Boxer Undeterred By Global Warming E-Mails Scandal

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

California Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken an odd position in regards to the latest developments in climate science. The publication of hundreds of e-mails between some of the world's leading climate researchers is proving to be an embarrassment to the proponents of man-made global warming.

In the emails, scientists appear to be encouraging each other to keep their stories straight about global warming while discussing strategies to discredit opposing views and deal with data points that inconveniently fail to support the correct conclusion: that human activity have caused a permanent increase in the world's temperatures.

You might think that the embarrassment accompanying the disclosure of these emails—even the liberal Jon Stewart is making fun of them on The Daily Show—would generate at least a pause in the adopt legislation that will cause billions of dollars to be sucked out of the American economy and kill thousands of jobs here at home. And you'd be wrong.

Boxer, who chairs the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and is a leading legislative proponent of anti-climate change legislation, has not even missed a step toward her eventual goal. Rather than deal with the allegation she intends, to paraphrase the old joke, to go after "the alligator."

According to published reports Boxer—rather than examine whether the e-mails are proof of a conspiracy within the scientific community to prove global warming exists despite the data, as some have alleged—wants her committee to go after the people who released the e-mails, calling it a criminal matter.

Describing the e-mails—taken from computers at the Climate Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia—as "stolen," Boxer said her committee might hold hearings designed to determine who stole them and how, despite claims that they are the product of whistleblowing.

"We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not," Boxer said. "Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated," she said, announcing a diversionary tactic that could give the scientists who may have perpetrated a scientific fraud of greater significance than the "Piltdown Man" a free pass.

Someone has her priorities out of whack.

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