Update: The Australian senate has rejected the Emissions Trading Scheme with the help of grass roots action and brave actions of politicians like Senator Fielding. See Global Gravy Trains takes a Major Political Hit by Joanne Nova here. See Myron Ebell’s story on Globalwarming.org. And the media coverage here. This is a defeat for Rudd and Wong (Rude and Wrong). Let’s hope this is just the first of the global green dominos to fall.

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely - not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws. They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction - to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played - to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods - not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society - itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause - is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age. See post here. For inspiration see this UK Telegraph post below and here.

Climategate: this is our Berlin Wall moment!
By James Delingpole, UK Telegraph

I’ve just had a great, very sympathetic interview about Climategate on LBC radio (London’s main commercial news and talk station) with Petrie Hosken. She told me she has been simply inundated with callers, all of them utterly unconvinced that human influence has made any significant on so-called “Global Warming”. She was desperate to get a few balancing calls from people who do believe in AGW but just couldn’t find any.

Can you imagine this happening a year ago? Or even a month ago? Until Climategate, we “Sceptics” were considered freaks - almost as bad as Holocaust deniers - beyond the pale of reasonable balanced discussion. Suddenly we’re the norm. Climategate has finally given us the chance to express openly what many of us secretly felt all along: AGW is about raising taxes; increasing state control; about a few canny hucksters who’ve leapt on the bandwagon fleecing us rotten with their taxpayer subsidised windfarms and their carbon-trading; about the sour, anti-capitalist impulses of sandal-wearing vegans and lapsed Communists who loathe the idea of freedom and a functioning market economy. We know it’s all a crock and we’re not going to take it.

This is our Berlin Wall moment! They can’t stop us now!

Why ‘climategate’ won’t stop greens
By Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun

If you’re wondering how the robot-like march of the world’s politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed “climategate,” it’s because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don’t give a s*** about “the science.” They never have.

What “climategate” suggests is many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.

Now they and their media shills—who sneered that all who questioned their phony “consensus” were despicable “deniers,” the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust—are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them. So they desperately try to portray it as the routine “messy” business of science, lamely insisting, “nothing to see here folks, move along.”

Before the Internet—which has given ordinary people a way to fight back against the received wisdom of so-called “wise elites”—they might have gotten away with it. But not now, as knowledgeable climate bloggers are advancing the story and forcing the co-opted mainstream media to cover a scandal most would rather ignore.

The problem, however, is those who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly as they say, have already done their damage.
The moment they convinced politicians the way to avert the End of Days was to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unholy alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green was forged. Big Government wants more of your taxes. Big Business wants more of your income. Big Green wants you and your children to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity.

What about saving the planet, you ask? This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power. If it was about saving the planet, “cap-and-trade” (a.k.a. cap-and-tax)—how Big Government, Big Business and Big Green ludicrously pretend we will “fight” global warming and “save the planet”—would have been consigned to the dust bin of history because it doesn’t work. We know it doesn’t work because Europe’s five-year-old cap-and-trade market—the Emissions Trading Scheme—has done nothing to make the world cooler.

All it’s done is make hedge fund managers, speculators and Big Energy giddy with windfall profits, while making everyone else poorer by driving up the cost of energy, and thus of most goods and services, which need energy to be lighted, heated, cooled, grown, constructed, manufactured, produced and transported. Readers often ask how they can fight back. First, forget about asking when the warmists will see reason. They won’t.

Instead, send a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper by e-mail (pm@pm.gc.ca), fax (1-613-941-6900) or call toll-free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Office of the Prime Minister. Do the same for Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff by e-mail, (ignatm@parl.gc.ca). fax, (1-613-947-0310), or call-toll free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Liberal Leader’s Office. Tell them you want no part of the madness in Copenhagen. Blow their phones off the hook. See post here.

Icecap note: US citiizens call your congressmen and women and senators and leave an email message for the White House here. You can call the White House switchboard at 202-456-1414, send a fax 202-456-2461 or leave comments here 202-456-1111. Overload the switchboard and comment box. Let them know how their actions might affect your vote. Regardless of your party affiliation, this is too important to our future to leave it to others to fight the good fight. It is time to take control of our future back from those who do not have our best interest at heart.

Australians also need to keep the pressure on. See Rudd’s plan to jam legislation through parliament and actions needed here. See Andrew Bolt’s Kevin Rudds’ $7B UN Wrangle here. See excellent speech by Senator Fielding here.

