verminous polluter, the Green Religion insists. If he has any proper place on the earth — the most extreme wing of this faith appears to believe he does not — then it was to remain as a localized species practicing subsistence agriculture in the warm fertile valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Ganges and the Yangtsze. Our growth beyond that has been a disaster, which must be reversed in order to restore the earth to its proper, Eden-like condition. Reducing mankind’s population on the earth to less than 1 percent of today’s total would be a good first step for our overstressed Mother Gaia, the Greens believe.

The “so-called free market” — to which mankind will always happily revert, absent heavy government taxation and coercion — has been an abomination, they insist, allowing the “lucky few” (those who pursue learning, develop their skills and talents, work hard, pool their capital, save and invest) to gather and enjoy “more than their fair share” of the world’s wealth and resources, using them to provide themselves a far more pleasant life than is the lot of those who take little interest in learning, whose only developed skills seem to be skateboarding, television watching, self-mutilation, and bearing out-of-wedlock children, for the support of which they demand the endless expansion of socialist regimes to “tax the rich.”

The solution to all these inequities is government. Big, all-powerful, redistributive government.

Take the Environmental Protection Agency.

There’s good evidence industrial pollution was already being curbed by market pressures long before this gang of bureaucratic obstructionists got going. But even if we were to concede that the EPA played a major role in the environmental clean-up that’s occurred in the past 70 years, there’s the problem: The job is largely done.

Since no one can show how reducing sulfur dioxide emissions any further makes any economic sense, it’s time for such agencies to congratulate themselves all ’round and close up shop, after setting up a few monitors to let us know if some new crisis should arise.

What?! But government must grow always more powerful and more expensive, punishing greedy, rich capitalist polluters, seizing their wealth and transferring it to the “victim” classes! It must!

The obvious solution? Invent some new form of pollutant, something invisible that no one previously thought of as a pollutant at all.

Carbon dioxide! It contributes to global warming; that’s the ticket! Evil mankind is going to cause all life on earth to fry on a griddle! Government needs vast new powers — and whopping big new taxes on greedy industrialists — to fight this new scourge!

This is nonsense, of course. Only a nation where the vast majority of children are now turned over to the government for 12 to 16 years of brainwashing could hope to pull off such a mass carny stunt.

The earth has been cooling for a decade. If it were to warm a bit, that would be a good thing, allowing us to produce more food. Back when it was warming, there’s no evidence that any activity of mankind had anything to do with it, nor that any activity of mankind could change it.

(OK, I take that back: There is one thing mankind could do to curb global warming, if it really was a problem. As I’ve pointed out before, in 1815, Mount Tambora blew up in Indonesia, the largest known volcanic eruption in 1,600 years. The cloud of dust, dirt, ash and crap thrown into the atmosphere stayed up there for a year, causing 1816 to be known in Northern Europe and North America as the Year Without a Summer, or “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” Rivers were frozen in July and August as far south as Pennsylvania. If we wanted to cool the earth for awhile — though I can’t imagine why — and if we could get the nations of the world to cooperate — ha! — we could all build a bunch of new power plants burning the dirtiest coal and peat moss we could find, churning out dark smoke till the skies were literally dark at noon, and we MIGHT get things cooled off for awhile. But you can forget about doing it through any manipulation of the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide, which is neither plentiful enough nor a good enough “greenhouse gas” to have a fraction of the impact of water vapor, let alone solar activity.)

The absurd myth of “man-made global warming” serves a purely political agenda. As H. L. Mencken famously warned us, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and thus clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Think back to 1952. Wacky Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee won 12 of 15 Democratic primaries — campaigning in New Hampshire in a coonskin cap and a dogsled — and seemed poised to sweep his party’s presidential nomination until the “party bosses” insisted he be placed second on the ticket below Adlai Stevenson of, um … Chicago.

Kefauver was suddenly famous because — just as most American families were buying their first televisions — he staged televised senate hearings … into what?

Most history books will tell you “organized crime” — Kefavuer’s hearings familiarized Americans for the first time with the word “Mafia.” But that’s only part of the story. Kefauver was also vastly popular because he held hearings demonstrating an even more dastardly threat to America. And what was that threat?

Estes Kefauver was almost elected president based on his theory that gory comic books featuring vampires and werewolves caused juvenile delinquency — a campaign that led to mass comic-book burnings, put hundreds of people out of work, and led to adoption of the “Comics Code,” which dictated that for more than a decade all kids would have to read were squeaky-clean tales of superheroes in tights, along with Archie, Veronica, and Little Richie Rich.

(That climate of repression worked out well enough in the end, producing “the ’60s.” Looking back, can anyone remember what juvenile delinquency in the ’50s amounted to? Kids moving up from putting baseball cards in their bicycle spokes to riding motorcycles on the sidewalk? Oh, the humanity!)

The nation was threatened by comic books? Like the man said: “an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

MEMORIZING THEIR CRAPPY CATECHISM

If you doubt what we confront here is a religion, look at the way these loons view species extinction.

For millions of years, millions of species have arisen, competed, prospered for a time, and then faded in the face of changed conditions or more effective competitors for their ecological niche or both. It’s natural, it works, it has kept life vibrant and alive on this planet for a lot longer than any earthly government ever has or ever will prevail.

Yet now, suddenly, our children are being propagandized to believe that species extinctions are a bad thing, that the lineup of species present on this planet in 1972 or 1992 is somehow, weirdly, the permanent ideal, that we must pursue the ridiculous goal of species stasis by prohibiting mankind from doing anything — shifting a single spadeful of earth to build a new hospital — that might disturb one of the zillions of regional variant subspecies of worm, maggot, or cocklebur that a “species biologist” has identified as “unique and threatened” in its “mini-ecosystem,” which can be as small as a vacant lot.

It’s still a tough world. Many families are again struggling to feed their children. Nuclear weapons will be used again. Placing antibiotics in chickenfeed to fatten up the pullets is going to breed new disease germs immune to most of our medicines. You want real trouble? It’s coming. So further crippling our economies and our technological growth at this juncture is not wise. The notion that our children’s lives will be somehow significantly impoverished if they never again have the chance to swat some regional subspecies of mosquito who might be inconvenienced or even exterminated if I drain a quarter-acre swamp on my private property without an “Environmental Impact Statement” is a steaming pile of unadulterated crap.

Those who wish to adhere to the Green religion have every right to believe this pathetic balderdash. But they have no right to propagandize other people’s children in such sublime idiocy at taxpayer expense, and they certainly have no right to impose these beliefs and doctrines upon us under coercion and threat of force by erecting government offices for that purpose. This constitutes the state “establishment” of the Green Religion, strictly and properly forbidden by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Species extinctions do not harm the people. Global warming does not harm the people. (A new ice age might, and one will surely ensue, but there’s nothing we can do about that except give thanks to the Creator for providing us with the opposable thumbs necessary to sew furs into “clothing.”)

We tolerated this balderdash when we felt wealthy enough to shrug it off, but these arrogant twits have taken it too far. Now the pendulum starts back the other way. And it’s a hard rain gonna fall.