SUBCOMMITTEE ON INCOME SECURITY AND FAMILY SUPPORT HEARING ON
GLOBAL WARMING AND LOW-INCOME FAMILIES
MARCH 12, 2009

[AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY]

Chairman McDermott’s announcement for this hearing began with this statement:  “A major international assessment released in 2007 highlighted the clear consensus in the scientific community that the Earth’s climate has unequivocally warmed and that most of the observed changes since the 1970’s are due to greenhouse gases emitted as a result of human activity.” 

Not so fast. For every scientist who supports the notion of human caused global warming there are more than 10 who consider that notion pure vanity.  And they made their names public.

Our Committee has been told that water vapor is the overwhelming heat trapping gas.  Even methane traps more heat than CO2.  Why are these two sources not taxed?  Simple.  How do you tax clouds and termites? 

Even the IPCC report, which is the basis for this hearing, did not develop its conclusions on science.  A UN bureaucrat removed five contributing scientist’s statements that there was no basis to blame human activity and replaced those statements with the bureaucrat’s conclusion that humans were to blame.  No science.

And that is where we are in this debate.  No science – just bureaucratic conclusions on which to lay a predicate for a brand new tax.

In the scientific world only two conditions obtain: theory and fact.  Theories are studied for centuries and then are proven by facts to be correct or incorrect.  Both Galileo and Einstein were famous deniers of centuries old theories – and famously attacked for being correct.   

In this rather recent discussion, the whole notion of proving or disproving the theory is not only ignored, it is considered heretical.  (Parenthetically let me note that to question science is considered scholarship.  To question religion is considered heresy.) 

Since the mid 1970’s when some of the same scientists were warning of a coming ice age and then felt comfortable going after some of the research grant money on the global warming side, we have not yet heard a single fact adduced proving humans to be responsible.  Not one.  We deal with computer models.

I want to remind you that the other multi-trillion dollar debacle we are witnessing around the world is because risk managers with grey hair were replaced by computer models.  Unfortunately, those mathematical tools didn’t know how to adjust for emotions such as fear and greed.

Today, predictions of future weather calamities are being made by computer models that do not take into consideration scientific observations of the earth’s natural temperature modulations. 

Curiously, every climate model predicting calamity requires for its accuracy a growing hot spot at low altitudes at the equator.  We have now had years to measure that hot spot with scientific instruments.  It doesn’t exist.  And how do the modelers respond?  “You must have misread your thermometer because the model shows it should be there.”

So we prepare to attack this erroneous conclusion with the one thing our government does best.  Raise taxes on the rich and give that money to the poor.  There!  That fixes that!

Have we forgotten the testimony before the committee that showed us that, because of entitlements, our nation’s total revenue stream will not be sufficient to pay the interest on the debt in just 31 years?  So we’ll just add another.   Let me show you a slide.

Whether you select the minimum plan or the maximum plan put forth by the experts, this program will dwarf our current welfare programs.

Turning the vast majority of our citizens into supplicants at the foot of government may serve your purposes as a political party.  I promise you it will not serve theirs.

But assuming you satisfy yourselves that you have taken care of our poor and “fixed” the climate, a vanity at which I just cringe, who is going to be hurt?

Just two billion of the world’s most vulnerable people. 

We have enjoyed a living standard in the last 100 years which is the envy of the world.  India and China are now going through what we went through.  The by-product of that success is CO2.  Why do we want to deny that same opportunity to the most vulnerable whom we will consign to a lifetime of hunger and poverty?  As Dr. John Christy told us last week having lived in that part of the world to help the poor; “Their lives are brutal and short!”