Monday 30 November 2009

DESA's Sha Zukang at forefront of CLIMATEGATE

COP15 climate change conference :Sha Zukang, Manmohan Singh, Mohamed Nasheed, Jairam Ramesh

UN under-secretary general for economic and social affairs, Sha Zukang, back to camera, talks to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, left, and Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh look on. Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP

Lord Monckton: Shut Down The UN, Arrest Al Gore

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Anti-climate cult crusader calls for world to rise up against communistic killers behind global warming fraud

Lord Monckton: Shut Down The UN, Arrest Al Gore 281109top

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, November 28, 2009

Appearing on The Alex Jones Show yesterday, Lord Christopher Monckton went further than ever before in his vehement opposition to the elitists running the climate change scam, calling for the UN to be shut down and for fraudulent peddlers of global warming propaganda like Al Gore to be arrested and criminally prosecuted.

Monckton said that those who are threatening to shut down economies, bankrupt nations, and deepen the problems of the third world by implementing draconian policies in the name of global warming should be indicted, prosecuted and imprisoned “for a very long time”.

“The fraudsters and racketeers from Al Gore to the people at the University of East Anglia who have been making their fortune at the expense of taxpayers and the little guy,” should be criminally charged, said Monckton, in response to the climategate scandal.

“We the people have got to rise up worldwide, found a party in every country which stands for freedom and make sure we fight this bureaucratic communistic world government monster to a standstill – they shall not pass,” he added.

Monckton said that the United Nations should be “closed down,” adding that he talked to a senior UN ambassador in Canada who told him that he no longer saw any purpose in the UN and it exists “only to enrich itself at the expense of the nations it claims to serve, it’s time it was brought to an end.”

“We would all save billions if we shut down the UN and just about all of its hideous bureaucracy,” said Monckton.

Lord Monckton emphasized how the emails released as a result of climategate prove that global warming alarmism was still prevalent in public but behind closed doors, warmist scientist are admitting that the “deniers” as they label people like Monckton are correct.

“Publicly they’re saying the science is settled, we’re all doomed unless you close down the economies of the west, whereas privately they’re saying to each other ‘we’ve got it wrong, none of this adds up and it’s a travesty that we can’t explain it’.”

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Monckton also slammed Obama’s science czar John P. Holdren, who in his 1977 book Ecoscience called for draconian population measures to be enforced by a “planetary regime” in the name of saving the earth, as an “openly admitted communist”.

Monckton pointed out how Holdren had been once of the most prominent alarmists in the 70’s warning about the onset of rapid “global cooling”.

“Now with seamless mendacity he says that what we’re now facing is global warming,” said Monckton.

“How can anyone like Holdren stand up with a straight face and expect anyone to believe it,” he added.

Monckton said that the agenda behind the global warming movement was to set up a communistic world government which will be run by people who “do not care how many people they kill with their policies” and that their goal is to “do away with democracy forever by stealth using the excuse to save the planet.”

Monckton said that the people running the scam had a “deliberate desire to control population by killing people in large numbers deliberately if necessary.”

The former advisor to Margaret Thatcher said that the warmists were sounding more and more desperate and knew that they had been rumbled as a result of climategate, which would only make it more urgent for them to try and force through a binding treaty in Copenhagen.

Monckton said that the answer to combating the move towards neo-feudalism and global government was to form a worldwide “freedom party” that would operate nationally in every country in order to defend freedom, democracy and prosperity while routing out every aspect of the communistic takeover.

“Every time these people try to take it away, we in the freedom party will stop them, and I think now is the time,” said Monckton.

Shocking UN Document Divulges Climate Cult Brainwashing

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Kids coerced into performing global warming song as strategy document reveals plan to greenwash young minds by turning environmentalism into gaia religion

Shocking UN Document Divulges Climate Cult Brainwashing 301109top2

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, November 30, 2009

With the reverberations of climategate still echoing, it has now emerged that children are being greenwashed in public schools by being forced to sing climate cult ditties and hate their parents as part of a United Nations propaganda program aimed at capturing young minds, as the UN itself officially acknowledges the global warming mantra as a new religion.

A shocking new UN strategy document also reveals how elitists are recruiting members of academia from all over the globe in an effort to hide the “end-run” around national sovereignty that their program represents.

