While being told by Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid that we "can't drill our way out" of our current gasoline price crisis, we are quickly coming to the point when everyone (who hasn't already), regardless of party affiliation or political leaning, will then ask the next logical question: "Then, what do we do?"  The sooner this question gets asked, the sooner we have the making of the political wave which could ensure that John McCain wins the election (along with a contingent of Republican legislators). 

As a problem that hits every American squarely in the wallet, and isn't going to go away when the next blip surfaces on the news cycle radar screen, this is a clear winner for Republicans if it is packaged correctly.  In fact, the potential for this to sway masses of Democrats to vote Republican in November is huge.  That may actually be a huge understatement, especially considering that the backbone of the Democratic Party isn't the effete, intellectual crowd which claims Obama as its own.  It also isn't the radical left-wing environmentalist types that have hijacked the agenda of the Party for the past two decades.  Digging deeper, and recognizing where the real bulk of the party lies, is the key.

This backbone of the party are the blue-collar families, heavily steeped in labor unions, that have provided the Democratic Party with a solid base from which to put forth their platform.  Without this base, the Party is simply a conglomeration of various "movements," which constitute planks of the platform which may not be all that important to this base.  Think about the teamsters and the auto worker unions.  Are the unions out there championing the plight of the polar bear, the protection of a woman's right to choose, the need for gun control, or the legalization of gay marriage?  There may be some union members (possibly even a large component) who support these causes, just as there are certainly members who hold positions more traditionally put forth by Republicans. The unions themselves however, and in large part, their members, are concerned primarily with improving or maintaining their economic well-being.  That is, after all, the purpose of labor unions: to protect the rights, and improve the pay and benefits, of their members. 

The current cost of energy (and particularly gasoline) presents a tremendous threat to the union members well-being in both the short and long terms.   Both the short- and long-term threats should be effectively exploited by  Republicans to reap benefits.  The Obama/Pelosi/Reid Democrats will focus on the short term as the problem and blur the long term to avoid finding the obvious solution (drill for more oil) in favor of their stated preferred outcome: development of alternative energy sources. 

Neither party is claiming to be able to provide the instant gratification of dramatically reduced gas prices.  Both are proposing a method for becoming more energy independent.  But the cost of the Republicans' proposal is increased potential environmental degradation of areas known of by few Americans and seen by even fewer, while the cost of the Democrats' proposal is the livelihood, economic security, and way of life for millions of Americans: many of them union members.

Union members drive trucks to deliver our food and other products to market.  Few feel the price at the pump more than our truckers, paying more than $5.00 per gallon for diesel fuel.  To tell them that we as a nation will not do anything to assist them in lowering those prices is bad enough, but to add insult to injury, the Democrats are telling them that they will be actively working to make the investments they've made in their livelihood (their trucks) obsolete. 

Union members mine the coal and drill for the oil that powers our electrical grid, fuels our vehicles, and literally greases the wheels of industry.  These folks are being told that the work they are doing is expendable, and even maliciously destructive, by the very party that takes their support for granted. 

Union members build the automobiles for a consumer base that demands independent transportation for themselves.  These workers are being faced with reductions in automobile manufacturing output because of increased fuel costs in the short term.  In the long term, increased fuel costs and increased conservation efforts means a decrease in vehicle miles driven.  Cars (which will cost more) will last longer, meaning that fewer cars (and fewer car builders) will be needed.

Tell these union members that the increased fuel costs are resulting in police departments restricting the number of miles that officers drive in a shift, thereby limiting the areas that they can effectively patrol.  Ask them if they are willing to wait until some unknown alternative fuel technology is developed before they can again enjoy the same level of protection they have grown accustomed to.

In the service industries and their unions, the direct impacts of increased fuel costs are more hidden, but still there.  All of us feel, and will continue to feel, the pinch of the high gas prices, unless we take positive action now.  It is the promised results of the action proposed by the Republicans that holds the potential to show union members that the Democratic party has left them and their Middle-American values behind in favor of a new set of values offered by the left-wing factions of their party.

Let's not squander the opportunity to draw a distinct line between the two parties and give everyone a reason to really decide which side holds the greatest promise for future prosperity.