Icecap Note: This is a follow-up to the posting now in Cold Storage below, on the NCAR Meehl etal study of record highs and lows that cherry-picked the starting year as 1950. The following is a graphic representation of the study from the UCAR website (below, enlarged here):

There were links also to WUWT, World Climate Report studies as well. Here below, Dr. Keen follows up his analysis expanding to all of the US and Canadian provinces and territories and shows there is no warming trend the last century.

Thanks for posting my chart of Western US and Canadian extreme temperature records by decade.  I’m sure that by now the usual suspects have accused us of picking all of their cherries by showing only the western half of North America.  Therefore, I spent the evening creating more charts for all 50 US states and 12 Canadian provinces and territories (excluding Nunavut, which was part of the Northwest Territories until recently).

I’m sending charts for the US, for Canada, and for the two combined.  They tell the same story that my earlier Western North American graph showed, but more dramatically!  MORE THAN HALF of the state and provincial maximum temperature records were set during the single decade of the 1930’s, and only 29 percent of these records were set since 1950.  This means that by considering temperatures after 1950, Meehl et al. removed most of the really good heat records from the data pool, and artificially inflated the number of maximum temperature records (and thus, the max to min ratio).  In other words, many of the maximum temperature records since 1950 would not be daily records for the entire period of record for these stations.

Meehl et al. calculate the max-to-min record ratio for each decade, but the difference (max MINUS min) is more illustrative (and not influenced by choice of denominator).  That chart clearly shows the dominance of maximum temperature records during the 1930’s, and that since then most decades have had more minimum records set, and since 1940 minimum records have outnumbered maximum records by a ratio of 3 to 2 (or 1.5 to 1, if you prefer).  Meehl et al. achieved opposite ratios by removing the extremes of the 1930’s.

No doubt the cherry pickers will note that although most of North American is included in this analysis (and not just the US), I deftly left out the Yamal Peninsula, which, as we all know, is the true key to global climate.  So I’ve created one more graph - a tally of the records for the seven continents, including Asia, which includes Siberia, where the Yamal Peninsula resides.  What’s it show?  Since 1950, 3 maximum and 4 minimum records have been set for the continents, a fairly even break.

Finally, although I consider linear trend lines somewhat useless and occasionally deceptive, I plotted those for each graph.  In all cases, the trend line is virtually indistinguishable from the zero-value axis, so it is not shown.  The bottom line is that if one wishes to express climate change by the varying number of temperature extremes, there has been no climate change for over 100 years.

See larger here.

See larger here.

See larger here.

See larger here.

Hypocrisy in high places is nothing new; but the extent to which it pervades the Climategate Culture - which gave us the hockeystick history of 20th-century global warming - knows no bounds.

Hard on the heels of recent revelations of the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to the IPCC’s contending that the current level of earth’s warmth is the most extreme of the past millennium, we are being told by Associated Press “science” writer Seth Borenstein (25 November 2009) that “slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives.” And in doing so, he quotes U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as saying that “relying on fossil fuels leads to unhealthy lifestyles, increasing our chances for getting sick and in some cases takes years from our lives.”

Well, if you’re talking about “cook stoves that burn dung, charcoal and other polluting fuels in the developing world,” as Seth Borenstein reports others are doing in producing their prognoses for the future, you’re probably right. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the proper usage of coal, gas and oil. In fact, any warming that might result from the burning of those fuels would likely lead to a significant lengthening of human life.

In an impressive study recently published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, for example, Deschenes and Moretti (2009) analyze the relationship between weather and mortality, based on “data that include the universe of deaths in the United States over the period 1972-1988,” wherein they “match each death to weather conditions on the day of death and in the county of occurrence,” which “high-frequency data and the fine geographical detail,” as they write, allow them “to estimate with precision the effect of cold and hot temperature shocks on mortality, as well as the dynamics of such effects,” most notably, the existence or non-existence of a “harvesting effect,” whereby the temperature-induced deaths either are or are not subsequently followed by a drop in the normal death rate, which could either fully or partially compensate for the prior extreme temperature-induced deaths.

So what did they find?

