Global Warming: The Biggest Case of Fraud in History

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Andrew Brimer
March 12, 2010
Filed under Opinion & Editorial

Has anyone else noticed that Al Gore has been very quiet lately? The former vice president and current Nobel Peace Prize winning environmental activist based much of his film, An Inconvenient Truth, off of the climate change data which recently has come into major controversy in what pundits have termed, “Climategate.”

What is “Climategate?” Well. put simply, it’s possibly the biggest case of fraud in recorded history. If “Climategate” is a reality, and by all accounts it appears to be, then almost all of the scientific data collected on “global warming” is potentially false, and even worse, the integrity of the scientific community will be in tatters.

In early October of 2009, global warming skeptics had unearthed evidence that scientists at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to manufacture a “hockey stick” graph showing a dramatic-but-illusory runaway warming trend in the late 20th century. A hacker – or possibly a disillusioned insider – has gathered thousands of e-mails and data from the CRU and made them available on the web. Officials at the CRU have verified the breach of their system and acknowledged that the e-mails appear to be genuine.

Australian journalist Andrew Bolt selected several incriminating e-mails that have already been discovered in the hacked data. These emails do not only involve the CRU but also involve numerous leading British and American climate scientists.

These e-mails show, among many other things, private admissions of doubt or scientific weakness in the global warming theory. In acknowledging that global temperatures have actually declined for the past decade, one scientist, according to realclearpolitics.com, asks, “where the heck is global warming?… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

More seriously, in one e-mail, a prominent global warming researcher admits to using a statistical “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail: the “trick” consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature “proxies” from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to – with an upward “hockey stick” slope.

Confirming the earlier scandal about cherry-picked data, the e-mails show CRU scientists conspiring to evade legal requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, for their underlying data. It’s a basic rule of science that you don’t just get to report your results and ask other people to take you on faith. You also have to report your data and your specific method of analysis, so that others can check it and, yes, even criticize it. Yet that is precisely what the CRU scientists have refused.

Most disturbingly of all was the view of CRU scientists on the issue of peer review. Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be published in professional journals. The problem lies in the idea of peer review corruption, in which an entrenched scientific establishment can stifle any doubts from the minority. Several emails, even from the head of the CRU mention the need to stifle editors of several journals who had voiced doubts about global warming and climate change in general.

Another e-mail refers to an attempt to keep inconvenient scientific findings out of a UN report: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is.”

In short, Climategate shows us that the tales of global warming, which we’ve been spoon fed for the last decade, may actually vary in actual severity and veracity. Consider the billions of taxpayer dollars worldwide, billions of corporate research funds into alternative energy, and the potential for TRILLIONS lost in terms economic opportunities with our cheapest sources of energy (i.e. oil, coal, timber, etc.). Climategate shows us that there is a very real chance that we have all had the wool been pulled over our eyes.

My question is, with this being the greatest crime in history, where are the arrests and public outrage? Well, I suppose one might argue that the scientific establishment responsible has already secured themselves from criticism.