It’s been odd, destructive and deadly, but climate experts say you can’t blame the brutal weather that has slammed New England on your neighbor’s SUV.

“We can’t link it with global warming,” said Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “One of the robust predictions of global warming is that rainfall comes in heavier, but less frequent events. This hasn’t been less frequent. I don’t think you can blame the stuff we’ve seen this summer on global warming. It looks like were locked into a weather pattern.”

Beth Hall, the former climatologist for the state of New Hampshire, who just took a teaching job at Towson University in Maryland, agreed with her MIT colleague.

There is something odd about the ferocious amount of energy expended suppressing any dissent from orthodoxy on climate change. After all, the climate cataclysmists have won the war of public opinion - for now, at least - with polls, business, media and Government enthusiastically on board.

So, if their case is so good, why try so fervently to extinguish other points of view? There is a disturbingly religious zeal in the attempts to silence critics and portray them as the moral equivalent of holocaust deniers.

Take the British Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which aired on the ABC last year with an extraordinary post-show panel of debunkers assembled to denounce it. The one program which actually questioned the consensus on man's contribution to climate change, it has been singled out for condemnation and forensic dissection in a way no other program has, least of all Al Gore's error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth.

This week, the British communications regulator, Ofcom, published a long report dealing with 265 complaints about perceived inaccuracy and unfairness in Swindle.

Arctic Blundering: Which one believes in the climate apocalypse of melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels?
Answer: Both

Chuck Todd, the NBC News political director summed it up best when he pointed out that the same speech could have been delivered by Sen. John McCain because its content was ideologically the same in many ways. The critical difference is that McCain is imbued with the values of a family that has fought to protect American values, American freedoms for generations.

Both believe that industrialization and modern society is contributing to a climate apocalypse of melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels. Both believe the free world must defeat Islamofascist terrorism. The former is a corruption of science. The latter is the single most important issue of our times. At one point, Obama sounded a call for Iran to relinquish its nuclear weapons ambitions.

Marc Morano

Producing America's own resources should not be a partisan issue. The Democrats’ refusal to increase our supply of energy keeps prices on the rise. 

Recent polling data from Rasmussen shows that 67 % of Americans support offshore drilling, and only 18 % oppose. The same poll also found that 64 % believe that if offshore drilling is allowed, gas prices will go down. Another poll from The Polling Company Inc. found that 81 % of Americans support greater use of domestic energy resources.

Even though the American public strongly supports expanded use of American resources, new oil and gas exploration and production is currently prohibited on 85 % of America’s offshore waters.  The Pacific and Atlantic regions of the Outer Continental Shelf, which hold an estimated 14 billion barrels of oil and 55 trillion cubic feet of gas, are off-limits.  Fourteen billion barrels of oil is equivalent to more than 25 years’ worth of imports from Saudi Arabia. Other countries around the world aggressively explore and embrace the discovery of new oil fields. Canada allows offshore drilling in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Great Lakes.

It didn't seem possible that politicians could think up a sillier energy proposal than Barack Obama's windfall profits tax on oil companies, but Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia has done just that.

Earlier this month, Mr. Warner suggested a return to the federal 55-mile-per-hour speed limit on America's highways, as a way to save on national gasoline consumption. "I drive over 55 miles an hour, . . . sometimes 65," he said on the Senate floor. "But I am willing to give up whatever advantage to me to drive at those speeds with the fervent hope that modest sacrifice on my part will help those people across this land . . . dealing with this financial crisis."

Meanwhile, environmental groups across the country are also pushing a lower national speed limit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The notion here is that if people simply lift the pedal off the metal on the highways, they will help avert an environmental apocalypse.

Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other liberal leaders on Capitol Hill are gripped by cold-sweat terror. If they permit a vote on offshore drilling, they know they will lose when Blue Dogs and oil-patch Democrats defect to the GOP position of increasing domestic energy production. So the last failsafe is to shut down Congress.

