A desperate push is underway to enact the Climate Security Act sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CN) and Sen. John Warner (R-VA). It would impose cap-and-trade mandates on anything that generates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and that pretty much includes everything involving energy use, including backyard barbequing.

Just what “climate security” is remains a mystery. It suggests that humans actually have something to do with the climate and only idiots believe that. If that were true, there would be no tornadoes tearing up the mid-west or hurricanes threatening the east coast. There would be no droughts, no blizzards, and other weather phenomena.

Will the news that 31,000 scientists signed a petition rejecting the catastrophic, man-made global warming threat change the political and cultural dynamic in this country on this phantom problem?

I hope so, but I sincerely doubt it.

This myth, this hoax, this fraud is being taught to children in public schools throughout America as if it were established fact.

This myth, this hoax, this fraud is being spoon-fed to Americans by the millions in newspaper articles and TV-news scare stories every day.

One of the candidates seeking the presidential nomination of his party said that high gasoline prices will affect how Americans drive - gee, do really think? This is just one of the many profundities spoken by Barack Obama from behind his teleprompter. We have seen gasoline prices go up strikingly before; sometimes we even had to wait in line for the privilege of paying more money so we could use our cars.

The excuse then was we had a shortage of oil; which turned out not to be true. Nonetheless we were urged by the government to keep our thermostats low (the sweater business boomed), to drive the "double nickel", 55 mph, and buy gasoline according to our license plate number on alternate days. Suddenly the oil genie reappeared and we were able to mothball our sweaters, drive at a more reasonable speed limit and gasoline flowed freely into our gas-guzzlers, albeit at a higher price.

"Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, ... we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge."

With that, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain threw his support - again - to a complex government program to reduce carbon emissions. He claims he can do this, without causing economic hardship, by using the power of the free market. As The Wall Street Journal commented, "His plan is 'market based' insofar as it requires an expensive, invasive government bureaucracy to interfere with the market."

McCain's cap-and-trade system would have a bureaucracy set a limit for CO2 emissions and auction tradable permits to carbon-emitting companies.

The planet is heating up as a result of global warming and mankind is facing disaster unless we take on Mother Nature and frustrate her plans to barbecue us all.

How do we know that? Well Al Gore tells us so, and we must pay heed to his warnings because he is a towering figure in climatology, recognized as such by the Nobel Peace Prize committee which awarded him their coveted Nobel Peace Prize, and Hollywood which gave him an Oscar for his doomsday film, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Oh that Al Gore! The allegedly credible Al Gore.

The global warming debate arrives in the Senate next week, and it's about time. Finally, the Members will have to vote on something real, as opposed to their buck-passing to courts and regulators, and their easy trashing of President Bush.

The vehicle is a bill that principal sponsors Joe Lieberman and John Warner are calling "landmark legislation." They're too modest. Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s.

Thankfully, the American system makes it hard for colossal tax and regulatory burdens to foxtrot into law without scrutiny. So we hope our politicians will take responsibility for the global-warming policies they say they favor. Or even begin to understand what they say they favor. For a bill as grandly ambitious as Warner-Lieberman, very few staff, much less Senators, even know what's in it. The press corps mainly cheerleads this political fad, without examining how it would work or what it would cost. So allow us to fill in some of the details.