How the Global Warming Fraud Really Got Started

In a previous post today I detailed how NASA's Dr. James Hansen, the chief propagandist for the global warming movement (Al Gore is the High Priest) is celebrating his 20th anniversary as a global warming alarmist by threatening to charge oil company executives with crimes against humanity. I little earlier I heard Rush Limbaugh tell a story from Newsweek Magazine about that 1988 hearing that shows the extent Hansen and his confederates were willing to go to promote their new religion:

It was 98 degrees in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 1988, and climate change was bursting into public consciousness. The Amazon was burning, wildfires raged in the United States, crops in the Midwest were scorched and it was shaping up to be the hottest year on record worldwide. A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now."

That was the day that panic over global cooling became panic over global warming.

Not included in the Newsweek piece was the fact that Hansen and his crew had done some research into Washington meteorological records and had determined that June 23rd was historically the hottest day of the year. They had an agenda and knew that their data alone wouldn't sell it. Given that liberal's are oriented toward immediate gratification, they were bound to quickly jump on this issue just because it was hot in the hearing room. There really isn't any more to it than that.

If they had held this hearing on a 10 degree day in January, the global warming movement might have been smothered in its crib.