'A quick idiot's guide to why Climategate matters' :: Political News and commentaries

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December 3, 2009

'A quick idiot's guide to why Climategate matters'

While Barack Obama hides his head in the sand in the midst of the furor over climategate, James Delingpole, who has been all over the climategate scandal like a dog on a bone with his pieces in The Telegraph here, here, here, and here, has a new piece today that provides a "very, very simple quick idiot's guide to why Climategate does indeed matter." Cutting to the quick, here's the the short list:

1. A bunch of climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have been caught out cheating. They distorted evidence, hid or lost inconvenient raw data, manipulated the science towards a particular end, and set out to silence hard-working, decent, honest scientists who disagreed with them.

2. Those climate scientists aren't just any old bunch of scientists. They work at the very heart of the IPCC process. They - and their friends: for this is a small and tight cabal, comprising around 43 scientists - are the 'lead authors' on the IPCC's reports. They also supply the most important of the four data records used by the IPCC. They are the people telling our political leaders that the world is suffering from catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming - caused largely by the growth in CO2 emissions - and that urgent action needs to be taken to prevent it.

3. According to one estimate - by the International Energy Agency - the global cost of dealing with AGW will be $45 trillion (that's 2/3 of the world's current entire economic). This will mean our energy bills will rise by perhaps a factor of ten; that we will be subject to more and more pettifogging rules on what kind of lightbulbs we use and how we dispose of our trash - perhaps even how often we're allowed to fly; it will mean governance by unelected "experts" and technocrats from the UN; it will cripple industry; it will mean higher taxes; it will take money from the middle classes in the Western world and hand them over in the form of "compensation" to kleptocrat dictators in the Third World; it will almost certainly send the global economy diving into a double dip depression. We are, in other words, about to be presented with the biggest bill in the history of mankind.

4. Given what we now know about the reliability of 2 and the basis of 1, are we really sure that with 3 we're getting our money's worth?

Read it all, pass it on, then ring the phones off the hook in Washington and tell them where to shove their cap-and-trade plans and to put the EPA's climate-change measures on hold - as in permanently.

Posted by Richard at December 3, 2009 7:42 AM

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