McCain holds rally for alarmists

 Senator John McCain (R-Az.) on September 15 held another pep rally to build support for his energy rationing legislation, the so-called Climate Stewardship Act (S. 139).  The event was advertised as a hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which McCain chairs.

 The hearing focused on junk science studies on regional impacts of global warming.  As has become his custom, McCain solicited testimony only from witnesses who support his alarmist views on global warming. 

 According to Greenwire (Sept. 13), Asked about his strategy, McCain said last week he is looking to get a vote, get a vote, get a vote on S. 139.  However, it now looks unlikely that he will be able to get a floor vote during the remainder of the 108^th Congress.

 At a briefing held the same day in the Senates Russell Building and sponsored by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, Dr. Richard Alley, the Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, discussed abrupt climate changes and their possible connection to anthropogenic global warming. 

 Although the information he presented suggested that abrupt climate shifts occur much more frequently during ice ages, Alley used an analogy to imply that human activities could cause sudden climate change.  Mankind is rocking the canoethe canoe being the global climate system.  When a canoe is rocked, most of the time it rocks back and forth and eventually steadies itself, but occasionally it flips over and sinks.   Alley said that by increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere we were rocking the canoe and that at some point it might tip over.  This is a new and more sophisticated version of the well-known scientific theory that the global climate is a sleeping beast that mankind is poking with a stick (in the form of greenhouse gas emissions).  It is not clear whether flipping over the canoe will have worse consequences than waking the sleeping beast.