Climategate 11

Self-righteous scientists threaten world economy; Incriminating emails reveal flawed data

The Province
Mon Nov 30 2009
By Jon Ferry


The David Suzuki Foundation says that "climate change is considered by many scientists to be the most serious threat facing the world today." I believe, though, a far greater threat is posed by climate-change scientists themselves.

Their preconceived, green notions about global warming could well wind up doing more damage to the world's economy than all the machinations of greedy Wall Street bankers.

As evidence for their disturbing bias, we need look no further than a set of emails a hacker has lifted from what's arguably the world's most influential climate-change research centre, the Climate Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia.

Now burning up the blogosphere, the researchers' revealing emails raise serious questions about the data on which the theory of man-made global warming is based, and the methods and motives of those promoting it so relentlessly and in such partisan fashion.

Indeed, the emails suggest the dire predictions of a leading clique of obstructionist climate-change scientists may simply be wishful thinking.

Global-warming true believers themselves have expressed concern about what furious bloggers are calling Climategate.

Even Richard Littlemore, writer for Vancouver-based desmogblog.com, the attack dog for the Suzuki foundation in savaging climate-change skeptics, acknowledges the emails are disconcerting: "They are embarrassing, sometimes humiliating evidence that climate scientists -- even really, really good ones -- are human and are apt to make mistakes or write intemperately when they think they aren't being watched." Intemperate? Try arrogant and self-righteous.

Indeed, the whole notion that scientists must march in lock-step with the currently fashionable eco-consensus is the construct of politicians, public-relations people and other cause-mongerers, not real researchers, for whom skepticism is second nature.

We're just a week away from the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

What the world needs, of course, is not a whole new round of punitive taxes, levies and energy curbs in an apparently futile bid to turn down the world's temperature a couple of degrees, but a scrupulously fair, independent inquiry into the science of climate change itself.

The last thing we want is to monkey-wrench the fragile global economy in the name of an unproven theory that increasingly appears to be under-researched, over-hyped and quite possibly a tissue of lies.