“When did global warming turn into a forced religion?,” asks the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser as she tells the story of how her daughter came home from school singing the words ” . . . You can hear the warning — GLOBAL WARMING . . . “.

“All the kids had been coerced into singing this catchy ditty, which we called “The Warming Song,” at a concert for parents. Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees,” writes Peyser.

That’s right, in the spirit of the Club of Rome’s 1991 resolution to make humanity the enemy in creating the contrived threat of environmental armageddon, children have been turned against their own parents in the service of a new gaia religion.

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.,” they wrote in a report entitled “The First Global Revolution”.

“Our children are on the front lines of the warming hysteria, a place where “experts” from Al Gore to the president leave no room for dissent or even the slightest skepticism, despite claims that are no more provable than the Earth is flat.,” says Peyser.

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A newly uncovered document sheds some light on the genesis of how such brainwashing found its way into our schools.

A strategy paper for the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world’s would-be environmental watchdog, reveals how the global elite in charge of the green takeover resolved that, “Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion “as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,” according to a Fox News report.

This approach follows a similar tack to the new methods adopted by Al Gore, who in his recent presentations has delivered his message as a kind of religious sermon, acknowledging, “Simply laying out the facts won’t work.”

The UN planning paper outlines a program of implementing a global system of governance based around environmental regulations and laws, stressing the agenda for the “evolutionary nature of strengthening international environmental governance.”

Participants included Janos Pasztor, currently head of the team pushing U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s unprecedented Seal the Deal lobbying campaign to pressure U.N. member governments into signing a new environmental agreement at Copenhagen, Dominic Waughray, currently head of environmental initiatives at the World Economic Forum; and Maria Ivanova, and Bulgarian academic Maria Ivanova, director of the Global Economic Governance Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

A core element of the program includes, “an extensive propagandizing role for UNEP that reaches beyond its member governments and traditional environmental institutions to “children and youth”.

“Civil society, including children and youth, and the private sector will be reached through tailor-made outreach products and campaigns,” states the document.

The document discusses recruiting academia to further the power of UNEP, noteworthy in light of the recent climategate scandal where scientists at major universities were caught hiding evidence of global cooling.

As the Swiss paper puts it, UNEP “should pioneer a new style of work. This requires going beyond a narrow interpretation of UNEP’s stakeholders as comprising its member states — or even the world’s governments — and recruiting a far wider community of support, in civil society, the academic world and the private sector.” At the same time the paper warns that these groups need to be “harnessed to the UNEP mission without appearing to make an end-run around the member governments.”

This passage is fairly damning, as the UN is all but admitting that the program does represent an “end-run around member governments,” and that they have to do their best to hide the fact.

The goals enshrined in the document, a counterpart to the globally binding agreement the UN is seeking to achieve in Copenhagen next month, are “certain to remain a UNEP rallying cry long after the Copenhagen meeting is over — and while the other brainstorming ideas that went into the new four-year strategy, not to mention the strategy itself, go into effect,” writes Fox News’ George Russell.

This document represents yet another smoking gun proving that the climate cult movement is all about expanding the power of a dictatorial, unelected global government, diluting powers of nation states, seizing control of the global economy, eviscerating the middle class with a raft of new regulations and laws, and shutting down industry with impossible CO2 reduction mandates, while erecting environmentalism, which is really a thin veil for global fascism, as the new universal religion.

This has nothing to do with saving the earth and, as the climategate scandal has illustrated, nothing to do with the real science – but everything to do with a relatively small clique of globalists running roughshod over humanity itself in pursuit of their malthusian control freak agenda.

UN/DESA Policy Brief: Reaching a Climate Deal in Copenhagen

A new policy brief by Imran Habib Ahmad of the UN’s Development Policy & Analysis division draws the following conclusions:

* Conservative estimates peg total developing-country financing needs for mitigation and adaptation at about $250 billion per year. This would be on the order of 0.5 to 1 per cent of world gross product by 2030;
* Current available bilateral and multi-lateral aid is in the order of $10-20 billion, with perhaps $5 billion more in the pike from current proposals;
* Funding for adaptation and mitigation programs must not be voluntary but tied to agreed long-term commitments, based e.g. on pro rata mechanisms (such as levied percentages of financial flows, mandatory contributions in relation to GDP). Specific options should be considered include include taxes on capital flows or on international transport, energy use or emissions, or volumes of transactions in carbon markets, and permit auctioning.

