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COMMENTARY
July 10, 2010
The weather
It has been very hot around here lately, though I'm inclined to attribute this to the arrival of summer in the northern hemisphere rather than to what was called "man-made global warming" (until its salesmen started hedging their bets with "climate change" instead).In other words, I still look upon the sun as the key player in meteorological developments on this planet. Call me superstitious; I've been called worse. Since the last time I checked in on "climate" -- a term I propose to recognize as neutral -- much has happened. The stake has yet to be driven quite through the heart of what I still consider to be the biggest fraud perpetrated on the tax-paying public in the current century. But progress is being made. Polls taken, throughout the Western world, have shown the public everywhere less and less willing to indulge this cash-sucking "settled science." Regardless of what has been reported, anecdotally, in the mainstream media, surely every curious person with access to the Internet now knows that polar bears are flourishing, the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica aren't retreating, even the glaciers in the Himalayas are holding up, and most of those low-lying, coral islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are still growing in size. Not that they have asked for my advice, but I do think the warm-alarmists of the IPCC and generally are foolish to commit themselves to such specific claims, for the sake of grabbing a few passing headlines; for in the end, hogwash undermines credibility. As that Lincoln fellow said, "You can't fool all the people all the time," though to be fair you can probably fool more of them today than ever. We learned this week a third whitewashing investigation into the behaviour of the settled scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit has dutifully whitewashed everyone. It was conducted by the Scottish civil servant, Sir Muir Russell, a classic "Sir Humphrey Appleby" old boy, who has long specialized in seeing no evil, and who totally ignored the CRU's critics in this case. Calls for a serious investigation are now being heard in the British House of Commons. Phil Jones has been reinstated at the University of East Anglia (which hosts the CRU), with the new title, Director of Research. This was after Sir Muir cleared him and all his establishment colleagues in the "Climategate" affair -- of the hacked e-mails, which anyone can still read for himself on the Internet. "Wrongdoing" can be an indeterminate expression, but in this case the term was used with fair precision, to mean: Did the subject commit a specific criminal act, for which he could be tried and imprisoned? As Gerald Warner comments in his Daily Telegraph blog: "The dogs in the street in Ulan Bator know that Phil Jones and his cronies defied FOI requests and asked for e-mails to be deleted and that people only do that if they have something to hide." But was there a Conspiracy? Of course not. When you have countless billions of dollars, pounds, and euros funding research to prove and demonstrate global warming, you hardly need a conspiracy. Like all previous global environmental scares, from Rachel Carson forward, "global warming" shone on soil rich with vested interests. From outsized research grants, to carbon trading schemes, there is no end of corrupt, but technically legal, ways to make money from this dubious "settled science" -- and continue making money, long after the whole premise has been exposed as buncombe, given the inertia of massive public-funding programs. (And there is still more "cap-and-trade" gunk oozing down the legislative pipeline.) The oil companies themselves -- BP was a spectacular example -- were (and remain) happy enough to play along, once they can see which way the money is blowing. The entire Third World is happy to appear for their turn at the trough, with strident claims of victimhood. No: a conspiracy has never been required to explain a long queue behind a tall pile of money. Three whitewashing investigations so far, each nominally more independent than the last, and called, successively, for the simple reason that the controversy will not go away. And the CRU has played (and still plays) such an important role in generating and co-ordinating international "climate change" alarms, that "Climategate" won't sweep under the rug. For there is no rug large enough. The scandal cannot go away, so long as people are able to read those e-mails. Yet the global warming establishment, and all scientific and popular media that had over-committed themselves to the CO2 hypothesis, cite these soi-disant "investigations" as if the research itself had been vindicated; adding the ludicrously false charge that skeptics have subscribed to some "conspiracy theory." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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