Inhofe's "Greatest Hoax" is a well-written and argued explanation of the global warming hoax as seen from Washington, D. C. It is somewhat biographical as it is focused on his career in politics. But it does so in a logical way that begins with a local battle over relocating a fire escape with the City Engineer in Tulsa, which Inhofe resolves by getting elected Mayor of the City and firing the obstructionist. He follows this with his campaign to eliminate the House's "discharge petition" procedure in the 1970's. Which brings him to finally becoming the sole voice of reason within our Congress at the height of Al Gore's public relations rampage in 2006 and beyond. It is an "inside baseball" type of book, with the subject being the mishandling of the global warming issue by three administrations and our Congress. But this is an important point of view, and understanding all these nuances is critical. Our Congress has spent the last 50 years revising the rules of the game so that accountability is almost impossible. His story of the discharge petition battle makes clear the need to be skeptical of any politician.
On the topic of anthropogenic global warming, and an airborne fertilizer, CO2, the book is authoritative and well sourced. Inhofe has used his staff wisely over the years to research important policy issues, and this is reflected in his knowledge of these issues and the organization he brings to the subject matter. I followed the ClimateGate scandal several years ago thru Technology Review and other sources, but I did not attempt to dig thru this smoldering heap of emails. Inhofe and his staff have done that, and he has some very interesting and cogent descriptions of the malfeasance that was uncovered. For example, Inhofe describes how tree-ring data that did not support a warming trend after 1961 was replaced with temperature data in order to create the Hockey Stick. And this mixing of apples and oranges was applauded as a good "trick" by other global warming "researchers" who needed to mask reality to fit their fantasies. And Inhofe is bipartisan in his criticism of his Congressional colleagues. John McCain and Newt Gingrich receive a few well deserved smacks on the backside for their mindless advocacy of global warming when it was the fashionable thing to do.
This is a great book. It will help future generations understand how the world allowed itself to be flimflammed by some second rate hucksters.
But that isn't all, Inhofe also ventures into the debate over earmarks, and as usual he takes the unpopular side of the argument. In this case, he argues that the administration managed to use the earmark process to funnel billions of dollars into global warming advocacy, and it will continue to do so. When the House voluntarily abandoned earmarks last year, it basically surrendered its only weapon to counter the administration. The complexity of Inhofe's argument convinces me that our popular understanding of the Congressional budgeting process is deficient. I'd like to think that expenditures that are discussed in public forums and voted on, if only in committee, are not earmarks. These are the legitimate stuffing of a Congressional budget. I'd like to think that earmarks are the curious expenditures that show up in the final draft with no public record of prior debate or discussion, leaving the Congress to vote on a bill that encompasses tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditures with a few thousand special favors thrown in amounting to a mere few billion dollars that are considered earmarks. But I must be mistaken. The process is apparently much more obscure or multifaceted than that. In any event, it needs to be uprooted and replaced.
Thirty years ago before "Global Warming", climatology was an interest of mine, and I attended many seminars on the subject. The usual joke at the beginning of each talk was no climatologist should be allowed to create more than one model in his career, since alterations to his original work could amount to nothing more than fitting the model to the data. We've come a long ways in thirty years. By allowing climatologists to create the data needed to fit the model, we've turned an obscure intellectual pursuit into a road to wealth and power that can employ thousands. This also needs to be uprooted and replaced.
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