The View from Mudsock Heights: A Scientific Scandal You Probably Haven’t Heard Much About

By Dennis E. Powell | Dec 4, 2009 at 9:55:18

Imagine, if you would, that a few weeks before Easter it were announced that the body of Jesus had been found, that it had been kept in an oh-so-secret crypt in the Vatican lo, these many years. That disclosure would be big news, wouldn’t it? It would put quite a crimp in the most fundamental tenets of Christianity. It would be pretty difficult to sustain the religion after that.

Something just as shocking has happened in the new religion of global warmism, though it is, oddly, not being very well covered.

A huge repository of information from the prestigious Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England was made public recently. It is unclear whether it was leaked by an outraged insider or acquired by an outsider who cracked the CRU’s computer network. The information contains an extensive email record that documents the unit’s deliberate falsification of data to show global warming where there is none.

Officials at the CRU admit that the documents are real.

There’s more: it also includes the source code of the unit’s software designed to keep track of temperatures from weather stations around the world. This source code shows not only that the software reported higher temperature trends than actually existed but included notations that show the falsification was deliberate. Here’s a snippet:

“valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,
-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,
2.6]*0.75         ; fudge factor”

That lists the artificial increase in temperatures in degrees that were to be added to the actual temperatures on an historical scale to make it seem as if it is getting warmer than it actually is. The phrase “fudge factor” is the notation in the source code itself. There are many such examples.

The resulting data were employed by, among others, the United Nations in its global climate report which held that the world is, literally, coming to an end. That report, in turn, is the basis for all kinds of proposals, from world treaties whereby the United States would give billions of dollars we don’t have to other nations so that they could become “more green” to the “cap and trade” legislation passed narrowly by the House of Representatives (but, fortunately, stalled in the Senate) that would have the effect of costing the average family an additional $1,800 in energy costs each year.

The data were financed in part by grants made to the CRU by the federal government.

What it means is that the data on which all the alarm about global warming (conveniently called “climate change” after the world stopped getting warmer a decade ago) is at best tainted and at worst entirely phony.

It is a huge scientific scandal, but one you may not have heard much about unless you get your news from the Internet. That is because it has received very little coverage in the traditional news media. There has not even been the coverage attendant to relatively minor scientific scandals, such as the 1989 claim by scientists in Utah that they had achieved “cold fusion” in the lab, or the 2005 claim by a Korean scientist that he had cloned human embryonic stem cells.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

The more one reads the leaked or cracked documents from the CRU, the worse it gets. The global warmism religion — I call it such because it is entirely faith-based, even more so now — has long held that there is scientific “consensus” (as if scientific facts were decided by a vote) that the global warming threat is real. But the documents show a scheme to silence and discredit dissenting scientists.

That scheme was largely successful. Publications and broadcasters who would be eager to give voice to dissent on a wide range of other controversies did not cover the growing scientific objections to the methodology and conclusions of the global warming bishops, priests, and acolytes. They did not cover, for the most part, the fact that the private home of the head of the global warming religion, Albert Arnold Gore Jr., consumes approximately as much energy as the typical WalMart store. The big news media, and the smaller media who sing to their karaoke tune, betrayed their watchdog role to become lapdogs instead. One wonders why.

The scientific scandal is huge, but the journalistic scandal is at least as big.

It will be interesting as the weeks unfold to see how the news media handle the emerging disclosures from the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit. The material is available, so keeping a lid on it is no longer a possibility. Pretending that it doesn’t exist, the reaction so far, may have a small short-term success but will be harmful in the long run.

The documents from the CRU make it pretty clear: the religion of global warming has joined the religion of global cooling (popular in the 1970s), the religion of Malthusian overpopulation (from about the same time), and the religion of acid rain (remember that?) in causing people to mistrust science — and to mistrust those who claim to keep us informed.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.