It looks like I’m going to let my Road & Track subscription lapse. I’ve been reading it since 1965 standing in front of a newsstand. I’ve always been too frugal or lazy to actually own a performance car but the technology fascinates me.

I’m two issues behind in my reading. Presently, I’m reading a story by Sam Smith and his photographer driving a crew cab pickup up ‘Going to the Sun Road’ in Glacier Park. Sam (one reason I subscribe to R&T) is lamenting the disappearance of Glacier’s glaciers and naturally, blaming climate change.

Sam could have driven our car up there while emitting less than half the green house gasses. He could have hiked and had the experience of a lifetime being in one of the few places on the continent where all native carnivores survive and thrive (as he pointed out). He could have hitchhiked. He could have had steak instead of cereal.

But no. He went about spewing the dreaded CO2 in a typical example of our moral decay; the ends justifying the means. Setting a bad example himself, like the joy of tossing a Busch Light can out in our driveway?

Mr. Smith obviously feels guilty about driving cars. A Ram pickup pulled into an overlook where they were watching the sunrise. Aha! A cause of climate change revealed? Sam felt he should visit with the owner of this neatly modified truck but he was too overwhelmed with shame or sadness to walk across the parking lot and associate with a fellow enthusiast.

His opinion that human activity and “our” ability to resolve the problem must have come from somewhere. Smith cites the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC gathers data and then distributes it to media and policymakers. I looked into the data trail to Sam Smith and us, and found some interesting discrepancies.

The trends were illustrated by graphs. The start dates on the graphs varied. Some examples:

• A graph of heat wave magnitude by the National Climate Assessment passed to the public showed an upward trend from 1960 to present. The part of the graph kept secret by the IPCC showed 1900 to 1960 to be substantially higher than the period we were shown, making the upward trend nothing but a joke.
• A U.S. Forest Service Graph exposed to the public shows an uptrend from 1982 of 3 million acres burned in wildfires through today of 10 million acres. The part kept secret by the IPCC was 1916 until 1982; all higher than the released data. Some of it was 80% higher than so-called crisis levels of today.
• Another area of grave concern is sea levels. Since the 1920s, sea levels have risen about nine inches, measured at the Lower Manhattan Tide Gauge according to data released by the IPCC. The data not released is the rest of the story (do you miss Paul Harvey too?). Measurements taken at that location began in 1850 and the rise in sea level has averaged 2.84 millometers per year ever since. Twenty thousand years ago sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today, allowing people to walk from Siberia to North America. Of that 400 feet of rise only 16 of them occurred in the last 7,000 years.

These lies by omission should give us pause any time we see new information on climate science or anything else (weapons of mass destruction?) that demand enormous amounts of lives and cash.

Sam Smith is a Good Samaritan. But like G.W. Bush, who believed the weapons of mass destruction story, he’s been duped. But all credibility goes out the window when he acts like a philandering evangelist.

Next week we find Michael Moore, of all people, exposing renewable energy fraud.