Mike pulls together all of the data in one place and makes a compelling argument.
Is this a scientific scandal or a journalism scandal?
It took an inordinately long time for the original Climategate scandal to percolate to the surface of the mainstream news media's consciousness. In that one, files were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University exposing the biggest names in global warming research as cynical, dishonest, politically motivated hacks.
The famous computer model used to predict global warming was found to be buggy and unreliable. And even though these men and their predictions were the basis for international treaties and proposed U.S. law, the news of their corruption garnered scant attention.
The Associated Press decided the leaked e-mails did not prove that climate data was faked, a judgment disputed by the left-leaning British newspaper, The Guardian.
But the AP missed the point. The e-mails did prove that the leaders in global warming science were not impartial researchers in pursuit of the truth, but had definite political agendas and did use their positions to stifle dissent and hide contradictory data.
For the past three years, we've been assured that the science supporting the international drive to impose economic burdens, erase national sovereignty and to crush individual liberty was based upon the best possible science. It was "settled," they told us. Balderdash.
But even as the U.S. news media played "hear no evil, see no evil," newspapers in Europe have begun to peel away the layers of deceit and have exposed the shabbiness and political agendas of the "research" used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to make their predictions.
Among the more dramatic claims made by IPCC was that, by 2035, Himalayan glaciers would melt. These glaciers are critical to agriculture for three nations, including the two largest, China and India. Their disappearance would be devastating. The disappearance of those glaciers would lead to famine in India.
As it turns out, the primary evidence used to make those predictions were anecdotes collected in a mountaineering magazine and a single master's thesis written by a Swiss graduate student who cited the magazine as his source. It was eventually confessed that the predictions were included in the final report to increase political pressure for a climate treaty.
Another prediction in the IPCC report said the Amazon rainforest would be denuded by even minor fluctuations in annual rainfall. This turned out to be entirely fabricated. The observed losses in rainforest were caused by logging and not climatic fluctuations. What's particularly disturbing is the reliance of the IPCC upon very suspect information sources for these predictions. Both the World Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace were treated as disinterested, reliable sources. But both the WWF and Greenpeace are politically driven advocacy pressure groups with left-wing agendas even more transparent than those of the scientists exposed in the original Climategate scandal.
And as is so often the case in climate science, there's money involved. The chair of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, had a fiduciary interest in pushing the IPCC's findings. Pachauri is heavily invested in such schemes as carbon trading, and the future of his investments depend upon sustaining hysteria and the passage of laws and treaties intended to cap carbon emissions.
Gee. This reminds me of a certain failed presidential candidate in this country who is on track to become the world's first "green" billionaire.
The IPCC report also concluded that global warming was responsible for an increase in the frequency and severity of disasters such as floods and hurricanes. The sourcing for that study was also anecdotal and not a single peer-reviewed paper was cited.
Both the United States National Atmospheric and Space Administration and the Climate Research Unit have been presented with Freedom of Information Act requests to share their data. In the case of the CRU, they were found to have violated the law and much of the requested information is missing. What has been found is that CRU cherry-picked and even moved data recording stations. At NASA, the little bit of information that has been gleaned reveals that NASA systematically deleted recording stations that returned cooler than desired results. The actual number of stations used in their data collection has fallen from 6,000 to only 1,500.
There was once a time when cover ups piqued journalistic attention. No more. Kim Jong Il is treated with more skepticism by North Korean newspapers than global warming orthodoxy receives in the United States.