The Collapse of the "Global Warming" Scam 
By John McClaughry

Ever since Prof. James Hansen's 1988 testimony before a Senate committee featuring Al Gore, Americans have been treated to a steady drumbeat of alarm over the Menace of Global Warming. Hansen, Gore, and a host of enviro organizations have proclaimed that human addiction to carbon combustion is causing global temperatures to rise alarmingly, and that governments must take unprecedented and desperate measures to reduce emissions.

The alarmists' central argument was, and is, that a doubling of the present atmospheric concentration of CO2 will produce global temperature increases of as much as 8.6 degrees C by the end of this century. This would produce unimaginable catastrophes: droughts, flood, hurricanes, drowned coastal cities, plague, species extinction, and more.

Skeptics noted that the Medieval Warm Period (900-1200) brought better weather, improved nutrition, and a wonderful flowering of civilization. More atmospheric CO2 would spur plant growth, and warmer winters would help New Englanders by lengthening their growing seasons, reducing their heating bills, making their travels easier and safer, and disadvantaging the competing ski areas further south.

The warming zealots scorned such observations. Their technique was to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on computerized climate models. The scientists who controlled both the models and the input data churned out scary scenarios aimed at terrifying politicians into approving the taxes, rationing, subsidies and penalties needed to curb greenhouse gas production worldwide.

The fact that the models failed to reproduce the known temperature record of the past century gave them no pause whatever. The charlatans simply invented unobservable climatic effects that magically led to the positive feedback that assured the approach of Al Gore's Heat Death.

The United Nation's climate body, the IPCC, issued periodic reports attributed to "over 2,000 climate scientists", but actually produced by a very small number sucking up millions in research dollars, plus the ever-present political flacks who actually crafted the "summary for policymakers".

In 2007 Al Gore received a Nobel Peace Prize for his films and lectures, that were so bad that a British court held that they could not be shown to schoolchildren without correction of the nine glaring scientific errors contained therein. Gore shared the prize with the IPCC itself.

All the while the warmists were conspiring to deride any scientist who failed to buy into the warming hysteria. They denied them space in scientific journals, kept them off of conference agendas, and shouted "the science is settled" whenever skeptics raised an objection.

But the Earth refused to cooperate. Since the El Nino temperature spike of 1998, the computer predicted global warming failed to appear. Just as the critics had said all along, the climate models are billions of dollars worth of rubbish.

In mid-November unknown persons hacked into the files of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the leading research centers that the IPCC relied upon for its scary predictions. This brought to light over three thousand email messages among the most prominent scientists engaged in this scam.

In them the conspirators discussed how they falsified the models to "hide the decline" and preserve the threat of Al Gore's Heat Death. They discussed keeping dissenting science out of prestigious journals and, it turns out, reported that they had deleted some raw data used in their modeling before anybody used the Freedom of Information Act to review it.

Now scientists not in on this scam have begun to penetrate the data. In the leading instance, Darwin Zero from North Australia, they discovered that the CRU "adjusted" the data not just to allow for relocating weather stations, but by simply adding degrees to make cooling trends into warming trends. Wrote one Australian scientist, "they are indisputable evidence that the 'homogenized' data has been changed to fit someone's preconceptions about whether the earth is warming." There's a name for this: fraud.

And since the whole edifice of human-caused "global warming" (rechristened "climate change" when warming failed to appear) is erected upon essentially the same raw data, the discovery of the deliberate corruption of that data destroys the alleged scientific basis for anthropogenic global warming. It also fatally undermines the political pressure for supranational controls over energy and economies so long urged by socialists and special interests of various stripes.

This is very bad news for the global warming crowd, from President Obama to Sen. Sanders, the big business Climate Action Group, Vermont Senate President Peter Shumlin, VPIRG, propagandist Bill McKibben, and the nuts in polar bear suits roaming the state house lawn.

But it's good news for the inhabitants of Planet Earth, who will now likely be spared a new world energy government promulgating economically destructive mandates, taxes and rationing on the world's struggling economy. Not a moment too soon.

John McClaughry is Vice President of the Ethan Allen Institute (www.ethanallen.org).