Several readers responded to my article of two years earlier (Is it all doom and gloom? – Fall 2007) that had circumspectly raised questions about (okay, joyously heaped scorn upon) the dire predictions of global warming believers. The letters were breathtaking in their scientific rigour and commitment to intellectual diversity. The one termed me “misguided [and] uneducated,” shockingly revealed that I don’t despise Alberta’s oil industry and demanded I be fired. The other attested that global warming must be real because it had been super-duper warm at his Ontario ski hill and they needed extra snowmaking. Wow, if my body odour and general irascibility (plus leering at the editor’s wife’s shapely bottom) haven’t gotten me fired, nothing will. Even better, the letters appeared just as the Climategate scandal erupted. The global warming movement (which I’ll term the “thermophobes” or “cryophiliacs” for short) spent the subsequent year collectively curling up into the fetal position. So I’m tempted to reply to the letter-wwriters, but my editor won’t give me their addresses.
Let me propose instead to nominate each to senior position on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IIPCC) – perhaps the chairmanship itself. These letter-writers would be better than the current occupant, one Rajendra Pachauri. The allegedly “world’s top climate scientist” is a former railway engineer who, when he isn’t jetting around the world first-class on PCC business or to catch crucial cricket matches, has engineered himself a set of companies that grub up grant money to “study” the effects of “climate change,” some of which they simply make up. Plus, he finds time to pen soft-core-porn spy novels with himself as pseudonymous protagonist. This toxic buffoon is indeed an apt personification of the “scientific consensus” that global warming is real, man-made, heralds the Apocalypse and can only be avoided by adopting a global governance model of the sort that has wrecked economies and ruined lives wherever it has been tried.
To hundreds of millions of regular folks around the world – especially in western countries, those expected to cough up the cash to fight “climate change” – Climategate was the first serious crack in the thermophobic fortress. Most reasonable people probably did think global average temperature had been going up, that the carbon-intensive modern economy was partially responsible, and that we should undertake reasonable measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, though if possible without crippling our way of life.
Climategate shook those assumptions. its voluminous leaked e-mails showed the top denizens of the Climatic Research Unit (CCRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia, steward of the world’s temperature record, admitting there’d been no discernible warming since the mid-90s – but being angry about it, even though they allegedly tremble at the idea of a warmer world – discussing ways to manipulate the temperature record to advance their claims and conspiring to freeze contrary voices out of scientific journals. The CRU’s temperature record was the foundation upon which the thermophobic edifice rested. As distinguished climate scientist Pat Michaels explained in an article at the time, “It was this record that prompted he IPCC to claim a ‘discernible human influence on global climate.'” Virtually every national bureaucracy, Canada’s included, relied on the CRU and IPCC to legitimize its accepted belief in global warming.
Climategate opened he gates to a torrent of related revelations. The thermophobes were overwhelmed. Disgraced CRU chief Phil Jones resigned, then ‘fessed up in a TV interview that there’d been no “statistically significant” global warming since 1995. He also let on that the Middle Ages were possibly warmer than present-day, an inconvenient fact the cryophiliacs had tried to suppress, most infamously researcher Michael Mann and his fraudulent “hockey stick” graph showing flat temperatures for 1,000 years followed by steep climb in the Industrial Age. Public opinion shifted strongly against the thermophobes and their political agenda in the U.S. and the U.K. The effects in Canada, where most news media ignored the issue except to cluck over the “stolen” -e-mails (odd, given the media normalry crave leaks), were more muted.
Another, bitter irony is that many “deniers” are distinguished climatologists who aren’t innately opposed to global warming theory – they merely consider the evidence weak and have found contrary evidence.