The two researchers say their results “point to widely different impacts of cold and hot temperatures on mortality.” In the later case, they discovered that “hot temperature shocks are indeed associated with a large and immediate spike in mortality in the days of the heat wave,” but that “almost all of this excess mortality is explained by near-term displacement,” so that “in the weeks that follow a heat wave, we find a marked decline in mortality hazard, which completely offsets the increase during the days of the heat wave,” such that “there is virtually no lasting impact of heat waves on mortality [italics added].”

In the case of cold temperature days, they also found “an immediate spike in mortality in the days of the cold wave,” but they report that “there is no offsetting decline in the weeks that follow,” so that “the cumulative effect of one day of extreme cold temperature during a thirty-day window is an increase in daily mortality by as much as 10% [italics added].” In addition, they say that “this impact of cold weather on mortality is significantly larger for females than for males,” but that “for both genders, the effect is mostly attributable to increased mortality due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.”

In further discussing their findings, Deschenes and Moretti state that “the aggregate magnitude of the impact of extreme cold on mortality in the United States is large,” noting that it “roughly corresponds to 0.8% of average annual deaths in the United States during the sample period.” And they estimate that “the average person who died because of cold temperature exposure lost in excess of ten years of potential life [italics added],” whereas the average person who died because of hot temperature exposure likely lost no more than a few days or weeks of life. Hence, it is clear that climate-alarmist concerns about temperature-related deaths are wildly misplaced, and that halting global warming - if it could ever be done - would lead to more thermal-related deaths, because continued warming, which is predicted to be greatest in earth’s coldest regions, would lead to fewer such fatalities.

Interestingly, the two scientists report that many people in the United States have actually taken advantage of these evident facts by moving “from cold northeastern states to warm southwestern states.” Based on their findings, for example, they calculate that “each year 4,600 deaths are delayed by the changing exposure to cold temperature due to mobility,” and that “3% to 7% of the gains in longevity experienced by the U.S. population over the past three decades are due to the secular movement toward warmer states in the West and the South, away from the colder states in the North.”

It’s really a no-brainer. An episode of extreme cold can shave an entire decade off one’s life, while an episode of extreme warmth typically hastens death by no more than a few weeks. If you love life, therefore, you may want to reconsider the so-called “morality” of the world’s climate-alarmist’s perverse prescription for planetary health.

For more information on this important subject, we suggest that you see the most recent publication (Climate Change Reconsidered) of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. If Borenstein were a real science writer, he would check out the findings of the voluminous body of peer-reviewed scientific literature on this and many other related subjects that is reported there. To simply ignore the other side of the issue, especially in a “news” story, must surely come close to bordering on fraud. But we guess that must be the defining characteristic of the Climategate Culture.

Reference: Deschenes, O. and Moretti, E. 2009. Extreme weather events, mortality, and migration. The Review of Economics and Statistics 91:659-681.
Read more here.

See agreement in “The Deadliest US Hazard - Extreme Cold” by Indur Glokany here.

Enlarged Table of Deaths by Hazard, Glokany 2008 here.

Enlarged Death Trend image here.

A climate lobby-group founded by Prince Charles to influence opinion in the world’s largest insurance market has tried - and failed - to stifle scientific debate on “global warming” in one of the industry’s foremost academic journals, says SPPI.

ClimateWise, known to skeptical brokers at Lloyds of London as Climate Foolish, was launched by the Prince of Wales in 2007 with the words, “Time is a luxury we do not have and I urge companies both at home and internationally to sign the ClimateWise principles and take the necessary action.”

The ClimateWise principles are “To lead in risk analysis, inform public policymaking, support climate awareness amongst customers, incorporate climate change into investment strategies, reduce businesses’ environmental impact, report and be accountable”.

SPPI’s Lord Monckton and a leading insurance broker, Paul Maynard, jointly wrote a learned paper for the respected Journal of the Chartered Insurance Institute, reviewing the science in detail and concluding that the climate scare is bogus and scientifically unfounded; and that CO2 is harmless and beneficial.

Before the paper was published in the Journal, members of ClimateWise first of all attempted to prevent it from appearing. Then they tried to censor it by removing the central scientific and mathematical argument that the effect of CO2 on temperature is now known to be around one-third to one-seventh of what the UN - and the Prince of Wales - would like us to believe. The co-authors stood firm, however, and successfully insisted that their article be printed in full as originally agreed. Next, ClimateWise supporters successfully lobbied the Journal not to reveal to its readers that the letters to the Editor about the paper had been overwhelming supportive of it.