Just when you thought the world was about to end, the Global Warming scientists have decided to press the "Pause" button on the warming trend.  Not the "Stop/Eject" button, mind you, because Global Warming is still happening.  But hey, at least we can buy another 10 years or so before we're sweating in the wintertime.

The truth that global warming is a farce has been leaking out for some time, thus the move from “global warming” to “climate change” was necessitated. Not quite as specific as “global warming,” but just as ominous in it’s purported implications. This has gone so far that at the national planning conference I attended last month, nearly every session was beating the “climate change” drum, whereas at the last conference I attended (in 2006), I was subjected to not a single mention of it.

What astounds me isn’t the need for the enviro-nuts to insist on a problem du jour. They’ve always done that since they became an organized bunch finding an ear in the leaders of the ’60’s anti-war movement. They’ve trumpeted the warnings of mass extinctions, the advent of a new ice age due to man-made pollution of the atmosphere, the dangers of nuclear energy, the destruction of over 200,000 acres of rainforest each day, global warming due to man-made pollution of the atmosphere. Each of these alarms were sounded with the impending doom at least 30 to 50 years out. Enough time that, should they be shown to be wrong (as many of them are), either folks would have forgotten about these warnings or be dead. So I can’t be surprised about the continued insistence on a problem of catastrophic scale.

What I am surprised about is that so many of us, the “uneducated masses” who don’t hold the PhD’s and who have never taken part in a PETA protest, a peace march, a sit-in, or a 12-hour hunger strike, have gone from seeing these people as they should be seen (Chicken Little) to seeing them as unerring guardians of our well-being. I’m just blown away by this. From those “true believers” I know, I hear them proclaim that they have “read the science” behind climate change and that it’s sound. “The computer models just don’t lie.” Sounds good to a techno-geek like myself, but for that troublesome term GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Climate is essentially the “average” of weather over a long period of time. In order to quantify our knowledge of climate over the long term, we need to be able to quantify our knowledge of weather over periods of much shorter terms. At the present time, our ability to predict the weather more than about 30 days out is non-existent, even with the very best of computer modeling. Why? Because the systems which interact to create the weather are terribly complex and not fully understood. We can’t quantify them all at this point.

Climate is a tremendously more complex system, extremely chaotic and subject to major deviations due to changes in seemingly very small details. So the addition of previously unaccounted for data to climate models can have very huge effects on the output of those models, as was recently demonstrated when the recently quantified ocean circulation cycles were plugged in to the UN climate change model. Now, the model's output tells us that there is apparently no climate change problem, at least for the foreseeable future. I’ve no doubt that someone will come up with new data in the future and plug that in, only to find that the output shows us back on the warming trend. But that shouldn't put us back into our current frenzy, because we just don’t know what else is missing that will further affect the model when it is eventually entered. Remember: GIGO.

The fact that a given piece of data isn't the only relevant one doesn't make it garbage.  However, a model which doesn't include all relevant data can easily produce output which does qualify as garbage.  Missing data can function much like pesky algebraic variables.  Change the value of the variable and you change the value of the solution to the equation. 3x+7=10 if x=1, but 3x+7=28 if x=7. Perhaps an even more accurate analogy is found when you consider that if you know what you want the value of the solution to be, you can make the math give it to you. I don't know what x really is but I want the solution to be 46, so I'll just assign x a value of 13.  In a somewhat different approach, garbage can also be obtained by basing long term future predictions on recent past data trends. I'm assuming that the road I'm traveling on will eventually reach the top of Mount Everest simply because the last 2 miles have trended uphill.  Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Reacting extremely to facts which we know are inadequate, inconclusive, or incomplete is just plain stupid. Actually, it's irresponsible, but many of the climate change gurus have long ago stopped caring about responsibility, particularly their own (see Lear Jet Liberals, Al Gore, John Travolta, et al); so stupid seems to be appropriate here as well.  When our knowledge expands to the point when we can predict particular components of the weather (for instance, amount of rainfall) with a relative degree of accuracy for a year or more in the future, we’ll be in a much better place to stand and claim the ability to be able to predict where our climate is headed. Until then, I can’t see the climate change furor as anything more than just fear-mongering. Sorry Mr. Gore: You can keep your Oscar and your Nobel Prize, but I’ll keep my truck and my barbecue grill, thank you very much.

Credit for causing this outburst to be written goes to my good friend Mark, who has been a long-time critic of climate change alarmists.