By Steve Byas

The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, by U.S. Senator James Inhofe, WND Books. 305 pages, endnotes and index.

I was sitting underneath OU's Memorial Stadium in September 2000, avoiding the oppressive heat of 108 degrees as long as possible before the kick-off of OU's football season, wherein they claimed their seventh national championship.

I commented to my son, who was sitting next to me, that this was the hottest I had ever seen it for an OU football game (it was also the earliest home opener in Sooner history). Sitting close by, a man commented, "And it will be even hotter next year, then even hotter the year after that."

At the time, I just dismissed the guy as an extremist who had bought into the Global Warming Myth of the day, but over the next few years I became increasingly concerned. No one seemed willing to stand up to the Global Warming Alarmists, led by former Vice President Al Gore. It appeared inevitable that we were on a path to socialistic government regulations that would destroy our economy. FOX News, supposedly the "fair and balanced" network, joined with practically every other media outlet and politician in parroting the mantra that the world was getting warmer, we were heading toward all sorts of disasters, it was caused by human activity (actually they generally said "man-made," as they usually do when something is bad, while if it is good, then it is politically correct to say "human-caused" instead of man-made), we must drastically lower our standard of living, and accept draconian government controls over the economy and our lives.

Then, there was a voice crying in the wilderness, arguing against the accepted Global Warming dogma. This modern-day John the Baptist was Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.

Almost alone among national politicians, Inhofe fought against the surrender of our free enterprise system. But this was not the first time Inhofe had taken up the challenge of fighting the Establishment. As recent as 2008, when other members of the Oklahoma congressional delegation buckled to the pressure and voted for the TARP bailout, it was Senator Jim Inhofe who courageously voted no (Representative Frank Lucas, to his credit, also voted no).

When still a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Inhofe challenged entrenched House rules designed to thwart legislation opposed by House Speaker Jim Wright and other liberals. Specifically, Inhofe took on a rule that was designed to bottle up "discharge petitions." When legislation is introduced, it is assigned to a committee. Far too often, good legislation never gets out of a committee, despite the likelihood it would be popular with the general public and pass if it ever made it onto the floor for a vote. There was a provision for a "discharge petition," under which a member could force a bill out for a vote, if the member could get the signatures of a majority of the members of the House on a petition. The problem was, under House rules, the petition was kept in the offices of House leadership, and no member was allowed to reveal the names of those who had signed the petition, under threat of expulsion from the House.

Cleverly, Inhofe revealed the names of those who had not signed the petition, which led to the collapse of the system of keeping the names secret. Inhofe's daring move was the subject of a lengthy article in Reader's Digest magazine. It also contributed to Inhofe's surprisingly easy victory for the U.S. Senate in 1994 over fellow Oklahoman David McCurdy.

As a senator, Inhofe took on the Global Warming Myth, and was dismissed as a "Holocaust denier" by many in the media and by Global Warming Alarmists. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., even declared that skepticism about Global Warming was "treason," and "we need to start treating them as traitors."

Even evangelical preachers like Rick Warren, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), expressed their concern about Global Warming, and implied that government restriction of the economy to combat Global Warming was the proper Christian position.

Inhofe directly challenged Global Warming's High Priest, Al Gore. In his book, Inhofe relates how Gore, at the end of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth movie, the message is flashed on the screen, asking the question, "Are you ready to change the way you live?"

"So I said, yes, Al Gore, are you ready to change the way you live," wrote Inhofe. When Gore testified to Inhofe's Senate committee in March, 2007, Inhofe asked Gore if he would be willing to sing a pledge, that as a believer in catastrophic man-made global warming, "would he consume no more energy at his residence than the average American household by March 21, 2008?"

Al Gore would not answer the question during the hearing, and even invited Inhofe to have breakfast with him sometime to further discuss the issue. Despite Inhofe's persistence, Gore dodged answering the question for months, until finally Gore gave a one-word answer: "No."

