The New Deniers

Skeptics of man made global warming have been called “deniers”, a name purposely chosen to tie them to “holocaust deniers”. In other words, nut cases refusing to recognize the obvious. Skeptics like me were held in contempt and shouted down by the true believers. Most skeptics kept their doubts about the doomsday predictions to themselves.

One would have thought that after the publication of over 3000 emails and reams of data either hacked or released by a whistle blower on November 17th from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, that things would change. I naively expected that the scandal dubbed “ClimateGate” would anger journalists and editors and they would now aggressively investigate and report on what appears to be a massive fraud. HA! Silly me.

“The Vancouver Sun” reluctantly ran a brief report on “ClimateGate” a week or so after the story broke on the internet and then pretended it did not matter, running one global warming scare piece after another on the buildup to the climate conference in Copenhagen. Today they ran four pieces lamenting the failure of the UN conference to impose massive restrictions and taxes on Canada and the developed world.

The ClimateGate emails revealed that the dons at CRU had fudged and cherry picked the data, conspired to “peer review” each other’s work, frustrated FOI requests for other researchers to see their data and methods and pressured scientific journals to exclude articles critical of their positions. Now they claim they have “lost” the original data on which they based their research! They also wrote each other lamenting the inability of their theories to account for recent cooling. Pretty damning stuff and those defending the emails as simply ‘banter between scientists’ sounded more than a little lame.

Honest and diligent reporters should have smelled out this story years ago. Canadians Steve McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick have been working on it for years and have written papers discrediting Dr. Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph widely used by alarmists. The graph showed a dramatic rise in temperatures in the last century and eliminated the Medieval Warming Period of 800 years ago. M and M, as the CRU scientists called them, discredited the hockey stick proxy data showing that they had cherry picked the data. (Recently Russia revealed the CRU had also selectively utilized the weather station data provided to them by Russia. CRU researchers only used 25% of the data, selecting the warmest locations.) McIntyre also made NASA back off from their contention that 1998 was the warmest year on record. It was actually 1934. NASA admitted their error. Did you read about any of this in your local newspaper or see it on TV? No, of course not. Should they take Al Gore’s Nobel Prize away and give it to McIntyre and McKitrick? Certainly.

You would think that when new evidence is presented a rational person would reevaluate their position. That does not seem to be the case with global warming (oops. Climate Change). And, with record breaking cold and massive snow dumps in Europe and North America even before winter’s official start (yesterday) one would expect some concern. Hey, it actually snowed in Houston and collected on the beaches in the south of France. Hello. Oh, I forgot, that’s climate change formerly known as global warming. Right.

There seem to be two camps that have a vested interest in perpetuating the global warming alarmism: The scientists who receive massive amounts of money from various governments to conduct their research. If scientists scream the world is coming to an end government opens the purse to fund the research. CRU received $20 million from the Brits. The US has doled out far more. This camp also includes those who invest in industries poised to gain from government funded alternative energy projects and those who can get in on the carbon trading schemes.

The other camp includes socialists who believe the solution to all the ills of society can be rectified by a world government. Craig McInnes wrote a piece in today’s Sun (After Copenhagen: Political Climate Change Begins at Home). He summed it up for us with this quote: “What Copenhagen demonstrates again is that we don’t have a system of international governance that allows a global interest to override national interests…” Just what Canadians need, the UN telling us how many cow (or moose) farts are allowed, how we can heat or light our homes or whether we can barbecue a steak. If you think about the UN Food for Oil scandal or the ongoing slaughter in Darfur you can probably guess how well global governance might work out.

What about the editors and journalists, you might ask? I suppose some are just lazy or hired to be the “environmental reporter” inclined to lean left and green. They have tended to just parrot news releases and propaganda put out by environmental groups without doing any serious checking of the facts. Hey, scary stuff sells papers. Don’t rock the boat.

If you really want to get information on global warming you have only to go to the internet. (Journalist take note.) You can start by viewing a special report by Fox News called “Global Warming, Or a Lot of Hot Air”. It ran last Sunday but it’s now posted on YouTube (part 1 of many--look for other links). If I could find it, you can. Next I would suggest Steve McIntyre’s site, Climate Audit and then Climate Depot. If you still believe in global warming after a little honest research God love ya. You’re a New Denier.