Please Start Thinking for Yourself on This Global Warming Crap, America!

RUSH: Algore and "Ball of Fire," a takeoff on Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, portrayed vocally by Paul Shanklin. All right, I gotta tell you a story first. I just heard this mere moments ago at the break at the top of the hour. A friend of mine told me that a friend of hers -- who is a stalwart conservative; a very, very responsible citizen; a straight arrow; just a clean-and-pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow-type woman -- is the mother of an 11-year-old child. This woman that we're talking about knows me and is very familiar with the program and is an ardent listener and a solid conservative. Yesterday, or sometime recently, the 11-year-old was forced to watch An Inconvenient Truth, the Algore propaganda movie. Well, no biggie. We've heard this happening throughout the country.

What makes this story unique was that the 11-year-old's parents were required by the public school system here in Palm Beach County to also go to school and watch the movie -- and if they didn't, there could be grade repercussions. The parents were required to watch along with the 11-year-old little sponges, those skulls full of mush that will soak up anything with a sob story in it (Polar bears and you name it). So our stalwart conservative regular listener to this program, someone who knows me fairly well, now believes Algore's movie. "I love Rush, but we're destroying our planet,” is what I was told she said. She's very worried about the polar bears. I've got it in the Global Warming Stack that's been accruing. Do you know that polar bears at the North Pole are increasing in population? They are not decreasing. There are more polar bears -- and guess what? An expedition to the North Pole to conduct a global warming study had to be canceled because of freezing temperatures below what humans can tolerate, snow and ice. It was just announced yesterday. They had to cancel a global warming excursion to the North Pole.

So I said to my friend here to tell her friend, "Well, just go get the New York Times today." I take this personally. This woman has been a steady listener of this program and doesn't really need me to reinforce her own instinctive conservatism. We got this one little stupid propaganda movie that she had to watch in order to protect her daughter's grade, folks, and she now thinks we're destroying the planet. So I said, "Go get the New York Times,” because I have it right here. The New York Times has done a mini-hit piece on Algore and his movie. This piece is replete with scientist after scientist after scientist who says that Algore cannot make the claims he's making and substantiate them in terms of science, and Algore admits in this piece, "Well, yes, we're right on the fundamentals, though, that the world is warming and man's responsible for it,” and they go find scientists who disagree with this.

The headline of this piece is: "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype,” and most of these scientists are talking about this movie. They're talking about this piece of propaganda, this "documentary," An Inconvenient Truth. It prints out to four pages. I don't have the time nor the inclination to read the whole thing to you. We will link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. In fact, Roy Sanders (who called this program) from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who is a great global warming skeptic, is quoted in this piece, as are a number of others. Here's one. Don J. Easterbrook, who later in the piece says, "I'm not a Republican. I have nothing to do politically with this." He is an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University. He said, "I don't want to pick on Al Gore, but there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data."

Now, Algore "in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made 'the most important and salient points' about climate change, if not 'some nuances and distinctions' scientists might want. 'The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,' he said, adding, 'I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.'“ He's admitting he's not a scientist. He's just an evangel. He's an evangelist on this stuff. This piece really, really hits Gore hard, and particularly on this movie -- and, of course, here's Gore saying the scientific "consensus" on global warming has never been stronger! You can't have consensus and science. Science is not subject to a vote. "In addition to all of the inaccuracies and statements that we are seeing, we have to temper that with real data,” the story makes more points. I have to take a break here. If I keep going here, I'm going to be way too long. So let me highlight a couple things from this when we come back. Sit tight. The El Rusho program, amidst billowing clouds of fragrant aromatic first and secondhand cigar smoke, returns after this.

RUSH: More from this New York Times piece: "James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, 'Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,' adding that Mr. Gore often did so 'better than scientists.' Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president's work may hold 'imperfections' and 'technical flaws.' He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States." You know what it was? It was either sand from the Sahara Desert or an El Niño, and they don't know which. But everybody was predicting a horrible hurricane season. If we got rising global temperatures, and the temperature of the oceans are rising and this is something that we can't reverse, then how in the name of hell do you explain so few hurricanes last year after the previous year?

