Climategate: Follow the Money

Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

al-gore-wins-the-2007-nobel-peace-prize
Al Gore wins the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize: Doing well by doing good?

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change “consensus.”

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits is per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what’s known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU’s temperature database: “I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.

Write to [email protected]

DECEMBER 1, 2009, 10:40 A.M. ET

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Related information:

Climategate:

Climategate scandal claims its first big political scalp (Telegraph)

Climategate: Googlegate?! (Telegraph)

Lord Cristopher Monckton on Climategate: Shut Down The UN, Arrest Al Gore

Climategate: This is the worst scientific scandal of our generation (Telegraph)

Climategate: The great climate change science scandal (The Times)

Climategate Scandal: The Whitewash Begins (Telegraph)

Climategate: Hacked emails include calls for ‘Earth Government’ as foundation of new world order, splitting of America

Lord Christopher Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’

Climategate: George Monbiot – aka the Great Moonbat – makes it all suddenly OK through medium of satire (Telegraph)

Climategate: Scientists Would Rather Change Facts Than Their Theories (RT)

Climategate on Lateline: Private climate documents hacked, published

Climategate Bombshell: Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails

Climategate: The Day Science Died (TBR)

Climategate: how the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science (Telegraph)

Climategate: CRU director admits the emails flying all over the internet appear to be genuine (Herald Sun)

Climategate: The Final Nail in The Coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?! (Telegraph)

Follow the money and the New World Order:

EU President Herman Van Rompuy Announces 2009 as ‘First Year of Global Governance’

Congressman Ron Paul on the Copenhagen Treaty and the Cyber Security Act: ‘They are doing everything in the world to control the internet.’

Al Gore could become world’s first carbon billionaire

Lord Christopher Monckton: Is President Obama Poised to Surrender the Constitution and US Sovereignty to World Government? (!!!)

EU Proposes €50bn Climate Change Deal Ahead of December’s Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen

So global warming is really about the elite finding more ways to take away your freedom and your money!

Man-made global warming is a scam:

Climate crunch: David Bellamy on global warming fraud

Global Warming Scam Exposed:

‘Rises in C02 lag 800 years behind temperature rises. So temperature is leading CO2 by 800 years!’
– Prof. Ian Clark

Study: CO2 levels remained constant since 1850! (University of Bristol)

What happened to global warming? The warmest year recorded globally was 1998 (BBC News)

Global Warming Expert Prof. Latif: Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.” (The Calgary Herald)

Solar Physicist Predicts Ice Age: “SOLAR CYCLE 24 HAS NOW GONE CLEARLY BELOW DALTON LEVEL.” (The Examiner)

The Great Global Warming Swindle (Documentary)

Ron Paul: Global Warming Petition Signed by 31,478 Scientists (Lew Rockwell)

NASA Study: Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Gobal Warming (DailyTech)

Global warming alarmists out in cold (Herald Sun)

Nobody listens to the real climate change experts (Telegraph)

Climate ‘denial’ is now a mental disorder (Telegraph)

Japan’s boffins: Global warming isn’t man-made (The Register)

Al Gore sued by over 30.000 Scientists for fraud (Video)

World is getting colder: It’s the sun, not CO2, that’s to blame (Washington Times)

Global warning: We are actually heading towards a new Ice Age, claim scientists (Daily Mail)

Scientists find greenhouse gas hysteria to be myth (World Net Daily)

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved (Telegraph)

Army: Sun, Not Man, Is Causing Climate Change (Wired)

World might be heading towards Ice Age (Economic Times)

Flashback: David Ballamy: ‘BBC shunned Me For Denying Man-Made Global Warming’ (Daily Express)

In the news:

US: Cheyenne records snowiest October on record

Autumn record-setting snowstorm wallops Rockies, Plains

US: Freak Summer Storm Dumps Snow in Yonkers

Nature knows exactly how to deal with CO2:

Carbon Dioxide Air Fertilization Improves Plant Growth and Quality, Cuts Operating Costs While Increasing Production:

If you really want to change the climate on this planet then:

Environment: Solar plant yields water and crops from the desert

Greening the Desert

1 thought on “Climategate: Follow the Money”

  1. The problem with putting faith in such a small group of so-called scientists who are propped up by MSM and Government, the public gets dumbed down and brainwashed to a point that they can’t think for themselves, so much so that facts have no meaning anymore. For example: how many people realize that actual global temperatures have been trending down for over a decade now?
    We have been emersed in so much miss-information to such an extent that this fact would be unbelievable. But, by entering the Satelite global temperature data-set http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt would show that temperatures have been trending down since Jan 1998. You just need to enter the data for youself in a graph program to see what is happeniung, yet we are told that the earth is warming “faster than we thought”. These claims go unchallenged. Disgraceful that we let these hoaxters get away with this.

    Reply

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