Prepared by:


Imran Habib Ahmad (UN-DESA) and

JJohannes (Hans) B. Opschoor

(Institute of Social Studies, the Hague and member of the United Nations Committee for Development Policy)


For further information please contact:


Imran Habib Ahmad,

Senior Economic Affairs Officer

Development Policy and Analysis Division,

Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Rm. DC2-2024

United Nations, New York, NY 10017, U.S.A.

Tel: +1 212 963-4687 Fax: +1 212 963-1061

e-mail: ahmad33@un.org website: http://www.un.org/esa/policy

UNDESA High-Level Meeting on Climate Change, Technology Development and Transfer Develops Final Statement


23 October 2009: The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the Government of India convened a high-level meeting on climate change, technology development and transfer in New Delhi, India, from 22-23 October 2009.

UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Sha Zukang opened the meeting, noting that it would build on a similar conference that convened in Beijing, China, in 2008, and suggesting that it could “send a clear message to Copenhagen that there is a way forward on technology cooperation and technology sharing.”

Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, outlined five essential components for an agreement in Copenhagen: enhanced action to assist the most vulnerable and the poorest in adapting to the impacts of climate change; ambitious emission reduction targets for all industrialized countries on an individual basis; nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing countries to limit the growth of their emissions, while safeguarding economic growth and sustainable development, with the necessary support; significantly scaled-up financial and technological resources; and an equitable governance structure to guide financial resources. He said the decision on technology would need to provide clarity on: who pays and how cost is shared; what the funding will be used for; and how the funding will be channeled towards the desired result. He also identified elements that could be included in a mechanism for technology development and transfer under the UNFCCC.

The final statement from the meeting indicates participants “believe that there is an urgent need to accelerate the large scale global deployment of environmentally-sound and climate-friendly technologies and to minimize the time lag between their initial development, transfer and deployment particularly in the developing countries,” and suggests creating centres or networks of centres to stimulate deployment of technologies. [UNFCCC Executive Secretary’s statement] [Meeting website] [Final statement]

UN DESA Climate Change Working Group Prepares Policy Briefs on Forests and Climate Change


© UNDESA22 April 2009: The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) Climate Change Working Group has prepared two policy briefs on forests and climate change. Policy Brief 15 addresses finance for forests and climate change, and Policy Brief 16 addresses reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).

Policy Brief 15, titled “Finance for Forests and Climate Change,” concludes that the “global climate change agreement should include actions on deforestation and forest degradation within the wider context of sustainable forest management.” It also suggests that: funding should be provided from various public and private sources including those mobilized through carbon trading; international action is urgently required to support developing countries in building capacity and preparing for forest carbon programmes; and negotiations on REDD and its financing have to be based on the broader and comprehensive framework of sustainable forest management.

Policy Brief 16, titled “Forests: the Green and REDD of Climate Change,” suggests that financial resources expected to be allocated to forests for climate change programmes, including through REDD, should be mutually supportive of financing sustainable forest management. It suggests that extensive capacity building and training activities should be developed “to enhance the capacity of developing countries for transparent, inclusive and accountable forest governance.” It also highlights monitoring, reporting and verification to enable countries to apply methodologies for estimating and monitoring carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation under REDD. [Policy Brief 15] [Policy Brief 16]

Prepared by:


DESA Climate Change Working Group


For further information please contact:


Hossein Moeini-Meybodi

United Nations Forum on Forests

Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Rm. DC1-1248

United Nations, New York, NY 10017, U.S.A.

Tel: +1 212 963-5949 Fax: +1 917 367-3186

e-mail: moeini-meybodi@un.org website: http://www. un.org/esa/policy

Climategate Scandal Heats Up, As Researcher "Accidentally" Deleted Data

It would appear that the Climategate scandal, the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. revealing that scientists distorted climate changevdata, is not going to cool off anytime soon.

Climate change skeptics are fired up about the "accidental" deletion of temperature data by head of the CRU Phil Jones and the bogus data aggregation procedure used by scientists that "renders the [temperature readings] totally meaningless," but what gets some people's goats the most is the fact that the University of East Anglia is still denying that there was any wrong doing.

The Washington Times: We read and reread these CRU documents in stunned amazement. But rather than investigating all the evidence of so much academic fraud and intellectual wrongdoing, the University of East Anglia is denying there is a problem. Professor Trevor Davies, the school's pro vice chancellor for research, issued a defensive statement on Tuesday claiming: "The publication of a selection of the emails and data stolen from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has led to some questioning of the climate science research published by CRU and others. There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest-quality of scientific investigation and interpretation."...

Read the whole thing here.

Climategate: The Fallout Continues from CRU Hacking

So where do we stand on “climategate,” the case of the hacked emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.?

For those living in caves, or with an excessively long Thanksgiving break, the release in late November of the documents—related to more than a decade of climate-change research—has caused something of a firestorm. There’s more on all that at Climate Audit and Real Climate.

Not much news on the investigation into the hacking itself, which is being conducted by local police in the U.K. Initial reports about “Russian hackers”—the files were posted on a Russian FTP site—may well be misleading.

One avenue of investigation making the rounds now is the use of open proxies by hackers to mask their identities. Since those third-party proxies can be located anywhere, they don’t offer concrete clues into the identity of the hackers. Computer forensics could help track down their identity—or at least the Internet Protocol address where it all started.

Over the weekend, the CRU took aim at one of the issues at the heart of the spat between its researchers and independent climate scientists around the world: Access to data. The CRU reiterated that most of its climate-research data is publicly available, and that it plans to make the rest of it available when it secures permission from national meterological services which own the data and control its dissemination.

For more on the propriety of how the CRU researchers do their science, Andy Revkin at Dot Earth has a post, including some juicy input from a fellow climate researcher at East Anglia on the future of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In any event, much of the attention in recent days has focused less on the how than the what. That is, the snarky emails among climate scientists that talked about the peer-review process, blocking rivals from publishing, and the like have yielded to the rest of the documents included in the hack.

One in particular that’s drawing attention: “Harry_Read_Me,” the three-year diary of a programmer’s efforts to make sense of the CRU’s computerized databases on global temperatures. More on that here and here.

The big issue: Just how reliable is the information that is at the heart of the climate center’s conclusions about global temperature trends? The CRU, for its part, stresses that
“our conclusions correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).”

Climategate: Penn State Professor Mann under investigation

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Penn State University is home to the largest meteorology program in the nation. It's something they are proud of. They are also home to Professor Michael Mann, who was exposed for 'tricking data' in CRU documents recently released in what is now known as Climategate. Mann is responsible for developing the famous hockey stick diagram of historical global temperatures used in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. This was designed to highlight abrupt warming in the past century that looks like a hockey stick on a timeline. We now know that to not be true... The trick, unfortunately made some aspects of past climate hide extremes to exaggerate any warming in recent years. Here is the e-mail that was sent from Phil Jones at CRU to the authors of the hockey stick. In it, credit is given to Mike for his 'trick' to manipulate data:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx,mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

Penn State has been overwhelmed with the response from the scientific community. It was left with no other option but investigate. The official Penn State statement:

University Reviewing Recent Reports on Climate Information

Professor Michael Mann is a highly regarded member of the Penn State faculty conducting research on climate change. Professor Mann’s research papers have been published in well respected peer-reviewed scientific journals. In November 2005, Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) requested that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) convene a panel of independent experts to investigate Professor Mann’s seminal 1999 reconstruction of the global surface temperature over the past 1,000 years. The resulting 2006 report of the NAS panel (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676) concluded that Mann’s results were sound and has been subsequently supported by an array of evidence that includes additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions.

In recent days a lengthy file of emails has been made public. Some of the questions raised through those emails may have been addressed already by the NAS investigation but others may not have been considered. The University is looking into this matter further, following a well defined policy used in such cases. No public discussion of the matter will occur while the University is reviewing the concerns that have been raised.

My question: What does this say for the integrity of their entire department? It is hard to imagine that Mann was the only person involved in manipulating the data at Penn State. What other faculty, and perhaps even grad students were part of the scheme?

Feeling guilty about your wealth ?


13.5% of the CCCP proceedings will go to fund United Nations Administrative Costs


Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation


TO READ ARTICLE ON TELEGRAPH.CO.UK CLICK HERE

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.


By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009


Who's to blame for Climategate?
CO2 emissions will be on top of the agenda at the Copenhagen summit in December Photo: Getty

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.