How the hell do you explain the fact these people have to cancel their excursion to the North Pole to study global warming because it's too damn cold to get up there? Too much snow and ice. If there's global warming, there's global warming. We never hear from the media when it's cold. We have these kind of stories, "Well, maybe this global warming thing isn't totally true." Never! You wait 'til we get to June and July and it gets hot like it does in the summer, and we're going to have some high temperatures in places. (panting) "Global warming! Oh, no, it's melting! The sidewalks are melting!” You can make book on it. Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore, "'We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is." " Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. 'Of course,' he said, 'there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions.'“ It's not about science. You even said so at the Academy Awards. It has nothing with science. It's a "moral issue." That's how the left sells their big government, high tax programs. That's all this is about.

Try this: "A report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore's portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium." Now, that's a thousand years. For you people in Rio Linda, a millennium is a thousand years and Gore is now saying our temperatures are higher than they've been in a thousand years. "Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period." In 1600 it was warmer, and of course none of the things that Gore says are causing global warming were happening then. "'Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,' Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. 'Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.'“

Look, I love animals. You people understand this. I melt around them. I love 'em just like everybody else does, but I'm not an idiot -- and this polar bear thing? That one picture of these two polar bears that appear "stranded" on what's left of a mammoth glacier, and it's nothing bigger than your average jungle gym, people see this and the kids cry, "Mommy, mommy, mommy!” and the kids are crying at night, afraid to go to bed, afraid to wake up. There's all kinds of panic and fear, and the parents don't want screaming kids around so it's either Ritalin or let 'em believe in Algore's movie. This infuriates me. It just infuriates me. The whole polar bear photo is a hoax. It was an ice floe! It was ice sculpture actually created by the waves and the bears are out there playing on it. It's not the remnants of a glacier that's detached and floating aimlessly out there, and the bears are not "stranded." They can go 65 to a hundred miles in the ocean swimming.

Now there's more of them at the North Pole than anybody knew. Pretty soon we're going to have to start shooting 'em. Wait 'til that starts happening. Now we have high-earning men blamed for too many carbon emissions. Everything I've told you about this is right out there in the open to be seen by inquiring, open minds. Sometimes I ask, "What is the point? What is the point?" Somebody who's a regular listener to this program for years, a solid conservative's kid can come home from school saying, "Mommy, you gotta go with me and watch the Algore movie because if you don't, I get punished by my grades." Parents show up, they watch it, and they have the same attitude that an 11-year-old has. I feel like doing a Howard Dean scream here. All right, I'm going to rely on you people on the phones to bail me out here and save me.

RUSH: I'll tell you another thing about cats, folks. If my little cat Punkin, if she were bigger, she would eat me. She wouldn't care. Even though she loves me, if she were able to, she’d do a lot of things. You ought to see the way she goes after little lizards. I rescue more lizards than you people would believe. She chases them. "No, Punkin, those are our friends. They eat the insects." She doesn't care. She'll bang them with the paws up the side of the corner and so forth. The things don't stand a chance. Well, I can't say that. Punkin will not go on grass, so I don’t have to worry about her walking away. For some reason she doesn't like grass.

Now, about the polar bears, here's another thing -- and I'm talking to you parents. Kids have an excuse. They're dumb. They haven't lived long enough to acquire a bunch of knowledge. Kids are, by definition, sponges when they're ten, 11, 12 years old, but you parents ought to know better. If something happened at the North Pole and it warmed up, I guarantee you there'd be more polar bears, just like with the caribou. When we put in the Alaska pipeline, everybody said, "Oh, no, we're going to destroy the habitat! The caribou, they're going to die!” There are more of them than ever because they like the warmth near the pipeline. They've been procreating like crazy (with no condoms). There are more caribou than ever. It’s the same with polar bears. The population is growing up there. I tell you this: if it happened to get as hot as they're predicting, they'd adapt. We have them in zoos, and they live, do they not? Polar bears do not need glaciers. They do not need ice. Yes, they're more comfortable, but they'll adapt. Man!

