Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1988, a young senator by the name of Al Gore was summoned to a Congressional hearing on the subject of global warming. Sitting to Gore's right was Dr. James Hansen, then-director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. During the hearing, Hansen stated with 99% certainty that global warming was taking place, and that it was likely the result of man-made greenhouses gasses. A short while later, Gore wrote an article in which he equated the night a particularly high temperature was recorded to Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass" pogrom against the Jews across Nazi Germany). Gore harshly admonished anyone who dared doubt Hansen's conclusion. And this was just the start.
Just recently we marked the anniversary of Kristallnacht. There is no disagreement over the events of that night; everyone knows that the burning of nearly 1,000 synagogues and murder of hundreds of Jews was the ominous opening salvo of the horrors to follow. With that, some people deny the Holocaust, others doubt its scope, and there are those –as we've seen – who exploit it nefariously.
The president of the National Academy of Sciences warned fellow academics, those tempted to blindly accept the veracity of claims on subjects they don't specialize in, after they rushed to sign a petition calling for immediate action before a catastrophe occurs. The petition organizers were members of a foundation seeking to ban nuclear energy. The fall of the Soviet Union created a vacuum for anarchistic behavior, and they filled the empty space.
The NAS president's warning was too late. The messianic fervor had already set in. Claudine Schneider, a Republican congresswoman from Rhode Island, said at one university symposium: "Scientists may disagree, but we can hear Mother Earth and she is crying."
As for the Kristallnacht comparison story, there is more. In 2007, in an interview with "Frontline," then-Senator Timothy Wirth (a Democrat from Colorado) confessed how the date for the congressional hearing was chosen: "Believe it or not, we called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6 or June 9 or whatever it was, so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo: It was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. It was stiflingly hot that summer. [At] the same time you had this drought all across the country, so the linkage between the Hansen hearing and the drought became very intense."
Wirth was then asked if he also altered the temperature in the hearing room that day.
"What we did was we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn't working inside the room and so when the, when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot," Wirth answered.
From the perspective of Al Gore, the guru of the fraudulent, unrestrained man-made global warming campaign – that night was his Kristallnacht.
After Gore's "Kristallnacht" came the "Holocaust." Anyone who viewed the calls of Claudine Schneider and many others of her ilk with skepticism was labeled an enemy of humanity. The religious zeal was all-consuming. In March 2006, CBS news anchor Scott Pelley was asked why he hadn't interviewed global warming skeptics. His reply: "If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?"
This is the atmosphere surrounding the science of climate change; the planet must march to the beat of the "green" agenda. Even if temperature measurements have repeatedly shown that climate changes occurred, occur and will occur regardless of mankind. Even if these measurements reveal a tremendous difference between biased forecasts put forth by bought-and-paid-for climate scientists and reality, we the "greens" will change science. And if governments must be extorted for this purpose, well that is a very small price to pay. The upcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Katowice, Poland, will confirm the claims.
