Panhandle Republican takes middle path in carbon [scam] rules

The sole rule at meetings of the carbon management caucus, organized by state Rep. Warren Chisum, is that none of the 40 or so members may talk about global warming.

"If we did," he said, "it'd consume all our time."

That rule gets at the political savvy of Chisum, a Panhandle Republican who was stripped of his power as a budget writer but re-emerged as a pivotal player in the future of Texas' energy economy.

San Francisco Examiner Editorial: Politicians shun facts, blow hot air on climate change

Former Vice President Al Gore’s appearance on Capitol Hill on Friday capped four days of testimony that elevated climate alarmism over sound science.

Unfortunately, compliant news media allow Gore’s bloviating to obscure the “inconvenient truths” that would greatly unsettle his eco-political agenda.

Federal legislators are now poised to move forward with punitive anti-emissions schemes such as cap-and-trade that ignore important and highly relevant new studies. These studies indicate that astronomical influences, not man-made emissions, may be largely to blame for any warming or cooling trends on Earth.

Moreover, the whole idea of “global warming” is now in serious doubt. Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., is among the many scientists who now think the planet has entered into a cooling cycle that could persist for decades.

Great chart - Temps cooling amid CO2 alert

It might make a lot more sense to draw a correlation between man-made carbon dioxide levels and rising temperatures if the temperatures hadn’t decreased in the last decade.

Studies show that average global temperatures have decreased as much as 0.2 degrees Celsius over the last ten years — just as human activity is thought to be taking its biggest toll on the planet’s climate.

The decrease is small, to be sure, but, say skeptics, it disproves the argument that rising man-made CO2 levels are the driving force behind global warming. [Via Climate Depot]