How Climate-Change Fanatics Corrupted Science

Subject:	How Climate-Change Fanatics Corrupted Science
Date:	Sun, 7 Feb 2010 10:41:46 -0700

How Climate-Change Fanatics Corrupted Science
A Commentary by Michael Barone
Thursday, February 04, 2010 Quick, name the most distrusted occupations.
Trial lawyers? Pretty skuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept
from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car
dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal
understanding of the word "clunker."

But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the
list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist.

First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how
top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and
conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government
concluded last week that the University of East Anglia's Climate Research
Unit violated the nation's freedom of information act, although the
violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.

The CRU has been a major source of data for the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, which for 20 years has issued alarms about supposed global
warming. The e-mails conclusively establish the intellectual dishonesty of
the climate scientists at the CRU and their co-conspirators.

Recently, there have been even more shocking revelations. The IPCC has
claimed that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035.
It turns out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the
World Wildlife Federation, based on no science at all. The head of the IPCC
was informed that a 1996 report said those glaciers could melt significantly
by 2350, not 2035, but he let the claim stand.

As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, "A Canadian analyst
has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite
similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority."
Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could
endanger "up to 40 percent" of the Amazon rainforest came from an
anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever.

"The global warming movement as we have known it is dead," writes Walter
Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American Interest.
"The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics."

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many
government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was
based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to the point that
they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on
flagrant dishonesty and dissembling.

There was some basis for concern. If carbon dioxide emissions were the only
factor affecting global climate, it is clear that increased emissions would
tend to produce warmer temperatures over time. Those temperatures could
create problems that rational societies would want to address.

But carbon dioxide emissions are not the only factor affecting global
climate. Solar activity and water evaporation and countless other things do,
too. Climate scientists do not fully understand those things and how they
interact. It is rational for society to want to learn more.

Unfortunately, the cadre of climate scientists who have dominated public
discussion and have controlled the IPCC have been demonstrated to be far,
far less than trustworthy. Like the theorists who invented epicycles to
explain away the failure of Ptolemaic theory to account for astronomical
observations, they have distorted science in the interest of something that
resembles religious dogma.

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious
faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your
waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of
indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all
argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics
(global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in
lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever
flimsy source may be at hand.

The rest of us, and judging from polls that includes most of the American
people, are free to follow a more rational path. In his State of the Union
Address, Barack Obama alluded to "the overwhelming evidence on climate
change." But he felt obliged to add, "even if you doubt the evidence" -- an
admission that the evidence is less than overwhelming. On a par with, it
seems, the claims of trial lawyers and the assurances of used car salesmen.

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.