THE DANGER OF O KNOWING WHAT JUST AIN’T SO

"It isn't what you don't know that hurts you," said cowboy philosopher Will Rogers.  "It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Mr. Obama will assume office in the early stages of a recession.  He is not responsible for the circumstances that have caused it.  But because of something he knows for sure that "just ain't so," he could make the recession much more severe than it otherwise would be.

He told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle in January his energy plan likely would bankrupt the coal industry and send electricity rates skyrocketing. Reporters Carla Marinucci and Joe Garafoli considered these remarks so unremarkable they didn't mention them in the story they wrote on Mr. Obama's meeting with the editorial board.  (Here's the video of Mr. Obama's remarks.)

But the 350,000 people who work in the coal industry, and the 57 percent of us who get our electricity chiefly from coal-fired plants might have a different view.

There probably isn't any good time to throw thousands of people out of work and roughly double what people must pay for electricity, but to make these gratuitous moves in the midst of a recession seems especially unwise.

Mr. Obama plans draconian steps because of his concern for anthroprogenic (man-made) global warming.  He reiterated his concerns in a taped speech to a climate change conference in California last week:

"Few challenges facing America — and the world — are more urgent than combating climate change," he said.  "The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.  Sea levels are rising, coasts are shrinking.  We've seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season."

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates sea levels will rise about three feet over the next 100 years.  But sea levels have been rising for the last 10,000 years (ever since the last Ice Age), and everything else Sen. Obama said is untrue.  Drought and famine typically are associated with colder rather than warmer periods, and nothing the world has experienced recently approaches what happened in the 1930s.

The science of global warming is beyond dispute for Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and most journalists.  But there is less agreement than ever among climate scientists, who are having increasing difficulty reconciling the theory with what is actually happening with the world's climate.  

According to the theory, carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and gasoline are chiefly responsible for warming.  There is no dispute that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing.  But the highest global temperatures ever recorded were in 1998 — ten years ago.  Global temperatures have been declining since 2002.  In the last year the decline was nearly great enough to offset all the warming that has occurred since 1980.

With the evidence turning against them, proponents of global warming theory are trying to manufacture their own.  Dr. James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) — one of four bodies which monitor global temperatures — declared this past October to have been the warmest ever.  

This was startling to those who knew that on Oct. 29, 115 communities in the U.S. set or tied records for low temperature; that the day before it snowed in London in October for the first time since 1922, and Tibet experienced its worst snowstorm ever.

It turns out that Mr. Hansen — who set off the global warming scare with his testimony before a committee headed by then Sen. Al Gore in 1988 –had carried over temperature readings from monitoring stations in Russia from September, an error so glaring it calls into question the reliability of all GISS data.

"Whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought," wrote Christopher Booker in the London Telegraph.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.