Let us pass from Oslo where Obama went one better than Carter who, you may recall, proclaimed in 1977 that his crusade for energy conservation was "the moral equivalent of war". Obama trumped this with his claim that war is the moral equivalent of peace. As he was proffering this absurdity, Copenhagen was hosting its global warming jamboree, surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasising since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled for the Council of Nicaea in 325AD to debate whether God the father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and with the Holy Ghost. Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic – human-caused - global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web more than a thousand emails either sent from or received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia headed by Dr Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from his post – whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. At that time the supposed menace to the planet and to mankind was global cooling, a source of interest to oil companies for obvious reasons. Coolers transmuted into Warmers and the CRU became one of the climate modeling grant mills supplying the often loaded data from which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports which have been since their inception – particularly the executive summaries - carefully contrived political initiatives disguised as objective science. The CRU emails undermine Warmers' claim to the moral high ground Soon persuaded of the potential of AGW theories for their bottom line, the energy giants effortlessly recalibrated their stance, and as of 2008 the CRU included among its financial supporters not only Shell and BP, but also the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex Ltd, a company in the nuclear waste business. After some initial dismay at what has been called, somewhat unoriginally, 'Climategate', the reaction amid progressive circles – 99 per cent inhabited by True Believers in anthropogenic global warming - has been to take up defensive positions around the proposition that deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate and, although embarrassing, the CRU emails in no way compromise the core pretensions of their cause. Scientific research is indeed saturated with exactly this sort of chicanery. But the CRU emails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers – always absurd to those who have studied the debate in any detail – that they commanded the moral high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the sceptics as intellectual whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate modeling enterprises. There's now a vast archipelago of research departments and "institutes of climate change" across academia, with a huge vested interest in defending the AGW model. It's where the money is. Scepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker. Filed under: Copenhagen, Alexander Cockburn, Climate change, Global warmingThose CRU emails expose Copenhagen as a farce
The facts are: ice coverage is unchanged while global temperatures are falling
Friday 18 December 2009
LAST UPDATED 7:17 AM, DECEMBER 18, 2009
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