Lord Monckton expressed concern to ClimateWise about “the engagement of the Prince of Wales in a lobby-group with an avowedly political purpose when the future Monarch is constitutionally constrained to be above politics.” The pressure-group has not responded.

SPPI is pleased to announce the publication of a major original paper by Lord Monckton. “Global warming” - a Debate at Last tells the gripping story of the attempted censorship on the part of the Prince of Wales’ pressure-group, reproduces the Journal climate paper in full, and also reveals an attempt by an IPCC scientist associated with ClimateWise to write a lengthy rebuttal of the paper.

ClimateWise supporters tried to persuade the Journal to publish a letter from the scientist and provide a weblink to the rebuttal without allowing the authors the right of reply. Upon threatened suit for equal standing for Lord Monckton, the Journal decided not to publish either the rebuttal or Lord Monckton’s response. SPPI’s paper reproduces not only the original article but also the IPCC scientist’s rebuttal and Lord Monckton’s response, in full.

Robert Ferguson, SPPI’s president, said: “Historians of the future, trying to answer the question why the world’s political and business elites so credulously fell for the ‘global warming’ scare, may well recognize this paper as significant and revealing. It describes the serial attempts at censorship and suppression of legitimate academic and scientific debate that surrounded the publication of Monckton-Maynard paper in the Journal of the CII.

“Better still,” continued Ferguson, “this paper is a rare instance of a real scientific debate about the climate. Normally climate catastrophists do not allow themselves to be drawn into debate, usually reciting the wilted mantra that ‘the science is settled and the debate is over.’ This time Dr. Dlugolecki, an IPCC contributor himself, after considerable assistance from what he described in an email to the Journal as ‘top scientists’, has actually debated the science. Monckton’s responses to the IPCC scientist’s argument, paragraph by relentless paragraph, should be appreciated by any serious seeker of understanding.

Says Monckton, “Perhaps Prince Charles would do better finding a new, less political, and more scientifically-credible subject for his campaigning zeal.”

Monckton added, “The Prince, whom we all love dearly, should resign from Climate Foolish for his own benefit.”

The paper can be read here.

Climate Science Corrupted by the IPCC

See also the SPPI Climate Science Corrupted by the IPCC by John McLean.

SUMMARY FOR POLICY MAKERS
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the sponsorship of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The UNEP’s belief in manmade warming in the late 1970’s led to a stage-managed conference in Villach in
1985, which in turn led to the political decision to form the IPCC. 

The IPCC rose to prominence because people with clear bias were appointed to key positions where they could influence the development of the entire organization. Bert Bolin, the first chairman of the IPCC was already heavily committed to the notion of manmade warming having worked previously for the UNEP, WMO, the Brundtland Report, the SCOPE 29 report (on which the first IPCC report was largely based) and, very crucially, having documented that the Villach conference reached a consensus that manmade emissions of carbon dioxide were to blame for variations in climate. John Houghton, the first
chairman of the IPCC working group that attributes blame for climate change, was assisted in his assertions by his staff at the UK Met Office and by a
very supportive UK government. 

The other key factor for the IPCC was the adoption of the UNEP’s methods of coercing governments and the general public. Those methods included (a) the
use of the environmentalists’ catch-all the “precautionary principle”, (b) a penchant for creating models based on partially complete scientific understanding and then citing the output of those models as evidence, (c) the politicisation of science through the implied claim that consensus determines scientific truth, (d) the use of strong personalities and people of influence, and (e) the manipulation of the media and public opinion.

Directly and indirectly these methods greatly influenced political parties whether they held government or not. None of these UNEP techniques provide scientific justification of the IPCC’s principal claim, which considered dispassionately, is very weak. Not only is it based on the output of climate models, that the IPCC shows us are built according to incomplete knowledge and therefore cannot be accurate, but also on the opinions of those who use such models as if somehow the models were credible and scientific truth should be determined by consensus and opinion.

It is long overdue that the IPCC was called for what it is - a political body driven not by the evidence that it pretends exists but by the beliefs and philosophies of the UNEP, the IPCC’s sponsor, and by the initial holders of key IPCC positions.

Again see this must read the very detailed analysis Climate Science Corrupted by the IPCC. See also this Roger Pielke Sr. post on his Climate Science weblog on the IPCC WG1 analysis.