In July 2010, Jon Karl of ABC News invited Inhofe to give an interview outside -- in the heat -- about the issue. "Their intentions were obvious," Inhofe wrote, knowing that they wished to ambush him, since it was such a hot day. Outside, Karl brought out a pan with an egg in it, but it didn't fry. "After the botched ambush, the crew tossed the egg out on to the grass. When my communications director started to take pictures of the unfried proof of global warming, the ABC news crew came sprinting back to clear the evidence."

The book is not just stories of Inhofe's personal experiences, but he also presents evidence of problems with the man-made Global Warming theory, such as the existence of the Medieval Warming Period. It was a time when the Vikings farmed in Greenland in areas that are now sheets of ice. "Climate alarmists have long been attempting to erase this inconvenient Medieveal Warm Period from the Earth's climate history for at least a decade because it doesn't fit in with their theories of catastrophe," Inhofe wrote.

He then relates the story of David Deming, an OU Assistant Professor of Geosciences. (Deming has written several articles for the Oklahoma Constitution newspaper on a variety of topics, including Global Climate Change). "Dr. Deming was welcomed into the close-knit group of global warming believers after he published a paper in 1995 that noted some warming in the twentieth century. Deming says he was subsequently contacted by a prominent global warming alarmist who told him point-blank, "We have to get rid of that Medieval Warm Period.'"

One of the more interesting aspects of the book to me is Inhofe's chapter on his defense of congressional earmarks. Clearly, the popular position is to decry earmarks, but as Jonathan Rauch wrote in the National Journal, "Beating up on earmarks is fun...Their budgetary impact is trivial in comparison with entitlements and other large programs. Obsessing about earmarks, indeed, has the perverse, if inconvenient, effect of distracting the country from its real spending problems."

Amazingly, many who have garnered great positive publicity in opposing congressional earmarks, like Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, voted for the $700 billion bank bailout known as TARP!

Inhofe argues that those who advocate the end of Congressional earmarks are saying, in effect, "Let's give all authority for the function of government programs to a centralized executive branch."

Inhofe explains: "Banning or eliminating Congressional appropriations they call earmarks, simply sends the money to the Executive Branch. The expenditure of taxpayer dollars remains at the same level, only with bureaucrats and administration officials allocating the funds rather than Congress. Not one dime is save."

The real issue, Inhofe writes, is "the bloated government budget, mostly in the area of entitlements and other large programs."

In an op-ed piece for the Washington Times, Inhofe said, "If an appropriations item that is directed by Congress is removed (or an attempt is made to remove the item), the money does not return to the Treasury to pay down the debt. Instead, the bottom-line expenditure amount remains the same, and the money is put into the hand of the executive branch, in this case, Mr. Obama, to spend how he sees fit."

Inhofe and Congressman Ron Paul coauthored a release challenging the recent earmarks ban in the House of Representatives: "I applaud Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) in being one of the only conservative Republicans in the House to defy the demagoguery and join me," Inhofe wrote.

Ron Paul and Jim Inhofe wrote in the release: "With the current earmark ban in place, Congress becomes nothing more than a rubber stamp for President Obama's spending request, and our opposition to the ban is based on the fact that this is not how our Founding Fathers envisioned our government. When writing the U.S. Constitution, they gave Congress, not the executive branch, the power of the purse."

In an interesting story, Inhofe relates how FOX News' Sean Hannity had a series about what he considered to be the 102 worst earmarks related to government spending of tax dollars. "After Hannity's program aired, I repeated his list in a speech I gave on the Senate floor." Inhofe asked what the 102 "earmarks" all had in common. The answer was that not one was a "congressional earmark. They were all enacted by President Obama and his bureaucrats."

Finally, Inhofe relates a story of when his granddaughter came home from school and asked him why he did not understand global warming. Inhofe traced that she had been taught some information from the EPA to a public school system in Oklahoma, the "false information" the result of a grant designed to brainwash kids into believing in man-made global warming. The source of the grant was a bureaucratic earmark.

I highly recommend the purchase of and the reading of this book by Senator Inhofe.