Climategate: You should be Steamed

cru_bldg-180pxBy Neil Frank

Now that Copenhagen is past history, what is the next step in the man-made global warming controversy? Without question, there should be an immediate and thorough investigation of the scientific debauchery revealed by “Climategate.”

If you have not heard, hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, of the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. CRU is one of the top climate research centers in the world. Many of the exchanges were between top mainstream climate scientists in Britain and the U.S. who are closely associated with the authoritative (albeit controversial) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Particularly disturbing was the way the core IPCC scientists (the believers) marginalized the skeptics of the theory that man-made global warming is large and potentially catastrophic. The e-mails document that the attack on the skeptics was twofold. First, the believers gained control of the main climate-profession journals. This allowed them to block publication of papers written by the skeptics and prohibit unfriendly peer review of their own papers. Second, the skeptics were demonized through false labeling and false accusations.

Climate alarmists would like you to believe the science has been settled and all respectable atmospheric scientists support their position. The believers also would like you to believe the skeptics are involved only because of the support of Big Oil and that they are few in number with minimal qualifications.

But who are the skeptics? A few examples reveal that they are numerous and well-qualified. Several years ago two scientists at the University of Oregon became so concerned about the overemphasis on man-made global warming that they put a statement on their Web site and asked for people’s endorsement; 32,000 have signed the petition, including more than 9,000 Ph.Ds. More than 700 scientists have endorsed a 231-page Senate minority report that questions man-made global warming. The Heartland Institute has recently sponsored three international meetings for skeptics. More than 800 scientists heard 80 presentations in March. They endorsed an 881-page document, created by 40 authors with outstanding academic credentials, that challenges the most recent publication by the IPCC. The IPCC panel’s report strongly concludes that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide.

Last year 60 German scientists sent a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to “strongly reconsider” her position supporting man-made global warming. Sixty scientists in Canada took similar action. Recently, when the American Physical Society published its support for man-made global warming, 200 of its members objected and demanded that the membership be polled to determine the APS’ true position.

Read the rest of this piece at Houston Chronicle.

15 Responses to Climategate: You should be Steamed

  1. Neil F. AGWD/BSD January 4, 2010 at 12:25 pm #

    “Over the last decade Earth’s temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. If the climate models cannot get it right for the past 10 years, why should we trust them for the next century?”

    Gee, who’s been saying this for the last couple of years here? God, I love it when I’m right………………………..

  2. Rob N. Hood January 4, 2010 at 4:05 pm #

    Maybe you guys are right, after all, about a lot of things (crazier things have happened right?). For example, the idea that the forces behind the obvious demise of everything good about America is Socialist and/or Communist. I’ve historically argued otherwise. However… there’s this Gorilla in the living room:

    Chinese rulers and the US elites have obviously partnered to enslave US workers and consumers. As a result, the US has become a vassal state of China, a huge population which props up the buck so that it can sell us junk via Wal-Mart, etc.

    But you’d have to admit that this didn’t start with Obama. Bush (W) started selling us off to China a long time ago. Sure Clinton helped a little with the NAFTA thing, indirectly. And even Reagan supported libertarian capitalism and started the wave of jobs going to Mexico. But I’d place most of the (recent) blame on W. Now, if Obama doesn’t do anything about this problem, which is HUGE, and could yet implode our entire economy, then he will be to blame also.

    • Dan McGrath January 12, 2010 at 4:46 pm #

      Yes. Bush wasn’t a good president. We know. Time to move on. We have a new bozo in the White House who’s taken all of Bush’s bad ideas and hopped them up on steroids and threw some new timebombs into the mix to boot. Let’s worry about that right now.

  3. Paul Wenum January 4, 2010 at 8:20 pm #

    Yes Neil, based on the article just read, if correct which we believe it is, you were right as well as others. As to the polical blather, I will not go there. Now, let’s see if the media will start a wave of doubt. That said, as you and I both know, we are not holding our breath.

    The Truth is finally happening. About time.

  4. Rob N. Hood January 8, 2010 at 7:57 am #

    Here’s some truth about how the addiction to oil is a major reason for the wars currently being fought and future wars being planned:

    On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was “suspected” of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.