Even with parents, the education system is so woefully incompetent and inept -- economics, biology, science, history, you name it -- and you couple that with an affluent society like ours and the baby boom generation's focus on me, me, me, me, me, and all this awareness and self consciousness, people are just waiting receptacles for guilt. That's what they're using to play on all this is guilt. Ask your friend what the hell has she done or her kid done to cause one bad thing to happen to a single element of life on this planet, other than maybe stomp on a fly, swat a fly or whatever? In terms of the polar bears, what in the world have they done?

Some people think I'm making up this story about the excursion to the North Pole being canceled. You people are trying my patience today. Not all of you people. Some of you people. You know who you are. This is an AP story: "A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite." Frostbite in an excursion to the North Pole to prove global warming! Why isn't everybody in this country hysterical over this? "The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment." Well, I feel like laughing my little ass off, folks. I just love stories like this. Phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock 'n' roller, all these arrogant snobs who think they've got all the answers can't go study global warming in the North Pole because they've got frostbite and it's so cold their batteries are dying.

Meanwhile, the polar bears are threatened. "They repaired the snowshoe with binding from a ski, but Atwood said the patch job created pressure on Arnesen's left foot, which led to blisters that then turned into frostbite. Then there was the cold " quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected." It's the North Pole, you idiots. What are you expecting to find, palm trees up there? "One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said." Nowhere in this story is there any questioning of the global warming scare that is being promulgated by a bunch of leftists. "Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures."

CALLER: That's a good point. That's actually why I called. I'm a physics graduate student at the University of Virginia, and I'll tell you what: for the better part of ten years I've been studying science, and global warming is not part of curriculum -- not in physics, I doubt it's in the curriculum of chemistry. It's a very small subset I think of scientists really study it at all. I think the reason -- I mean you talk about the scientific "consensus." That's the great appeal of global warming: the reason it's a consensus is out of laziness, I think, more than out of knowledge.

RUSH: I don't doubt that at all. I think these things develop an inertia. There's identity associated with it. You get yourself involved in one of these things that sweeps the planet and you're part of an accepted clique. Everybody wants to be part of the big group. Nobody wants to be an outsider. Nobody wants to be laughed at, thought of as a nerd or whatever. You get involved in one of these big movements and make you feel good about yourself. Then there's money for research on the other end of this. The UN will fund any kind of research that will prove its agenda. Many governments will do the same thing. Let's face it: scientists are not entrepreneurs when it comes to earning money. A lot of people need grants, research grants and this kind of thing, which is why they hold up as many people as they can, the private sector and that sort of thing. As an aside, one of the interesting things to me about embryonic stem cells is that there's so little private sector money in it because there haven't been any results. That's why everybody in that area of research is going to the government because that's the only place they can get it.

RUSH: All right, something I keep saying -- and I picked it up from Michael Crichton because it made total sense to me. I'm a layman when it comes to science, but it makes total sense to me. I've asked a number of people about it. I want to get your opinion. How can there be "consensus" in science? Science is not up to a vote. When you were in class getting your degree, were you guys allowed to vote on what science is and isn't, or were you taught certain absolutes in order to learn what you had to learn to get your degree?

CALLER: We were definitely taught absolutes. There's not a whole lot of room for opinion. I mean, you can interpret the results and stuff, but it's based on several axioms. The problem is a lot of it is accepted just kind of on faith because there's so much information that one person can't take it all, so if you get enough people preaching something like global warming the rest is -- clearly not the rest, but a lazy scientist -- will be quick to say, "Oh, okay. This guy studied it. My field is lasers, not meteorology, so I'll just take his word for it."