ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured column from the Sun, Walter Williams gives his take on climategate.
Climate Coverup Exposed
By Walter Williams
My column Dec. 24 started out: “Americans have been rope-a-doped into believing that global warming is going to destroy the planet. Scientists who have been skeptical about manmade global warming have been called traitors or handmaidens of big oil.” New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies, engaged in scientific and academic fraud but committed criminal acts as well.
Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. CRU has the world’s largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world, including the U.S., its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 global warming report.
The e-mails involved communication among climate researchers and policy advocates around the world who brazenly discuss both the destruction and hiding of data that does not support their global-warming claims. They discuss criminally deleting data rather than comply with Freedom of Information Act requests. There’s also discussion of faking data for journals such as Nature, conspiring to keep opposing science out of peer-reviewed journals (of which they controlled the editorial boards), and using statistical “tricks” to hide the cooling period of the past 10 years. One e-mail said, “The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Another said, “it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP,’ even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back.” MWP refers to the Medieval Warm Period (800 A.D. to 1300 A.D.) when the Earth was much warmer than it is now. This bothers the global warmers because they can’t blame the temperature increase a thousand years ago on SUVs, coal-burning power plants and incandescent bulbs.
Editors of professional journals, who were willing to publish articles that disagreed with the warmers, were forced to resign – as in the cases of editors at Climate Research and Geophysical Research Letters.
The fact is an increasing amount of climate research suggests a possibility of global cooling. Geologist Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, emeritus professor at Western Washington University, says, “Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.”
Last year’s column closed with my speculation that if ever “the permafrost returns to northern U.S., as far south as New Jersey as it once did, it’s not inconceivable that Congress, caught in the grip of global warming zealots, would keep all the laws on the books they wrote in the name of fighting global warming. Personally, I would not put it past them to write more.” This is confirmed by the Obama administration’s climate czar, Carol Browner, who, despite dishonesty, fraud and criminality, says she considers the science on global warming settled.
Write to Williams, a George Mason University economics professor and syndicated columnist, at wwilliam@gmu.edu.
