Climate Fun

Everyone likes to attach GATE to any scandal, so let's see how many GATES we can throw on all the climate scandals that have happened over the last few months. Below are some excerpts from the Orange County Registers list of Global Warming Scandals. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the "settled science" to confirm or deny the Register's list. But there seems to be an awful lot of smoke.

ClimateGate: Thousands of leaked documents from Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit showed systematic suppression and discrediting of climate skeptics' views and discarding of temperature data, suggesting a bias for making the case for warming.

FOIGate: The British government has determined someone at East Anglia committed a crime by refusing to release global warming documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information Act requests.

ChinaGate: An investigation by the U.K.'s left-leaning Guardian newspaper found evidence that Chinese weather station measurements not only were seriously flawed, but couldn't be located.

HimalayaGate: An Indian climate official admitted in January that, as lead author of the IPCC's Asian report, he intentionally exaggerated when claiming Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 in order to prod governments into action. It was originally advanced by a researcher who later admitted it was "speculation" lifted from a popular magazine.

PachauriGate: The IPCC chairman who accepted the Nobel Prize with Al Gore at first defended the Himalaya melting scenario claiming critics practiced "voodoo science" until the melting-scam perpetrator confessed.

PachauriGate II: The IPCC chairman also claimed he didn't know before Copenhagen that the bogus Himalayan glacier claim was sheer speculation. But the London Times reported that a prominent science journalist said he had pointed out those errors in several e-mails and discussions to Pachauri, who "decided to overlook it."

SternGate: One excuse for imposing worldwide climate crackdown has been the U.K.'s 2006 Stern Report, an economic doomsday prediction commissioned by the government. Now the U.K. Telegraph reports that "some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified."

SternGate II: A researcher now claims the Stern Report misquoted his work to suggest a firm link between global warming and more-frequent and severe floods and hurricanes. Robert Muir-Wood said his original research showed no such link.

AmazonGate: The London Times exposed the IPCC claim that global warming will wipe out rain forests was fraudulent, yet advanced as "peer-reveiwed" science. The Times said the assertion actually "was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise," "authored by two green activists" and lifted from a report from the World Wildlife Fund. The "research" was based on a popular science magazine report that didn't bother to assess rainfall. Instead, it looked at the impact of logging and burning.

PeerReviewGate: The U.K. Sunday Telegraph has documented at least 16 nonpeer-reviewed reports from the advocacy group World Wildlife Fund that were used in the IPCC's climate report.

RussiaGate: Russian think tank investigators evaluated thousands of documents and e-mails leaked from the East Anglia research center and concluded readings from the coldest regions of their nation had been omitted, driving average temperatures up about half a degree.

Russia-Gate II: A presentation last October to the Geological Society of America showed how tree-ring data from Russia was deceptively truncated and misrepresented.

U.S.Gate: Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions, just as in the Russian case, resulting in misleading higher average temperatures.

IceGate: The IPCC based its peer reviewed findings of reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and in Africa on a feature story of climbers' anecdotes in a popular mountaineering magazine, and a dissertation by a Switzerland university student, quoting mountain guides.

ResearchGate: While a Penn State University inquiry into climate scientist Michael Mann found no misconduct, they did find "further investigation is warranted" to determine whether Mann engaged in actions that "seriously deviated from accepted practices for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities."

ReefGate: The IPCC based its peer reviewed findings linking climate change and coral reef degradation on advocacy articles by Greenpeace as its sole source for this claim.

AfricaGate: The IPCC claim that rising temperatures could cut in half agricultural yields in African countries turns out to have come from a 2003 paper published by a Canadian environmental think tank not a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

DutchGate: The IPCC also claimed rising sea levels endanger the 55 percent of the Netherlands it says is below sea level. The portion of the Netherlands below sea level actually is 20 percent.

AlaskaGate: Geologists for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography and their U.S. and Canadian colleagues say previous studies largely overestimated by 40 percent Alaskan glacier loss for 40 years.