Radical Environmentalism – “Climategate” – The Fall of Global Warming? (Part 11)

…continued from a previous post, commenting on the recent discovery of purposefully manipulated climate data – dubbed “Climategate” - designed to falsely promote the concept that the earth is warming…Hey, I’m all for good stewardship. But science shouldn’t lie about statistics in order to promote a dubious agenda.
****************
The exposure of falsehoods, data deletion, and attempted cover-ups recently related to The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is having some repercussions in the environmental community. I am reading blogs and posts by people who were formerly convinced of Anthropogenic Global Warming as fact, but who now have their suspicions that the world has been led down “an inconvenient path”.

What changes in attitude or action are being seen as a result of Climategate?

On his way to the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) summit in Copenhagen next week, Saudi Arabia’s lead climate negotiator has said, "It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change… So, whatever the international community does to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have no effect on the climate's natural variability." I think some of us have been hinting at that very point for a while.

In the wake of the Climategate memos, Australia’s Parliament got rid of a pro-Kyoto leader, and then voted down their proposed cap-and-trade energy policy (designed to regulate carbon emissions to be more environment-friendly). It was expected to pass before the Climategate scandal came to light. I continue to “warm” to the idea of moving to Australia if things continue down their current path here in the United States. I certainly hope that our lawmakers have the fortitude to abandon cap-and-trade before they further wreck our economy.

Here’s a good one - Al Gore has suddenly canceled his December trip to Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, though he had already sold 3,000 tickets to his scheduled speaking event, at over $1,200 each (that’s $3.6 million that he’s turning down – why would he do that?). And there are at least two people in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts who are calling for Gore’s Oscar to be investigated or rescinded for his 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth. Here’s a little-known fact - did you know that Gore and his producers have admitted that much of the footage showing majestic icebergs in the movie was not real – but was made using CGI (computer-generated images)? You know – like Toy Story – which, by the way, also isn’t real.

Remember that graph at the beginning of An Inconvenient Truth that showed the sudden temperature rise in recent years? In an article entitled “The Deceit Behind Global Warming”, written by Christopher Booker and Richard North, they note:

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in the past, global temperatures had been higher than in the late 20th century.

In 1998 came the answer they were looking for: a new temperature chart, devised by a young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the "hockey stick" because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, then suddenly flicking up at the end to record levels.

Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling, when CO2 had already been rising, all had been wiped away.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

Items like this have been known for several years, but they are finally getting some real exposure in the wake of Climategate. Look for more of Michael Mann’s involvement to be revealed as the scandal progresses. Things are beginning to unravel, but will it come apart altogether?

One U.S. climatologist is quoted in the Climategate documents as saying, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... Our observing system is inadequate." Do you see his leap to a conclusion, even when the facts don’t support it? Rather than postulate the possibility that global warming is not occurring, the automatic conclusion is that the measurement system must be incorrect. This is a perfect example of the “bad science” I have been pointing out in this series.

And this is precisely what I mean about environmentalism becoming a religion. Because some scientists reach out to global warming on faith – whether the facts support it or not. For them, it is truly "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). This is the very definition of faith in the Bible. And because many of these scientists do not have God in their life, they have replaced the worship of God with a worship of the earth. Now, their environmental faith is in jeopardy. Will they finally replace it with a faith in God?
************************
Next in this series.......
or
Back to Part 1 of this series...