Fenger Pointing
Becky Fenger | December 2, 2009
Chilling Climategate
A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe that global warming is occurring has dropped from 80 percent in July 2008 to 72 percent now. That figure should sink even lower with the revelation of the 3,000 plus e-mails and papers from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) on the Internet.
The e-mails that have been rooted out by a hacker (or maybe a whistleblower) come from a small cadre of British and U.S. climate scientists who have massaged data to fit their theories, used outright flawed data and phony numbers, hidden their work from the public who paid for it, squelched contrary evidence and threatened skeptics with professional harm. Jokingly, Prof. S. Fred Singer says that these people have "demonstrated that global warming is man-made after all – created by this group of zealous scientists!" And these are the very scientists who have authored the United Nations' reports on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) that have been used to scare the world into regulating carbon dioxide emissions.
I have been involved in this fight since 1994, yet I harbor no illusions that this will puncture the balloon of Al Gore and his disciples. Despite the fact that even global warming zealots admit the damning e-mails are a major blow to their cause, they will not admit defeat. Take Carol Browner, President Barack Obama's energy and environment advisor and former director of the EPA (please!). She stubbornly announced that the purloined e-mails "don't change anything." That's the hardened and dishonest Carol Browner administrations have come to know and love.
Last weekend, there was no mention of Climategate on public television's "Washington Week" or "The McLaughlin Group," even as panelists discussed the Copenhagen Summit and which nations will agree to cuts in carbon emissions. George Stephanopoulos described the scandal as a mere "complication," yet the U.S. is poised to spend trillions of dollars and choke our freedoms based on faulty climate models and fraudulent data. His panelist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, argued, "People have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There's not a single smoking gun in there." Is he daft? It's the Scottsdale Gun Club and Shooter's World combined! And He can't excuse the dishonest scientists by claiming "academiaspeak" as a defense.
The New York Times refuses to print the e-mails. Another political commentator maintained that anyone could lift a few phrases in correspondence and make it appear there is fraud and deceit there. A few, maybe. But three thousand? One of the e-mails read: "It is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has stopped." Oops. He let the polar bear out of the seal-skinned bag there. But the real travesty is the Al Gores of the world could so long lie to the frightened public, so long threaten the livelihoods of AGW skeptics, so long stifle peer review, so long ignore requests for documents. That should change now that the Competitive Enterprise Institute (bless their pointy little heads!) is taking legal action against the government to force disclosure of public climate information. (Did I mention that we paid big bucks for this info?)
Science is sporting a huge black eye over the outing of this massive data manipulation and the realization that many great institutions of science refused to defend independent scientific inquiry.
The sad reality is there is so much money involved in the man-made global warming hoax worldwide the myth won't die. The Waxman Markey Cap and Trade bill will fade away, but that will be due more to the fact of the desperate state of our economy and high unemployment rates rather than any scientific revelations. The biggest industry in the world is fighting "climate change." The energy bill that would tax Americans almost a trillion dollars would send only 15 percent of that amount to our Treasury; 85 percent would go to the entities that helped support the legislation.
When the mainstream press puts a blackout on a story, even if it's the biggest scandal in the scientific field in a quarter century, it's like the tree that fell in the forest with no one to hear it. Robert Watson, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore's science advisor is fighting release of the data from the Climate Research Unit. How wonderful and proper if we could find it in our Christmas stockings.