Winds of change

Written by Jennifer Harper, Washington Times | 09 February 2010

It's reinventing-the-wheel time. The Obama administration has announced intentions to create a big, fat, shiny, new federal office called the "Climate Service" to track global warming, complete with six regional offices and lots of good intentions.

"It looks like the [warming] empire strikes back. Obama is attempting to engineer a global warming bailout. This is a classic response of the federal government: Bail out a corrupt and dying industry," Marc Morano, editor of the watchdog site ClimateDepot.com, tells Inside the Beltway.

"What else would you expect of the feds? Man-made global warming has proven itself to be nothing more than sub-prime science, sub-prime economics, and sub-prime politics," Mr. Morano adds. "This new federal agency will … produce the best science that politics can manufacture."

But wait a minute. Don't we already have an agency that does all this stuff? Could be:

"The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The USGCRP began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-606), which called for 'a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.'

"Thirteen departments and agencies participate in the USGCRP, which was known as the U.S. Climate Change Science Program from 2002 through 2008. The program is steered by the Subcommittee on Global Change Research under the Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, overseen by the Executive Office of the President, and facilitated by an Integration and Coordination Office."

Sounds familiar. Judge for yourself. This cumbersome passage comes right from the eye of the storm at www.globalchange.gov.

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