Global warming "skeptics" had unearthed evidence
that scientists at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at Britain's
University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to manufacture a
"hockey stick" graph showing a dramatic-but illusory-runaway warming
trend in the late 20th century....A hacker-or possibly a disillusioned insider-has gathered thousands of
e-mails and data from the CRU and made them available on the Web.
Officials at the CRU have verified the breach of their system and
acknowledged that the e-mails appear to be genuine...
These e-mails show, among many other things, private admissions of
doubt or scientific weakness in the global warming theory. In
acknowledging that global temperatures have actually declined for the
past decade, one scientist asks, "where the heck is global warming?...
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."
And, most interesting (and possibly most damning):
[I]n one e-mail, a prominent global warming alarmist admits to using a statistical "trick"
to "hide the decline" in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an
explanation of this case in technical detail; the "trick" consists of
selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature "proxies"
from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed
to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global
warming establishment wants it to: with an upward "hockey stick" slope.
It gets better:
Confirming the earlier scandal about cherry-picked data, the e-mails
show CRU scientists conspiring to evade legal requests, under the
Freedom of Information Act, for their underlying data. It's a basic
rule of science that you don't just get to report your results and ask
other people to take you on faith. You also have to report your data
and your specific method of analysis, so that others can check it and,
yes, even criticize it. Yet that is precisely what the CRU scientists
have refused.
But what stood out most for me was extensive evidence of the
hijacking of the "peer review" process to enforce global warming dogma.
Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review
by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be
published in professional journals. The idea is to weed out research
with obvious flaws or weak arguments, but there is a clear danger that
such a process will simply reinforce groupthink. If it is corrupted,
peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to
exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a
hearing.
And that is precisely what we find.
Nevertheless, the 0bama administration and the Democrats in Congress seem to be willing to make law and policy that will put Americans out of work, impose draconian tax policy on the use of energy in this country, and send this nation on a wild goose chase to find the solution to a problem that is the figment of someone's imagination.
In other words, based on fraud.
I hope that this will result in prison sentences for those who have already profited from this fraud and a return to some sense on this topic.
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