[After reading Professor Stott, I could not encourage you more to view  The Great Global Warming Swindle, a brilliant UK documentary not shown on US television but available on the Internet.  It's long but absolutely worth watching. ---JW]

Global warming represents the latest doom-laden "crisis," one demanding sacrifice to Gaia for our wicked fossil-fuel-driven ways.  But neither history nor science bolsters such an apocalyptic faith.

Our so-called "crisis" is neither a product of current observations nor of projections.

But does it matter if global warming is a "crisis" or not? Aren't we threatened by a serious temperature rise? Shouldn't we act anyway, because we are stewards of the environment?

Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about "saving the planet."

What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence?

As an early and continuing strong supporter of President Bush's war effort, I nonetheless regularly have criticized his administration's inept communications and war-fighting strategies -- particularly in the years from 2004 to 2006.

Along with many others, I was both exasperated and puzzled by the gap between the magnitude of the president's bold enterprise and the stingy assignment of material resources (men and material), and diplomatic energy with which he provisioned it.

Even so, for all their mismanagement of a still vital and noble struggle, the Bush team has better served our cause than has the Democrat Party served its interests in its near-unanimous opposition to the war recently.

Theirs has been the most blatantly unprincipled war opposition short of treason in living memory -- and the Democrat Party is likely to pay a fearsome price at the polls for a generation.

In response to the media frenzy, initiated by the Washington Post, regarding the treatment of our soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I wish to give my perspective.

Please understand that I am speaking for myself and I am responsible for my thoughts alone.  The news media and politicians are making it sound like Walter Reed is a terrible place and the staff here has been abusing our brave wounded soldiers.  They are lying.

I am completing my 24th year of service in the Army next month.  I am currently the senior clinical chaplain at Walter Reed and have been so for the last four years. I will leave to go back to the infantry this summer. 

Here is the truth of what has happened.

As our president arrived in Brazil last week, our media made it sound as if Latin America had erupted in flames. TV news featured flying tear-gas canisters; a typical newspaper headline read, "Angry Crowds Rally Against President in Brazil."

Message: Bush is hated. He's ruined our relations with the hemisphere. Nobody loves us anymore - and it's all his fault.

If you bothered to read the reports below the headlines, you learned that 6,000 Brazilians had gathered in Sao Paulo to protest Bush's arrival in their country.

Wait a minute - wasn't that 600,000? Or at least 60,000?

Nope. Just 6,000 outraged citizens.   In one of the world's largest cities, with a population close to 20 million.

But no way were you going to see a headline that admits, "Anti-Bush Demonstrations Fizzle, Numbers Just Aren't There."

In the last week, two news items caught my attention.

News item No. 1: Dateline Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates - The Louvre Museum is selling the use of its name for a museum in Abu Dhabi for $520 million, and will rent out some of its art exhibits and provide technical museum management services for another $747 million.

News item No. 2: Dateline Dubai, United Arab Emirates - The Halliburton Corp. is moving its worldwide corporate headquarters to Dubai. It will keep most of its staff in Houston, will maintain its legal incorporation in the United States, will remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but will list its shares on a Middle East exchange also.

Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, these items would have given rise to Third World screeching about Western cultural and economic imperialism. But today it is French and American whining that greets these moves.

Imagine the reaction if Western agents slaughtered a hundred Sunni pilgrims on their way to Mecca. The outrage would spark incendiary rhetoric, riots and revenge killings from Peshawar to Paris.

But when Sunni suicide bombers murdered 118 Shia pilgrims (and wounded almost 200 more) on Tuesday (3/6), Sunnis around the globe looked away: Shias only count as Moslems when America can be blamed for their suffering.

Human-rights groups were too busy applauding European requests for the extradition of CIA operatives (the real enemies of Western civilization, of course). Since this butchery wasn't the fault of Americans or Brits, the Europeans themselves took no interest.

American leftists, who raved that Abu Ghraib was another Auschwitz, didn't offer a single word of pity for the Moslem victims of Moslems.

All to be expected.  But shouldn't Moslems have denounced the attacks on the pilgrims?  How do you say "fugedaboutit" in Arabic?

Science works by means of prediction on the basis of testing a hypothesis. 

Once data is collected and evaluated, and a hypothesis formed, scientific method requires that certain predictions be made to act as tests of the overall theory. If the predictions work out, we can regard the hypothesis as proven. If not, we vow to do better next time.

How, then, can the hypothesis of man-made ("anthropogenic") global warming be tested?  Wouldn't one way be to have access to some natural example comparable to what's occurring now, so that we could analyze it and get some idea of what we're facing?

It so happens that we have exactly that. This isn't the first time warming has occurred on earth - it's a commonplace and recurring phenomenon.  One such episode took place in relatively recent historic time - the Medieval Warm Period.

During the MWP, worldwide temperatures rose by 1 to 3 degrees centigrade for a roughly three-hundred-year period beginning in the 10^th century and ending late in the 13^th century.

Warming advocates have made a series of predictions concerning climatic effects over the coming century. Do they pass the MWP test?

The 2008 Democrat presidential primary season has gotten off to a good start -- for the Republicans.

As the Democrat Party presidential aspirants finished their speeches last week to the party's winter meeting, the early big political fact is the dangerous populist and anti-war pull that the candidates feel. This is particularly dangerous for Sen. Hillary Clinton as she ratchets-up, almost weekly, her anti-war Iraqi rhetoric and policy.

Only Jimmy Carter after the Watergate scandal and her husband after the fall of the Soviet Union got a pass from the American electorate on their national-security shortcomings.  Hillary won't be so lucky.