When the dust settles - that is, when the forces of liberty prevail over tyranny - historians many years from now will marvel at the ingenuity of those who perpetrated the Great Climate Change Hoax. They won’t be surprised by it insofar as ingenuity and guile accompany wickedness as a side of rancid coleslaw always appears with a deluxe cheeseburger platter at the local greasy spoon diner.

It was a hoax two decades in the making, one that blossomed and flowered under the careful cultivation of a psychotic named Al Gore, whose metamorphosis into a political Captain Ahab has him on an obsessive quest to slay his own particular White Whale.

Anyone recall that famous speech of Ahab’s to Starbuck?

Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. Look ye, Starbuck, all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. ‘Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung.

Pretty much sums up Pope Albert - except, of course, that Ahab was a far more fascinating person and infinitely more eloquent than the pompous, turgidly prolix Gore. Adolph Eichmann may have personified the banality of evil, but Albert Gore II most certainly fleshes out the lamest, most boring psycho this generation has ever seen and many of those those who rally under his apocalyptic banner share in some degree the madness that consumes him, although for most of them it is not so much psychosis as it is religious zeal. But then, there was always a razor-thin line separating the two, no?

Others, of course, are neither mad nor particularly religious - just cynical and hungry for both wealth and power. These are to be feared more than than any mad prophet or his acolytes, as they and those who serve them are the ones possessing the true measure of the issue. While the zealots cry havoc in the sunlit wilderness and let slip the polar bears of Arctic doom, their cynical manipulators remain in the shadows, working feverishly to muzzle any who would point out that neither the Arctic nor the polar bears are in any real danger.

This December the United Nations will be hosting a world summit on climate change in Copenhagen to address the myriad planetary crises triggered by human industry, not the least of which is the imminent demise of the Arctic polar bear. If you thought such a summit would include the input of leading experts, you need to pay more attention.

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.

Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.

So, as the great Copenhagen bandwagon rolls on, stand by this week for reports along the lines of “scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction by vanishing Arctic ice”. But also check out Anthony Watt’s Watts Up With That website for the latest news of what is actually happening in the Arctic. The average temperature at midsummer is still below zero, the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping. After last year’s recovery from its September 2007 low, this year’s ice melt is likely to be substantially less than for some time. The bears are doing fine.

There is no political disinfectant as powerful as the cleansing sunlight of truth. Facts, as the esteemed John Adams loved to observe, are stubborn things and their intractability is exceeded only by that of those who refuse to acknowledge them.

As the climate fascists in Europe scurry to stifle any neo-Galileo who dares question their own brand of Ptolemaic pseudoscience, the worker bees in suits who infest the cubicle hive of federal bureaucracy known as the Environmental Protection Agency are busy servicing the Climate Change Queen by ensuring that nothing contradictory enters her chamber.

A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency’s alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin’s report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

“He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he’s ordered an investigation. “We’re going to expose it.”

One can only hope that Inhofe makes good on his promise although I am a bit miffed he is characterized as a “global warming skeptic.” This is a misnomer that has gained traction in the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) crowd as a sort of code-phrase analogous to “Holocaust denier.”

The controversy comes after the House of Representatives passed a landmark bill to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, one that Inhofe said will be “dead on arrival” in the Senate despite President Obama’s energy adviser voicing confidence in the measure.

An EPA official told FOXNews.com on Monday that Carlin, who is an economist — not a scientist — included “no original research” in his report. The official said that Carlin “has not been muzzled in the agency at all,” but stressed that his report was entirely “unsolicited.”

“It was something that he did on his own,” the official said. “Though he was not qualified, his manager indulged him and allowed him on agency time to draft up … a set of comments.”

Carlin has a web site and it indicates he received his PhD in Economics from MIT; his undergraduate degree in physics was awarded by CIT. Clearly this man is no stranger to science. The final version of his report - obtained from sources in the EPA - can be located here.

Despite the EPA official’s remarks, Carlin told FOXNews.com on Monday that his boss, National Center for Environmental Economics Director Al McGartland, appeared to be pressured into reassigning him.

Carlin said he doesn’t know whether the White House intervened to suppress his report but claimed it’s clear “they would not be happy about it if they knew about it,” and that McGartland seemed to be feeling pressure from somewhere up the chain of command.

Five months of the Obama regime leaves this observer convinced that the “most open, transparent and ethical administration in history” most definitely ordered the report suppressed.

Specifically, the report noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend over the past 11 years, that scientists do not necessarily believe that storms will become more frequent or more intense due to global warming, and that the theory that temperatures will cause Greenland ice to rapidly melt has been “greatly diminished.”

Carlin, in a March 16 e-mail, argued that his comments are “valid, significant” and would be critical to the EPA finding.

This relates to the EPA claim that the Carlin report contains no “original research,” i.e., no actual climatological or meteorological work performed by Carlin himself. Big deal. There are plenty of researchers who have already done this work; Carlin merely collated and analyzed their data and then assembled it in a 98-page report. The fact he didn’t do the research himself in no way invalidates the data and to argue that it does is to argue that no one is in a position to argue for or against anything unless having personally researched it.

McGartland’s comments are revealing:

“The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” he wrote, according to the e-mails released by CEI. “I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

He later wrote an e-mail urging Carlin to “move on to other issues and subjects.”

“I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc., at least until we see what EPA is going to do with climate,” McGartland wrote.

Reps. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Darrell Issa, R-Calif., also wrote a letter last week to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson urging the agency to reopen its comment period on the finding. The EPA has since denied the request.

Citing the internal e-mails, the Republican congressmen wrote that the EPA was exhibiting an “agency culture set in a predetermined course.”

“It documents at least one instance in which the public was denied access to significant scientific literature and raises substantial questions about what additional evidence may have been suppressed,” they wrote.

In a written statement, Issa said the administration is “actively seeking to withhold new data in order to justify a political conclusion.”

“I’m sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach,” Sensenbrenner said in a statement, adding that the “repression” of Carlin’s report casts doubt on the entire finding.

We already know what the EPA will be doing on the issue of climate change as surely as we know what the census bureau will be attempting to do in 2010.

Carlin said he’s concerned that he’s seeing “science being decided at the presidential level.”

“Now Mr. Obama is in effect directly or indirectly saying that CO2 causes global temperatures to rise and that we have to do something about it. … That’s normally a scientific judgment and he’s in effect judging what the science says,” he said. “We need to look at it harder.”

He is, of course, correct. What concerns me is that many legislators in the House and Senate appear to be either oblivious or indifferent to these very disturbing facts. I count my own Congressman, Leonard Lance, among that number.

The controversy is similar to one under the Bush administration — only the administration was taking the opposite stance. In that case, scientist James Hansen claimed the administration was trying to keep him from speaking out and calling for reductions in greenhouse gases.

Hansen was muzzled for a very good reason: he is clearly psychotic.