    Bab el-Mandab, between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Oil and other exports from the Persian Gulf must pass through Bab el-Mandab before entering the Suez Canal. In 2006, the Energy Department in Washington reported that an estimated 3.3 million barrels a day of oil flowed through this narrow waterway to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Most oil, or some 2.1 million barrels a day, goes north through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex into the Mediterranean.

    An excuse for a US or NATO militarization of the waters around Bab el-Mandab would give Washington another major link in its pursuit of control of the seven most critical oil chokepoints around the world, a major part of any future US strategy aimed at denying oil flows to China, the EU or any region or country that opposes US policy. Given that significant flows of Saudi oil pass through Bab el-Mandab, a US military control there would serve to deter the Saudi Kingdom from becoming serious about transacting future oil sales with China or others no longer in dollars, as was recently reported by UK Independent journalist Robert Fisk.

  5. paul wenum January 8, 2010 at 10:24 pm #

    In response. “Drill baby drill ” in the USA Period!

  6. Rob N. Hood January 10, 2010 at 4:46 pm #

    Don’t worry Paul, we will and we are. Obama quietly approved exploratory drilling in the Bering Sea. You people should give him credit for that. But you won’t. In addition to that, instead of coming up with real solutions to the finite problem of fossil fuels, we will continue to invade and kill many people in foreign lands. Be proud America. We will fight to the bitter end just like all imperial powers (except for Great Britian, which gave up its world power rather skillfully compared to most).

  7. Happy Chappy January 10, 2010 at 9:00 pm #

    It is simply incorrect to blame Bush or Clinton or Reagan for jobs going to China. There is no legal/constitutional way to stop it. Think about it if a German or Chinese company can sell goods to the U.S. how could you possibly stop an American company from moving their manufacturing to China and selling the product here??? As for making Walmart the scapegoat; wrong again. Every store sells products made in China and elsewhere. It’s all the same stuff regardless of where you buy it. You need to understand that it is excessive regulation, high taxes and high wage and benefit costs in the U.S. that drive the companies overseas. Fix the real problem. Make the U.S. a more friendly environment for business and business will stay here. We cannot continue to drive jobs offshore and survive as a 1st world country.

    • Rob N. Hood January 11, 2010 at 4:56 pm #

      Sorry, but that is a spuriously simplistic way of explaining the situation and what could be done about it. Either you have no imagination or are a mouth-piece for the corporate libertarian elite who profit from this rigged and destructive system. And your ultimate solution- ok, let’s pay US worker even less, and we can become a third world county (by some standards we’ve already become a sort of 2nd world country). As usual the Right has it absolutly backwards, not to mention the fact that many workers and even Unions have over the last several decades, made extensive and painful concessions, ie. pay and benefit reductions to keep their jobs, and then the company stabs them in the back anyway and closes down. It’s coprorate cannabalism, monopolies are greater at this time then ever before. That needs to change, and fast. They need to be broken up, just as i nthe past they have been when the system gets beyond a point where it is detrimental. THAT is one of th solutions, and it will have to occur sooner or later. I’d rather is be sooner.

  8. Rob N. Hood January 11, 2010 at 10:59 am #

    Oh, I get it now. Palin is the poster child for “Drill baby Drill”. heh heh heh… She’s also the poster child for evreything that is wrong with the Repub party.

  9. paul wenum January 13, 2010 at 2:05 am #

    Move on my friends as Dan Said for which I agree. Quit looking back and start looking forward. Get over it and vote wisely next time.

  10. Rob N. Hood January 14, 2010 at 9:12 am #

    Huh? We can’t learn from the past? Isn’t the past a rich and incomparable source of information and knowledge? Really, you people on the Right are so odd and contradictory to everything logical and rational. You may be right about global warming (I don’t agree at this point but am keeping an open mind), but that doesn’t make you automatically correct about anything else. I’ve tried hard to figure out how your brains work, but it leaves me amazed and dazed every time.

  11. paul wenum January 15, 2010 at 1:27 am #

    You have an open mind like a “Hoover” vacuum cleaner. Sucks it in and nothing comes out. Sad.

  12. Rob N. Hood January 15, 2010 at 12:03 pm #

    Projecting again are we?

  13. paul wenum January 21, 2010 at 4:18 am #

    No, you are a “Project.” I’m not “projecting.”

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