Senator to demand probe of global-warming 'fraud'

As WND reported, documents and e-mails retrieved by a computer hacker from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit indicate top climate-change scientists have manipulated data to hide cooling trends and worked together to marginalize scientists with opposing views.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a guest on the Washington Times morning radio show, said he knew scientists were "cooking" information years ago. The e-mails, he said, were the proof, and now something needs to be done.

A Washington Times editorial said the content of the e-mails "could end the academic careers of many prominent professors. Academics who have purposely hidden data, destroyed information and doctored their results have committed scientific fraud."

"It is pretty serious," Inhofe said. "And since, you know, Barbara Boxer is the chairman and I'm the ranking member on Environment and Public Works, if nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation.

"This thing is serious," he continued. "You think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with."

Inhofe said he would ask for an investigation into the United Nations and its climate-change committee "on the way they cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."

Inhofe's comments:

Lord Christopher Monckton, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's key science adviser, wrote at Pajamas Media that society should jump directly to prosecutions of those responsible.

He earlier warned that an upcoming global warming summit in Copenhagen is laying the groundwork for a one-world government.

He said the "scientists" delivered a "global warming" fraud.

"I am angry, and so should you be," Monckton said.

"The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the 'global warming' fraud – for fraud is what we now know it to be – tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of e-mails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world's four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant 'global warming' for 15 years – and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years," he wrote.

"In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up," he said.

"Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and 'global warming' profiteers – for that is what they are – have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the U.K. by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled.

"And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists – they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers," Monckton said.

"I have reported them to the U.K.'s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute," he wrote.

'Hide the decline'

One e-mail uncovered at the East Anglia center said: "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 (sic) from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Another expressed internal doubts: "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. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re (Assessment Report 4)? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment – minor family crisis."

James Delingpole wrote in a London Telegraph column the most damaging revelations from the e-mails and documents indicate climate-change scientists may have "manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause."

"And, perhaps most reprehensibly," Delingpole writes, "a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer-review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with (anthropogenic global warming) can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority."

He cites an e-mail: "This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature.' Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board. … What do others think?"

Myron Ebell, of the GlobalWarming.org website where "cooler heads prevail," called the e-mails "shocking."

"It's kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political community," he told WND.

The documents, he said, "raise a huge number of questions about the integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community."

"What I've seen there is a very strong effort to manage the issue by scientists and not as a scientific issue. It's very improper," he said. "One of the criticisms is that we need scientists to be scientists, and policy can be handled in public debate."

Delingpole observed the world "is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called 'skeptical' view is now also the majority view."

Phil Jones, head of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, confirmed to Investigate magazine the documents appeared authentic.

Despite the advocacy of a financially vested former vice president, Al Gore, and others, public opinion about whether mankind is causing an ultimately catastrophic rise in global temperatures also is shifting.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has urged members of Congress to consider the joint opinion of nearly 32,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who believe humans likely have little or nothing to do with any "global warming."

The Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered, has steadily grown without any special effort or campaign.

But in the last few years, and especially because of the release of Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth," the campaign has been reinvigorated.

"Mr. Gore's movie, asserting a 'consensus' and 'settled science' in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary moviegoers and to public-school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore's movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse," project spokesman and founder Art Robinson has told WND.

Robinson, a research professor of chemistry, cofounded the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine with Linus Pauling in 1973, and later cofounded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

Paul cited the petition results in his statement to Congress.

"Our energy policies must be based upon scientific truth – not fictional movies or self-interested international agendas," Paul said. "They should be based upon the accomplishments of technological free enterprise that have provided our modern civilization, including our energy industries. That free enterprise must not be hindered by bogus claims about imaginary disasters."

The petition states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

Robinson has warned of serious political and economic consequences of assuming "global warming" results from mankind's actions.

"The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded," he said. "In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries," he told WND.

Warned Paul, "Above all, we must never forget our contract with the American people – the Constitution that provides the sole source of legitimacy of our government. That Constitution requires that we preserve the basic human rights of our people – including the right to freely manufacture, use, and sell energy produced by any means they devise – including nuclear, hydrocarbon, solar, wind, or even bicycle generators.

"While it is evident that the human right to produce and use energy does not extend to activities that actually endanger the climate of the Earth upon which we all depend, bogus claims about climate dangers should not be used as a justification to further limit the American people's freedom," Paul said.