Kvosper


 * **[|Global-warming Alarmism Dying a Slow Death]** || [|| Print |] || [| E-mail] ||

Last December in Copenhagen at the United Nations climate summit, officials and global-warming alarmists seemed confident of their imminent triumph. “There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that it will yield a success,” proclaimed UN global-warming chief Yvo de Boer just weeks before the conference. But Copenhagen was not the victory de Boer had been anticipating. In fact, most analysts labeled it a significant setback for the alarmist agenda. And since then, problems for the human-caused warming campaign have only grown. After a series of scandals exposed extreme misconduc t (if not criminality) by leading climate scientists and errors surrounding the movement’s theories, pundits began announcing the inevitable collapse of climate hysteria. But the vested interests will not go down without a long, hard fight.
 * WRITTEN BY ALEX NEWMAN ||
 * TUESDAY, 30 MARCH 2010 00:00 ||
 * [[image:http://www.thenewamerican.com/images/stories/AP-1-2010/2608-globalwarm-ap.jpg width="85" caption="global warming"]]

The climate alarmists were already doing poorly in the United States before the Copenhagen failure. An October 2009 Pew poll showed that only 36 percent of Americans even believed in man-made global warming. The issue consistently ranked last among public priorities. Commentators referred to the movement as a “cult,” and critics ridiculed the theories and dangerous “solutions” all over the Internet. And that was before the proverbial hitting of the fan late last year.
 * Scandals**

In November 2009, a scandal now known as Climategate changed everything. Just before the much-touted global-warming conference, incriminating e-mails and data from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were revealed to the world. And the picture was not pretty. Prominent climate scientists, including many who were deeply involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, were exposed plotting to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, conspiring to violate Freedom of Information laws, and scheming to keep contradictory viewpoints excluded. The scandal led to even more distrust of the alarmist narrative.

After Climategate made headlines around the world, obvious factual errors started turning up in the UN’s IPCC report as researchers began scrutinizing it more closely. Widely considered the “gospel” of the anthropogenic-warming campaign, the report was rapidly losing credibility.

First came “Glaciergate.” In its final report, the IPCC suggested that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 or sooner. It turns out the wild assertion (along with several others in the same paragraph) was lifted from an advocacy group’s propaganda literature, which took it from an Indian magazine article that has since been discredited. The claim was totally incorrect. The IPCC has been forced to recant it.

More errors were soon exposed in a flurry of bad press for the alarmists. Amazongate, as it has become known, involved fantastical predictions about global warming’s effect on the Amazon rain forest. Up to 40 percent of it could be in danger, according to the report. The IPCC also took this claim from advocacy group literature. But on top of that, it incorrectly attributed it to a report that did not even hint at such a prediction. Critics have correctly labeled the assertion a “fabrication.”

There was also Africagate. The IPCC erroneously claimed that rain-dependent agriculture in some African countries could be cut in half by 2020, with the wildly inaccurate claims also taken from an advocacy group report (written by an academic who works with “carbon credits”). Of course, this was also wrong. But this time, IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri was the one responsible for allowing the error to be repeated in the condensed “Synthesis Report.”

Questions and criticism about the use of temperature data have also been ongoing and continue to plague the UN panel’s credibility. “Chinagate,” where scientists misused Chinese temperature records, is just one example.

The claims of increased hurricane frequency were also proven fraudulent. And as if those blows were not enough, the Dutch government recently forced the IPCC to retract its claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level. It’s actually 26 percent.

The rapid loss of public credibility over all the errors has also accompanied numerous calls by prominent voices for official inquiries and even criminal investigations. Several universities involved have already launched reviews. And even previous IPCC chief Professor Robert Watson, for example, is calling for a probe to investigate “warming bias” by the UN panel. “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying,” he told the U.K. Times Online. “The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.” The UN will indeed launch an “independent” inquiry, but critics generally expect a coverup.

U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) went further, proposing criminal investigations to determine if alarmists violated any laws. A Senate report produced for Inhofe’s Environment and Public Works Committee concluded that, among other problems, “scientists involved in the CRU controversy violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws.”

Similarly, British authorities were investigating possible criminal activity by Climategate scientists who refused to provide documents and data under lawful Freedom of Information requests. The scientists may reportedly escape prosecution under the FOI law because of a six-month statute of limitations. ||