Like Tiger Woods, President Barack Obama arrived Friday for the finale of the Copenhagen climate gathering eager to give cold cash to get hot love.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday rolled out a carpet of greenbacks for Mr. Obama's beatification. She told delegates that the United States was prepared to join with other rich nations to provide $100 billion every year in what amounts to reparations to poor countries to atone for our purported damage to Earth's climate.
She left it to President Obama on Friday to announce how much American taxpayers shall pay. Typically the U.S. ponies up at least one-third of such pledges.
If you divide $33 billion by 300 million Americans, such a promise is roughly equivalent to an extra $440 every year from every American family of four.
Mr. Obama needs to top the standing ovation delegates gave Venezuela's Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez for vowing to “fight against capitalism.”
This United Nations conference was never about global warming, except as a pretext to justify the vast global wealth transfer Obama will deliver.
As its chairwoman flatly said when the gathering opened, nothing as irrelevant as facts or scandal would be allowed to take its global governance and global wealth redistribution agenda “off the rails.”
She spoke in reference to the scandal known as “climategate,” e-mails hacked from computers at Britain's University of East Anglia climate research center.
Those private e-mails reveal climate scientists, including experts whose data and analyses are central to the whole U.N. case for global warming, snickering over how they rigged data to “hide” recent cooling and discarded raw data that could undermine their warming claims. (A Russian think tank announced Thursday its suspicion that East Anglia cherry-picked Russian temperature measurements to favor warming and discard evidence of cooling.)
Climategate's e-mails make abundantly clear that the entire scientific pretext for Copenhagen was built on fraud and deceit.
And prominent among these crooked scientists is the suspended director of the East Anglia climate center, who in recent years raked in more than $19 million in taxpayer money for his fiefdom by concocting evidence that temperatures are rising and the sky is falling.
The saddest moment for me at Copenhagen involved Dr. Stephen Schneider, who long ago helped me refine my climate book “The Cooling,” in which I put forth a careful case for global cooling, even the risk of a new ice age. (My predictions remain far more accurate than those warning of global warming, which since then has failed to manifest as the 30-year trend needed to define a change in climate, not mere weather.)
Schneider back then was already a believer in warming, but he generously provided a dust jacket blurb for my book. Ever since, he has unfairly been accused of once advocating climatic cooling.
Schneider is best known for writing in 1989 that “we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change.”
“To do this,” he continued, “we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
Steve is right. Scientists are also human beings who should never be mistaken for paragons of objectivity. When they distort the data to advance a political agenda, they cease to be ethical scientists.
I remember Schneider telling me sadly of Carl Sagan. To promote nuclear
disarmament, Sagan went to the press with a new hypothesis called “nuclear winter,” the notion that nuclear war could chill Earth's climate, perhaps even bring on a new ice age.
“We wondered why Carl didn't bring this to us at NCAR [the National Center for Atmospheric Research] to simulate on our supercomputer,” Schneider told me. “When we later played his nuclear war, all we could produce was a bit of 'nuclear autumn,' a little more frost in a few places.”
What Sagan presented to the press was his own computer model of Earth with no mountains and no oceans. The oceans act as a temperature balancer for our planet, remaining relatively warm in winter and cool in summer, thereby reducing temperature extremes on nearby continents.
Sagan knew that the NCAR computers would not produce “nuclear winter,” so he concocted a phony computer model to fool the press by producing his politically desired result, not the scientifically honest one.
Schneider back then had the integrity to criticize Sagan, not only to me but later in the pages of Scientific American.
But days ago in Copenhagen Schneider refused to criticize his warming comrades at East Anglia, exposed in their own emails as being as politicized and dishonest as Sagan.
Instead, Schneider had his assistant try to silence — and then had a United Nations security cop threaten to take away the video camera from — Irish journalist Phelim McAleer, who had dared to question him about climategate.
Days later, a warming zealot among the delegates hurled a hard vegetable at baseball-pitcher speed into McAleer's face, nearly putting out his left eye.
Politics poisons science, perverting the ethics of those egotistical enough to believe they can faithfully practice both at the same time. America needs separation of science and state.
Among the many monsters spawned by mating politics and science is authoritarianism, the attitude that those white-robed state priest-scientists in charge may not be questioned.
Schneider, ironically, was there to promote his new book, “Science As a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate.”
By joining the extremists who stifle and attack climate skeptics instead of honestly debating them, Schneider has allied himself with the climategaters who have damaged both the integrity and public credibility of climate science.
Lowell Ponte is co-host of the radio show “Night-Watch,” heard live nationwide Monday through Friday, 10 p.m. to midnight Eastern time, on gcnlive.com.
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