Whether or not the groundhog sees his shadow on February 2, there's no denying that January put into a deep freeze the claims of crisis by global warming alarmists. Frigid temperatures destroyed fruit and coral in Florida, and snow fell on Al Gore's palatial home in normally warmer Tennessee.
The 20,000 delegates and journalists who gathered in Copenhagen to discuss climate change had to spend some of their energy hiding their embarrassment about the revelation of emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit, which is an official collaborator of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Those disclosures told the world about some scientists' willingness to suppress climate-change data and rig the process in order to pretend there is consensus among scientists about global warming, to ostracize contrary views, and to promote their globalist agenda.
Obama's State of the Union demand for cap-and-trade legislation fell on deaf ears. Maybe that's because Obama is on record as promising that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be reduced to our 1910 level of emissions, when we had a population of 92 million.
Such a massive reduction in our energy use would mean lowering our standard of living to 19th century levels. The only Republican Senator willing to work with the Democrats on climate change legislation, Lindsey Graham, admitted that "the cap-and-trade bills in the House and Senate are going nowhere."
Even the New York Times admitted that "prospects grew dimmer" for the global warming advocates because Scott Brown repudiated cap-and-trade in his winning campaign in Massachusetts. Some incumbents who voted for the House bill find that challengers are scoring points with the public by attacking that vote.
January ended with a cold blast reportedly from Osama bin Laden blaming the United States for not halting what he called "the global warming crisis" and for failing to sign the Kyoto Protocol. He wants to punish us by getting the global economy to abandon the U.S. dollar.
What was to have been the baptism of the major nations into the religion of global warming in Copenhagen, Denmark, turned out to be a dry run. President Obama came and left empty handed, Communist China refused to limit emissions, and the Third World dictators didn't get the $100 billion handouts they expected.
At the close of the Copenhagen confab, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus made this same point about global warming. "I'm convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon," he said, "global warming is not a matter of temperature. Global warming is a new religion, a religion of climate change. . . .
"This religion tells us that people are responsible for very small increases in temperatures, and they should be punished. . . . I'm absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes. It's a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth.
"The role of man is very small, almost negligible. Politicians, their fellow travelers, and the media understood that this is a good topic to take on, because talking about the world in the years 2050, 2080, and 2200 is an excellent way to escape from current reality."
President Klaus sent a message to the world: Do not dictate to humanity how to live based on an "irrational ideology." Man's natural ingenuity can create new technologies that will lessen any impact that mankind has on the planet's environment.
Vaclav Klaus concluded: "I lived in a Communist world where politicians told us what to do. I don't think politicians or presidents should tell business what to do. That is always a mistake."
Nevertheless the propaganda continues. A father's letter to the editor of the Education Reporter described what his 5th-grade daughter Lily, at Three Oaks Elementary, Fort Myers, Florida, said she had learned in school. "I would rather just shoot myself in the head because it would be a less painful death than to suffer and die from global warming."
Thousands of public school students have been shown Al Gore's propaganda movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Another movie called "The Story of Stuff" is also shown in classrooms to teach students the evils of human consumption.
The movie projects a very negative view of capitalism and paints human use of natural resources as "exploitation," which is supposed to be synonymous with trashing the planet. The movie accuses us of chopping down the trees, blowing up mountains to get the metals inside, using up all the water, and wiping out the animals.
The main cause of unemployment and poverty is the lack of enough energy. Rather than expanding government to limit energy, we should be increasing the use of energy to eradicate hardship.