Here’s Cato Institute’s climate ad signed by 100 scientists who claim that climate change has been grossly overstated. Of course, the AGW side has already dismissed this action. Same old, same old, they say. No new names on the list. Just the usual suspects, getting more and more desperate.

Only a few days left till the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama. But while he and his team say reducing the carbon dioxide emissions will be first priority, the inauguration itself will leave a huge carbon footprint on the presidential red carpet.

Using data from the EPA, environmentalist organizations, and various news accounts, the Institute for Liberty estimates more than 500 million pounds of carbon dioxide will be released during the four-day festivities.

The 600 private jets expected to fly visitors to and from the event will produce 25,320,000 pounds of CO2.

Personal vehicles could account for 262,483,200 pounds of CO2.

The horses in the parade will produce more than 400 pounds of CO2.

It would take the average household 57,598 years to produce as much CO2 as Obama’s inauguration. If Barack Obama’s administration is going after small business for its carbon footprint, then maybe they should look at themselves first.

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Read Christopher Booker’s column in The Telegraph.

“Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Far from the science being “beyond dispute”, we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore’s wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried.

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Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050″. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only “clean” coal-fired power plants, using “carbon capture” - burying the CO2 in holes in the ground - which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn’t even yet been developed. He then babbles on about “generating five million new green jobs”. This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those “dirty” coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050″.

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.”

Rachel Marsden has written a refreshing piece about the religion of global warming and its Demagogue Number One - The Goracle.

Forget any sort of environmental leadership position that would limit him to America - The Goracle simply cannot be contained. Within mere days of the Obama win, Gore exploded like Chernobyl all over the op-ed pages of the New York Times:

“The inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he - and we - must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly gworing threat posed by the climate crisis.”

From the next almost president through climate prophet to Global Saviour, it’s been quite a journey for Al Gore. Let’s hope Obama can keep his head cool. Al Gore shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an official position.