Kelly Young
Jacksonville Progress
JACKSONVILLE — The house of cards erected by proponents of anthropomorphic global warming has taken several more significant hits during the last few months, as data previously blindly accepted by the scientific community is now receiving the scrutiny it deserves and is being found severely lacking.
Sparking the renewed interest in scientific integrity was the ClimateGate scandal of last November, when emails either leaked or hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit showed a concerted effort by researchers in England and America to alter results, hide data, impede the inquiries of global warming skeptics and pressure colleagues with differing views.
The East Anglia emails revealed scientists using “tricks” to “hide the decline” after determining that temperatures after the 1950s weren’t as warm as initially expected. The correspondence also exposed leading global warming alarmists discussing efforts to discredit the work of scientists with opposing viewpoints, delete emails pertaining to certain reports and deny data to skeptics. One of the exposed emails laid bare by ClimateGate even admitted that researchers “can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment.”
Despite the glaring ethical and policy implications of the exposed emails, the mainstream media did their level best to bury the scandal — first ignoring it for weeks and then making an effort to defend the scientists and downplay their indiscretions when the story refused to die.
Then in early January, scandal again struck as the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was forced to explain a claim made in a 2007 report that glaciers in the Himalayas are on-track to melt entirely by the year 2035. Since that assertion was made in IPCC’s AR4 report, numerous researchers have come forward to reveal that that conclusion is not based on any available scientific data and is patently untrue.
IPCC later issued a statement regretting the “poor application” of its procedures and admitting that the glacier claim was off by several centuries. It has also since come to light that the panel’s head researcher (Rajendra Pachauri) knew about the faulty science prior to the Copenhagen climate change summit but took no action to correct it. Despite the bad press caused by this public disgrace, Pachauri has refused to step down or to punish the scientists responsible for the false assertion. And more glaring ethical and policy implications were ignored by the media.
Now, the most recent incident undermining the credibility of researchers and politicians who back man-made global warming came just last week when further analysis of AR4 resulted in yet another claim from that document being discredited by competent scientists.
This time the flawed conclusion was that 40 percent of South America’s Amazon rainforest would “react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation.” A little investigation by honest researchers revealed that the above statement had come from a study by the World Wildlife Federation entitled “Global Review of Forest Fires,” — a piece that barely had anything to do with the Amazonian rainforest and which had nothing at all to do with climate change. How it came to appear in a UN document as supporting evidence of man-made global warming is anyone’s guess. And yet again, people who rely solely on the network newscasts for their current events heard little or nothing about it.
After years of faked scientific consensus, it appears as though the cracks in the global warming tale are beginning to leak a little much-needed skepticism into the greater American public. Rasmussen reports that 50 percent of likely voters now believe global warming is caused primarily by long-term planetary fluctuations and not by human activity. Compare that to April 2008, when only 34 percent of respondents blamed climate change on planetary trends.
And 41 percent of participants in a recent Gallup poll say the danger of global warming is being exaggerated by the government and the news media — a record high result for that particular question. That’s a pretty impressive figure considering that only the other side of the story is getting told.
It’s been a tough couple of months for the theory of anthropomorphic global warming. More and more unconvinced scientists are adding their voices to the cry that more research is needed before binding energy policies are passed in this country, while more and more studies passed around as scripture by global warming alarmists are starting to show their flimsiness.
Even President Obama got laughed at last week during the State of the Union address when he mentioned the “overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.”
People are starting to wise up to the hoax of man-made global warming — and with an administration in office bent on carbon taxing us back into the dark ages — it couldn’t be coming at a better time.