Majority Leader Reid has decided that deliberation is too taxing for "the world's greatest deliberative body." This week he cut off serious energy amendments to his antispeculation bill. Then Senate Appropriations baron Robert Byrd abruptly canceled a bill markup planned for today where Republicans intended to press the issue. Mr. Byrd's counterpart in the House, David Obey, is enforcing a similar lockdown. Speaker Pelosi says she won't allow even a debate before Congress's August recess begins in eight days.

What is it with Al Gore? Why is he compelled to exaggerate climate change (excuse me, “the climate crisis”), and then to propose impossible policy responses? It’s like he’s inventing the Internet all over again!

OK, it’s pretty much standard rhetoric in Washington to say that if you don’t do as I say, there will be massive consequences. But to say, as Gore recently did: “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk;” and: “The future of human civilization is at stake” — that’s a bit much, even for the most faded and jaded political junkie.

Here’s how Gore works. He’ll cite one scientific finding that shows what he wants, and then ignore other work that provides important context. Here’s a list of his climate exaggerations from his well-publicized July 17 rant, along with a few sobering facts.

The Journal yesterday noted yet another company spending very little on some pollution-control modernization to sell millions of dollars of ration coupons to the West’s Cult of Carbon Guilt. As CEI President Fred Smith noted in testimony to the Senate Environment Committee last year about a previous, wildly expensive and wasteful example of this practice, “[a]ccording to a study published in the journal Nature [“Is the global carbon market working?”], installation of those scrubbers could have been financed by loans or grants at a total cost of about $130 million. Thus almost $6 billion has been diverted away from other uses into the pockets of industry in the developing world.”

The beneficiary of this environmentally meaningless corporate welfare profiled in the WSJ is the chemical/pharmaceutical interest Rhodia, which has actually been raking in carbon-offset cash year in and year out since Kyoto began the scheme. They are even selling their credits directly to taxpayers in Kyoto’s few covered countries, to help governments try and live up to their (or their predecessors’) green posturing about which they are too timid to speak the truth. Rhodia joins others whose ranks include companies who go into the business of doing nothing in order to sell carbon ration coupons instead —because you have to employ a lot fewer people and use a lot less energy when you’re twiddling your thumbs.

A conservative commentator thinks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s purported effort to work with evangelical activists on common goals of fighting global warming and helping the poor is politically savvy, yet unfortunately a sham.

Speaker Pelosi (D-California) recently told liberal bloggers at the Netroots Nation Conference that she "work[s] with Evangelicals to protect God's creation" and fight poverty. But Matt Lewis, a contributing writer for TownHall.com, believes that claim is deceptive. He believes liberal advisers and consultants have made a concerted effort to find a way to position liberal politicians like Pelosi as if they are "pro-family or pro-Christian."

Last week Nobel Laureate and climate change fanatic Al Gore called for a man-on-the-moon effort to reduce carbon dioxide to curb global warming. He proposed to have 100 % of our nation’s energy coming from renewable, carbon-free energy sources in only a decade. Likening his efforts to that of President JFK, he said:

When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal.”

Gore, claiming that the history of civilization is at stake, is willing to spend up to $3 trillion (yes, with a “t”) to achieve emissions free energy by 2018. Thanks to some research and number crunching from The Heritage Foundation’s David Kreutzer, Ph.D. and Patrick Tyrrell, we found that Al Gore’s proposal is the equivalent of 15 man-on-the-moon efforts in terms of cost.

AFFORDABLE domestic air travel will be snatched away from many Australian families under the Federal Government's proposed emissions trading scheme, says an airline chief.

Virgin Blue chief executive Brett Godfrey has described the Government's green paper on emissions trading as disappointing and its analysis on the impact on the aviation sector as "way wide of the glide path".

"To suggest that Australian domestic airlines 'will generally be able to pass on carbon costs because their competitors will face similar cost increases' ignores the current economic stresses the entire industry is already experiencing," he said.

"Exceptionally high fuel costs have already forced all airlines to raise fares and withdraw some services."