President Obama had two compelling reasons to delay his scheduled trip to the U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen from this week until Dec. 18.
First, the Senate is having a hard time swallowing his health plan.
The president’s job approval rating has dropped another 4 points since the House pushed through its version of his health plan on Nov. 4. The decreasing public confidence in Obama makes skeptical senators more likely to balk or pass something so puny that it embarrasses him.
It initially made sense for the president to drop by Copenhagen on his way to Norway to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday. But as Obama’s visit to the Hill on Sunday showed, there’s a growing sense that this is a make-or-break week for health care — which makes it a bad time to highlight a carbon policy that alienates the same moderate senators Obama is trying to roll up on health care.
Second, attending a global summit on climate change this week would be like Tiger Woods hosting a seminar on balancing fame and family.
When announcing the postponement, the White House said it was because of recent “progress toward a meaningful accord.” In fact, all of the news on man-made climate change has been bad for Obama and other believers.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the scientific scandal at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit is how much of the global warming belief structure was based on the outfit’s research.
Once it was revealed that scientists at the school had colluded with their peers around the world to cook results and silence skeptics, the whole international climate complex came unraveled like an old cotton sweater.
The White House sent Science Adviser James Holdren up to Congress to answer questions about the first great fraud of the 21st century. It was an unfortunate choice. Holdren’s rapid blinking, jerking gestures and shaggy beard suggested Ted Kaczynski more than Robert Oppenheimer.
Holdren’s answers were astonishing — yes, the data from the Climate Research Unit are in doubt; yes, the data provide the partial basis for the only two other long-range temperature studies; no, this should not give us pause about proposals to shrink the economy by trillions of dollars.
In the message attributed to Holdren from the leaked e-mail cache, he warns his fellow warmists that they should avoid answering questions from skeptics “because one’s interlocutor turns out to be ineducable and/or just looking for a quote to reproduce out of context in an attempt to embarrass you.”
Advice Dr. Holdren ought to have heeded.
By then, though, the head of the climate unit at East Anglia had stepped down and probes had begun at schools around the world.
What had been a growing public discomfort with the scolding certitude of the climate crowd had turned into a collective snort.
Like the televangelist caught shearing his flock to pay for a motel mistress, the climate cover-up rang the favorite bell of today’s culture: hypocrisy.
Climate gurus who claimed they were protecting the scientific process against greedy business interests were actually perverting the process in order to keep their own funding.
Al Gore, who found a second career as the P.T. Barnum of climate change, was supposed to bask again in adulation in Copenhagen with a speech to thousands in town for the United Nations summit.
Gore instead canceled his speech to huddle with other climate leaders, like U.N. climate boss Rajendra Pachauri, with whom he shares his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Pachauri also crafted the theme of this year’s big climate hoedown: “Less Meat Equals Less Heat.”
Giving his Nobel speech a week before his visit to the climate confab will allow Obama to avoid the embarrassment of receiving his award while the Senate is blowing off his global warming policies.
Though a recent decline in global temperatures and the e-mail scandal have been a tipping point for American public opinion — the president knows that the Senate will not approve any commitment for carbon reductions or for billions in aid to help the Third World become more ecologically hip — it will take much more to shake the faith of the European elites whom Obama is looking to impress with his Nobel speech. They have invested too much in the new state religion of climate change to let some inconvenient truths get in the way.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected]