Last week, someone (probably a whistle-blower at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England) released emails and other documents written by Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and other leading scientists who edit and control the content of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The emails appear to show a conspiracy to falsify data and suppress academic debate in order to exaggerate the possible threat of man-made global warming.

The misconduct exposed by the emails is so apparent that one scientist, Tim Ball, said it marked “the death blow to climate science.” Another, Patrick Michaels, told The New York Times, “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”

Although I am not a scientist, I know something about global warming, having written about the subject since 1993 and recently edited an 800-page comprehensive survey of the science and economics of global warming, titled Climate Change Reconsidered, written by a team of nearly 40 scientists for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

The content of the emails doesn’t surprise me and other “skeptics” in the global warming debate. We have been saying for many years that the leading alarmists have engaged in academic fraud, do not speak for the larger scientific community, and are exaggerating the scientific certainty of their claims. Tens of thousands of scientists share our views, including many whose credentials are far superior to those of the dozen or so alarmists the media choose to quote and promote.

The implications of these emails are enormous: They mean the IPCC is not a reliable source of science on global warming. And since the global movement to “do something” about global warming rests almost entirely on the IPCC’s claim to represent the “consensus” of climate science, that entire movement stands discredited.

The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians, and others who relied on the IPCC to form their opinions about global warming to stop and reconsider their position. The experts they trusted and quoted in the past have been caught red-handed plotting to conceal data, hide temperature trends that contradict their predictions, and keep critics from appearing in peer-reviewed journals. This is new and real evidence that they should examine and then comment on publicly.

It is possible that the emails and other documents aren’t as damning as they appear to be on first look. (I’ve read about two dozen of them myself and find them appalling, but others may not.) Looking at how past disclosures of fraud in the global warming debate have been dismissed or ignored by the mainstream media leads me to suspect they will try to sweep this, too, under the rug. But thanks to the Internet, millions of people will be able to read the emails themselves and make up their own minds. This incident, then, will not be forgotten. The journalists who attempt to spin it away and the politicians who try to ignore it will further damage their own credibility, and perhaps see their careers shortened as a consequence.

Recent polls show only a third of Americans believe global warming is the result of human activity, and even fewer think it is a major environmental problem. This new scandal, combined with a huge body of science and economics ignored or deliberately concealed by the alarmists, proves that the large majority of Americans was right all along.

How did the Average Joe, who knows so little about the real science of climate change, figure out that global warming is not a crisis when so many journalists were completely taken in by it? I think he saw some clues early on that most journalists, because of their liberal biases, missed.

Average Joe noticed how Al Gore and other Democratic politicians were quick to capitalize on the matter, even before the scientific community could speak with a unified voice on the issue. He figured out, correctly, that politics rather than science was the force that put global warming on the front pages of the newspapers and on television every night.

He also probably noticed that spokespersons for liberal advocacy groups like Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists were suddenly being quoted in the press as experts on climate change, whereas just a few years earlier they were (rightly) considered radical fringe groups. Fenton Communications fooled the mainstream media, but not the rest of us.

And Average Joe noticed how global warming “skeptics,” even distinguished scientists and trusted people like former astronauts, were ignored, rejected, or demonized by the press just for asking for proof, and for not going along with the latest and increasingly silly claims about all the things global warming was supposedly causing: droughts and floods, warming and cooling, “global warming refugees,” and so on.

While the issue of global warming is complex, one need not be a genius to figure out that man’s role is small, that the effects of modest warming of the kind seen in the latter half of the twentieth century were at least as positive as negative, and that scientists who can’t predict next week’s weather probably can’t predict what climate conditions will be like one hundred years from now. This isn’t “denial,” it’s just common sense. The executive summary of Climate Change Reconsidered makes these points and more, in plain English, and it is only eight pages long. The report itself contains more than 4,000 citations to peer-reviewed literature.

The IPCC email scandal makes this a good time for reporters and other opinion leaders to take a serious look at the skeptics’ case in the global warming debate and perhaps move to the middle, where serious journalists and honest elected officials should have been all along. A good place to start is The Heartland Institute’s Web site devoted to global warming realism.

It’s not too late to regain some of the native skepticism that Average Joe relied on all along to see through the global warming scam.

Joseph Bast is president of The Heartland Institute and editor of Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, by Dr. Craig Idso and Dr. S. Fred Singer (Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute, 2009). The book’s executive summary and contents can be downloaded for free from www.nipccreport.org.