The climate-change fraud

Opinion

Written by John Mangun / Outside the Box

WEDNESDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 2009 20:36

While it may be true that the Philippines is stuck in the middle of the South China Sea, you would think that at least one media outlet would choose to cover one of the biggest stories of the 21st century.

This past week, computer hackers or perhaps a “whistle-blower” insider released thousands of e-mail and other documents obtained from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. The email and internal reports show that data used to support the idea of man-made global warming and climate was falsified, manipulated; and scientific data that went contrary to the climate-change theory was covered up and suppressed.

And while this story is breaking news around the world, certain political leaders in the Philippines are pushing for increased taxpayer funding of the Philippine Climate Change Act, a law based on a fraud. The US Congress is opening investigations about “ClimateGate” and English newspapers are calling it the greatest scandal in modern science.

And not a single newspaper here chooses to cover this story. So I will.

The CRU is widely recognized as a leading institution concerned with the study of climate change. It is the organization that supplied a good portion of the data and analysis used in various UN reports and, of course, Al Gore’s famous movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

In September, a striking revelation was made that the data used to create the “hockey stick” of suddenly increasing global temperatures in the last 20 years was manipulated. The basis of the “hockey stick” of global warming that has made Al Gore a multimillionaire was the growth of trees on the Yamal peninsula in Russia. One of the members of the climate group at CRU, Keith Briffa, is the author of the “hockey stick” data that have been used for 10 years to create the climate-change hysteria. It appears calling him an “author” is appropriate since the “hockey stick” and the hysteria may be based on fiction.

After nearly a decade and hundreds of billions spent on the climate-change panic, the original data were finally released to other scientists. What Briffa did was to use data from a selected sample of tree rings that support the global-warming theory. Tree rings that refuted his claim were ignored. In September, other scientists put all the tree-ring data together and discovered that temperatures have not shown any unusual increase in the last 20 years and there isn’t any hockey stick of temperatures.

In other documents, CRU seems to acknowledge that their climate models are inaccurate, data were falsified or, at the very least, manipulated; scientists have no clue as to future climate trends, and no explanation for the cooling trend since 1998. Further, it also appears that any evidence contrary to the climate-change hysteria was ignored and suppressed.

From an e-mail referring to the fact that temperatures have been dropping since 1998: “I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years [i.e., from 1981 onward and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline in temperatures].” In other words, data were falsified to fit the climate-change conclusions.

Other e-mail suggest that pro-global warming scientists faked data to get the results they were looking for. Just over a month ago, on September 28, Tom Wigley wrote to Phil Jones of the Hadley Center about his efforts to get the right-sized “blip” in temperatures of the 1940s: “Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip.” Data that did not support global warming and climate change were removed from the studies.

Another problem is that the models just do not work. From an October 2009 e-mail “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment. Our observing system is inadequate.”

The fact that the models do not accurately work is known to the global-warming scientists, and they will not publicly admit that their theory cannot hold up to investigation. In a 2005 e-mail from Phil Jones, he says, “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has, but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

Here is the point. The Philippines has limited resources that need to be used wisely. Too often though, local leaders talk and act as if pesos grow on trees. This nation cannot afford to spend money foolishly, and climate-change measures are becoming more foolish with each passing day.

Hopefully, a leader will emerge who has the wisdom and the courage to create a list of priorities that need funding and not just talking for political pogi points. Every centavo spent on the silly climate-change nonsense is money that is not spent on education. Every peso spent on things like nationwide WiFi is money that is not available for improving agricultural production.

Talk is cheap. What we need is a candidate who spells out in black and white what he or she thinks should be the specific spending priorities of government. Not just noble-sounding words, but concrete ideas with numbers to back the ideas up.

This nation is capable of making great strides very quickly if its leaders would only focus resources wisely and specifically, rather than trying to do everything, meet every need, and eventually accomplishing little.

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