Global Warming E-Mails Scandal Show Scientists May Have Cooked the Facts

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

It is starting to look like President Barack Obama, aided and abetted by former Vice President Al Gore, Sens. Barbara Boxer, and John F. Kerry and others, may have lied this nation into a war against man-made global warming.

Preliminary analysis of the contents of thousands of E-mails and documents taken from the computer archives of the Climate Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia—possibly by a hacker, possibly by a whistleblower—indicate a number of the world's most important scientists engaged in research designed to prove that global warming really does exist may have been cooking the books.

As columnist Michael Barone wrote in Sunday's Washington Examiner, "The CRU has been a major source of data on global temperatures, relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the e-mails suggest that CRU scientists have been suppressing and misstating data and working to prevent the publication of conflicting views in peer-reviewed science periodicals."

If true, the cooking of the temperature data to provide support for the idea that man-made global warming is occurring is a scandal of most serious proportions. It should force policymakers to reconsider the role science plays in the formulation of policy if its conclusions can be manipulated the way those concerning climate change now appear to have been.

Some of those involved in the E-mail chains that are now under examination have concocted what on their face come across as bizarre explanations for some of the things they said, many of which boil down to the notion that the words they used did not mean what they mean. It sort of takes us back to what the meaning of "is" is.

They have been engaged in a political war, using science as a weapon. The E-mails reveal the dangers inherent in relying on "approved science" as the last word on anything, especially if—as it now appears—some of the more influential supporters of the idea of global warming tried very hard to make sure that contrary theories and evidence that countered their assumptions and projections were never allowed to see the light of day, at least in any reputable scientific journal.

The real tragedy in all this is its effect on the common, ordinary citizen of the planet. Because the industrialized world is driven by carbon-based energy, the effort to rein in the release of carbon into the atmosphere has had a very real impact on human productivity and economic growth. People have had their livelihoods, their very way of life threatened by the ivory tower science behind the idea of man-made global warming. And, despite the very real indication that the current studies are unreliable as the basis for anything and that we need to begin all over again, with greater transparency and more effective peer review, the revelations coming from the East Anglia E-mails seem to have no effect on the political process whatsoever. President Obama is still going to Copenhagen and is still going to use the apparently phony data to try and bring the world to a point of agreement on carbon emissions.

Truth, like science, now appears relative.

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