“The author of melting-glacier chapter…knew that claim was false when he made it but included it anyway, because, “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

This past Saturday, my daughter and her family were at our home and we played a guessing game – guess how much snow just got dumped on us.

We measured in the side yard, back yard and on the deck, averaged the three, and came up with 23.5 inches. A few days earlier we had gotten six inches, and just before Christmas we got hit with 30 inches.

Our December snow broke DC snowfall records and we now are likely going to break the record for the most snow in a winter.

All three DC area airports — Dulles, Regan National and BWI – had no flights for two days.

Down here, 90 miles south of DC, we are about to triple our average total seasonal snowfall of 12 to 24 inches.

With another six inches of snow expected this week, this is a good time to talk about global warming.

President Obama in his State of the Union address, said his legislative agenda this year includes “passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill”. With a nod to the dissenters, he said, “I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But here’s the thing — even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future.”

President Obama had already sent John P. Holdren, his Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, to Congress to try and get that “comprehensive” legislation passed.

In what was officially titled “The Administration’s View of the State of the Climate”, Holdren did not hold back in his testimony: “The air and the oceans are warming, mountain glaciers are disappearing, sea ice is shrinking, permafrost is thawing, the great land ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are losing mass, and sea level is rising. We know the primary cause of these changes beyond any reasonable doubt. It is the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping pollutants from our factories, our buildings, our vehicles, and our power plants; from farming, cement manufacture, and waste disposal; and from deforestation and other forms of land-use change that move carbon out of soils and vegetation and into the atmosphere.”

Those are some pretty strong statements, but Holden said it was all based on scientific data, stating that: “The most authoritative global assessment… is the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) shared the 2007 Nobel Prize with Al Gore: the IPCC for its Fourth Assessment Report of 2007, and Al Gore for his book and film, “An Inconvenient Truth”.

One of the main claims in the IPCC’s “authoritative” Report was that the Himalyan glaciers were melting so fast that they would be gone by the year 2035.

But that claim was inconveniently false.

The “Himalyas are melting” claim was taken from a citation in a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report.

The 2005 WWF citation was based on a 1998 news story in the New Scientist.

The 1998 New Scientist report was based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, an Indian scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Hasnain now says his claim was just “speculation”. The Times reported that other glaciologists say his claim was “inherently ludicrous”.

A few weeks before the President’s State of the Union, The London Sunday Times reported that Murari Lal, the author of melting-glacier chapter of the IPCC Report, told the paper that he knew that claim was false when he made it, but Lal included it anyway, because, “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

And that, my fellow snow-shovelers, is the substance of what the President’s expert on the subject says is “the most authoritative global assessment” on global warming.

Editor’s Note: Mike Sharman, a resident of Foothills of Faith Farm in Madison County, Virginia, has served as an attorney and guardian for children for more than two decades. Mike writes a weekly editorial column published by the Culpeper Star-Exponent and others, and has written Faith of the Fathers: Religion and Matters of Faith Contained in the Presidents’ Inaugural Addresses from George Washington to George W. Bush. He also has a work in progress, to be entitled Endowed By Our Creator: Documentary Evidence of Our Christian Heritage. You may contact him at [email protected]

The views of the author are not necessarily those of The Aquila Report.