We skeptics already knew that many cryophiliacs – scientists, activists or politicians – are nasty pieces of work. Merely for questioning the “science” of global warming or putting forward contrary evidence, anyone who challenged was been labelled “denier.” If you didn’t quite get the allusion, this as helpfully compared to denying the Holocaust. Unspeakably offensive as well as logical gibberish. As someone with a great- aunt who perished at Auschwitz, I’m acutely aware of the distinction. As well as the irony: global warming skeptics were being discredited using similar rhetorical tricks as he Nazis employed. Another, bitter irony is that many “deniers” are distinguished climatologists who aren’t innately opposed to global warming theory – they merely consider the evidence weak and have found contrary evidence. So for me, learning that Mann could fudge numbers or scheme to ostracize an opponent, held all the thunder of a warm winter at Collingwood. It was other content in the Climategate e-mails that really stunned me, for it suggested the very core of global warming theory is pure suppositional mush. In their zeal to “prove” global warming, the CRU’s cryophiliacs so distorted and manipulated their own database that they rendered it unworkable even by their own staff. Climategate’s most damning document is a nearly 4,000-word collection of files attributed to Ian “Harry” Harris, a CRU researcher who was put in charge of assembling a comprehensive global climate database from the CRU’s patchwork of files. As Harris put it:
“Just how off-beam are these datasets? Unbelievable … botch after botch after botch … the entire project … fatal data error … WHAT IS GOING ON? … no working synthetic method for cloud … useless … the worst project I’ve ever attempted … more missing data and so forth … Oh Tim, what have you done, man? …. am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!! … there is no guarantee that the station number file … will reflect what actually happened!! … this renders the station counts totally meaningless … What a bloody mess … Confidence in the fidelity of the Australian station in the database drastically reduced … so any false references … There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations … broken databases … What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no ‘supposed,’ I can make it up … Tim was in fact calculating Cloud Percent, despite calling it Sun Percent!!! … well, dtr2cld is not the world’s most complicated program. Wheras (ssic) cloudreg is, and I immediately found a mistake! … I really thought I was cracking this project. But every time, it ends up worse than before … What a crap crap system … OH F**** HIS.”
Remember, this is a CRU staffer musing privately about the world’s authoritative climate record – the very foundation of global warming theory and all the ruinous policy and tax demands put forward by the cryophiliac movement. Harris’s file revealed not only that the world temperature record shows no appreciable global warming, but that there is no effective record to begin with. While any given person in any given city can easily find out the day’s weather, the world as whole today lacks a functional central database. The CRU was merely masquerading as one.
If scientific hypothesis holds that something will happen and if it doesn’t, then the theory is invalid. And if it’s based on discredited data and a corrupted database (in the words of its own salaried staff), then it’s a hoax, irrespective of the motives, greed, ignorance, etc. of its critics. Global warming theory is comprehensively wrecked, and residual claims of global warming are delusion, guesswork or fabrication.
In he months after Climategate broke scarcely a week went by without new revelations. A major Russian organization accused the CRU of having deliberately ignored most of Russia’s temperature stations – which showed either no warming or actual cooling. The majority of plots in Darwin, Australia, also showing flat or declining temperatures, were quietly removed from the temperature record. And recently it came to light that hundreds of stations across Australia were adjusted upwards to create the illusion of a century of warming.
As for the “scientific evidence” in he IPCC’s main report, which claims to be scrupulously “peer-reviewed,” it turned out that first one or two, then a handful, then dozens of instances were simply lifted from magazine articles, some based on as little as a single mountain guide’s musings about glacier retreat. Not long ago the InterAcademy Council (IIAC) slammed the IPCC for conflicts of interest, manipulation, bias, making tendentious claims with scant evidence and raising anecdote to the level of peer-reviewed evidence. Pachauri recently told The Times of India we shouldn’t expect better of the IPCC, because it isn’t primarily a scientific body, but a government-owned policy-making one.
A revealing bit of recent flim-flam was the claim by he past resident of the Australian Academy of Sciences that his community doesn’t know whether water vapour (clouds) would act as a positive or negative feedback to CO2 temperature forcing. Without water vapour acting as a positive feedback, global warming shrinks to negligible amount – CO2 alone can’t do the job. But now this alleged super-high-end top-level man of science claims that it doesn’t matter. Whatever you make of the role of water vapour feedback, saying it doesn’t matter reveals that, in your mind, global warming isn’t about science, but politics.
It should by now be clear that for the climate change movement, the political objective comes first, the “scientific” conclusion second, the theory third, and the evidence last or not at all. The politicization of science now infecting Western countries – something previously confined to totalitarian regimes – is perhaps the greatest tragedy wrought by the global warming movement. It threatens the integrity of all science, indeed the ability to view the world in rational terms, to seek the truth and go where it leads. The very basis of the Enlightenment.
What does all this mean for skiing? Who knows? The climate is always changing – all by itself. One thing I can promise, however: as we move into what’s likely to be a brutally cold La Nina winter, I won’t claim it’s proof of global cooling.
As a final note, for those who doubt what I’m saying, everything I’ve cited is easily available. Include in our own research: Climate Audit, Friends of Science, Lord Moncton, Watts Up With That and, or inimitable rock-‘n’-roll covers lampooning the cryophiliacs, Minnesotans for Global Warming.
