The Big Scam

• Last week, the public learned that claims made by the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change were not based on science, but on speculation. Specifically, the IPCC's 2007 report said the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 due to man-made global warming.


The claim, used at the U.N. Copenhagen climate change conference in cold and snowy December to rush through a restrictive greenhouse-gas-emissions treaty, was not based on a scientific study. It was based on a telephone call that a reporter had with a scientist who was speculating.  The IPCC has withdrawn the claim. Murari Lal, the scientist who included the contention in the U.N. report, admitted that he knew it wasn't based on peer-reviewed scientific research.


• Also in the last week, it was revealed that U.S. researchers working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are excluding temperature data from cold regions for a database used by the U.N. in its global warming scare campaign.

Canwest News Service, a Canadian agency that also owns a chain of newspapers, reported Friday, "In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.  "Worse, only one station — at Eureka on Ellesmere Island — is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

"The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada."

Canwest also reports that Americans Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, say that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has "reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database" and has "cherry-picked" the stations.  The NASA agency uses data from "sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather."
In a paper published on the Science and Public Policy Institute Web site, D'Aleo and Smith say the "NOAA ... systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.
"The thermometers, in a sense, marched toward the tropics, the sea and to airport tarmacs."
• Then, just last weekend, we find that same 2007 IPCC report included another phony claim: that "the rapidly rising costs" of natural disasters since the 1970s is linked to global warming.
British newspapers reported Sunday that that assertion was neither peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific paper when the IPCC report was issued. When the paper that the claim was based on was published in 2008, its authors said:  "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."  Now the IPCC says it is "reassessing the evidence."
Is this what we are seeing with the contention that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are causing the planet to overheat?  We can't see into the future, but this myth has taken so many hits from the truth that its survival is in doubt.