We’ve been had

Last year, my column “Global Warming Rope-A-Dope” (12/24/08) started out: “Americans have been rope-a-doped into believing that global warming is going to destroy the planet. Scientists who have been skeptical about manmade global warming have been called traitors or handmaidens of big oil.”

New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies, engaged in scientific and academic fraud but committed criminal acts as well.

Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. CRU has the world’s largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world, including the U.S., its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 global warming report.

The emails involved communication among climate researchers and policy advocates around the world who brazenly discuss both the destruction and hiding of data that does not support their global-warming claims. They discuss criminally deleting data rather than comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

There’s also discussion of faking data for journals such as Nature, conspiring to keep opposing science out of peer-reviewed journals (which they controlled via the editorial boards), and using statistical “tricks” to hide the cooling period of the last 10 years.

One email said, “The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Another said, “it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP,’ even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back.”

MWP refers to the Medieval Warm Period (800 A.D. to 1300 A.D.) when the Earth was much warmer than it is now. This bothers the global warmers because they can’t blame the temperature increase a thousand years ago on SUVs, coal-burning power plants, incandescent bulbs and 60-inch TV screens.

Editors of professional journals, who were willing to publish articles that disagreed with the warmers, were forced to resign — as was in the cases of editors at Climate Research and Geophysical Research Letters.

A flagrant example of suppression is found in CRU director Phil Jones’ letter to Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann that questions whether the work of academics who question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the IPCC report, which represents the environmental extremist’s view on climate science.

Jones writes, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

The fact of the matter is an increasing amount of climate research suggests a possibility of global cooling. Geologist Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, emeritus professor at Western Washington University, says, “Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.”

Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, currently at Uppsala University in Sweden asks, “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?”

Last year’s column closed with my speculation that if ever “the permafrost returns to northern U.S., as far south as New Jersey as it once did, it’s not inconceivable that Congress, caught in the grip of global warming zealots, would keep all the laws on the books they wrote in the name of fighting global warming. Personally, I would not put it past them to write more.”

This is confirmed by the Obama administration’s climate czar, Carol Browner, who, despite dishonesty, fraud and criminality, says she considers the science on global warming settled.

[Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.] COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM