UNDER THE RADAR – AT 9:17 A.M. ET:  Funny, but I couldn't find much about this in the usual media.  It's a good first step, but it's only a beginning:

(CNSNews.com) - The House of Representatives has voted to defund a United Nations climate change panel after the Republican who introduced the proposal said the body had “whipped up a global frenzy” over climate change because its members were politically motivated.

“It is tragic that some perhaps well-meaning but politically motivated scientists who should know better have whipped up a global frenzy about a phenomenon which is statistically questionable at best,” Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) said on the House floor late Saturday night.

Luetkemeyer introduced the amendment to the Full Year Continuing Appropriations Act, a bill that will fund the federal government for the balance of the year. His amendment prohibits any of the money the government plans to spend this year from supporting the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body that reports on climate change science.

COMMENT:  The vote may be purely symbolic, as prospects in the Senate are iffy, but the message sent is a strong one.  The climate-change lobby will call it "anti-science," but it isn't.  The vote expresses displeasure with the UN's irresponsible handling of "climate change," and Luetkemeyer is correct:  political motivation plays a key role.  What we have often seen is political science, not real science.

As we have screamed here before, it is time, in this advanced country, for a Challenger-like commission to investigate the whole area of climate change and definitively report what we know, what we don't know, and what we have to know.  We are being asked to spend trillions of dollars to defeat a phenomenon that may not actually exist.

One element here that bears investigating – and President Eisenhower predicted it some half century ago in his farewell address to the nation – is the impact of government grants on scientific findings.  When grants are only available to those who go along with the party line, you may be sure that the line will find favor in laboratories throughout the country.  Even in science, money talks.

The left will ask no questions.  So we'll have to.

February 23, 2011