Barbara Hollingsworth: Who's who on climate fraud
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Local Opinion Editor
December 4, 2009
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In 1912, a respected paleontologist at the British Museum confirmed that bones found in a Piltdown quarry came from the “missing link” between apes and humans. Forty years later, the so-called Piltdown Man was proved to be a hoax. Thanks to purloined e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), global warming is turning out to be the 21st-century equivalent of Piltdown Man.
E-mails between a small group of highly influential climate scientists at the center of the worldwide panic over global warming exposed multiple discussions among them concerning their manipulation of data and using various evasive tactics to avoid releasing the facts behind their ginned-up numbers to the public via Freedom of Information Act requests.
Here’s a rogue’s gallery of five major perpetrators of what’s turning out to be the biggest scientific hoax in modern history:
Geoff Jenkins, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s first scientific group and self-described “frontman explaining climate change.” Jenkins admitted in 1996 to a “cunning plan” to feed fake temperature information to Nick Nuttall, head of media for the United Nations Environment program. At the time, Jenkins predicted temperatures in London would hit 113 degrees Fahrenheit and the Thames River would rise three feet even though 1996 was, in fact, cooler than 1995.
Phil Jones, director of the CRU, controlled two key databases that are the primary sources underlying claims by the United Nations and others of a global scientific “consensus” that catastrophic consequences will result from man-made global warming unless trillions of dollars are spent now to prevent it.
Jones e-mailed instructions to colleagues to “hide the decline” in temperatures and to pressure editors of academic journals to blackball the work of “climate skeptics.”
After claiming that the original climate data had been destroyed in the 1980s, Jones was caught urging his CRU colleagues to “delete as appropriate” data requested under Britain’s freedom of information laws.
Michael Mann, director of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center, is one of the lead authors of the U.N.’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change report. Mann was the originator of the “hockey stick” graph that supposedly proved that the Earth’s temperature was at the highest level in recorded history. However, it also appeared to eliminate both the Medieval Warm Period, in which surface temperatures were higher than they are today, and Europe’s “Little Ice Age.”
In 2003, Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre exposed the flawed methodology behind Mann’s hockey stick. The recent e-mail leak led another scientist to quip: “Dr. Mann is in transition from Penn State to State Pen. We can only hope he does a better job with license plates.”
Mann has been a committee chairman for the National Academy of Sciences and a member of multiple NAS panels and committees.
James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose records were also cited as evidence, second only to the CRU data, of incontrovertible man-made global warming. McIntyre also caught Hansen engaging in the same sort of statistical manipulation in which past temperatures were lowered and recent ones “adjusted” to convey the false impression that the nonexistent warming trend was accelerating. After trying to block McIntyre’s IP address, NASA was forced to back down from its claim that 1998 was the hottest year in U.S. history.
Al Gore, Former Vice President Al Gore is the author of “An Inconvenient Truth,” star of the 2006 Oscar-winning movie of the same name and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless efforts to limit economic development in industrialized countries with a cap-and-trade scheme. Many experts agree that such a system would increase food and energy prices, while wasting trillions of dollars on alternative energy sources (in which Gore is heavily invested). Gore’s case rests on the now-discredited theory that carbon dioxide emissions (which are increasing) are heating up the Earth’s atmosphere, even though actual global temperatures have been declining for at least a decade.
These five, though far from being the only ones, are among the top perpetrators of the Great Global Warming Hoax. They should never be taken seriously again.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner's local opinion editor.
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