A spokeswoman for former Vice President Al Gore has suggested that scientists cited in a new Senate minority report that calls global warming worries "entirely without merit" have been bought off.

The U.S. Senate report documents hundreds of prominent scientists – experts in dozens of fields of study worldwide – who say global warming and cooling is a cycle of nature and cannot legitimately be connected to man's activities.

But Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider told the Washington Times that after a quick review, about 25 or 30 of the scientists cited in the report may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp.

However, Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the claim, telling the newspaper the company is concerned about climate change reports, and doesn't pay scientists to "bash global-warming theories."

"Recycling of that kind of discredited conspiracy theory is nothing more than a distraction from the real challenge facing society and the energy industry," he told the Times. "And that challenge is how are we going to provide the energy needed to support economic and social development while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions."

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A spokesman for Gore declined WND requests for additional comment on the issue.

"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting – a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number – entirely without merit," Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer at the Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, said in the report . "I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."

"Of course I believe in global warming, and in global cooling – all part of the natural climate changes that the Earth has experienced for billions of years, caused primarily by the cyclical variations in solar output," said research physicist John W. Brosnahan, who develops remote-sensing instruments for atmospheric science for clients including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

However, he said, "I have not seen any sort of definitive, scientific link to man-made carbon dioxide as the root cause of the current global warming, only incomplete computer models that suggest that this might be the case.

"Even though these computer climate models do not properly handle a number of important factors, including the role of precipitation as a temperature regulator, they are being (mis-)used to force a political agenda upon the U.S.," he continued. "While there are any number of reasons to reduce carbon dioxide generation, to base any major fiscal policy on the role of carbon dioxide in climate change would be inappropriate and imprudent at best and potentially disastrous economic folly at the worst."

The report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP ranking member cited more than 400 prominent scientists in dozens of fields of study from more than two dozen nations around the world who voiced objections to the so-called "consensus" on "man-made global warming," the subject of Gore's award-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth."

Gore, of course, has likened skeptics of the global-warming philosophy to "flat Earth society members."

As recently as Nov. 5, he said:

"But when you're reporting on a story like the one you're covering today, where you have people all around the world, you don't take – you don't search out for someone who still believes the Earth is flat and give them equal time. And the reason the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the thousands of scientists who make up that group, have for almost 20 years now created a very strong scientific consensus that is as strong a consensus as you'll ever see in science, that the climate crisis is real, human beings are responsible for it."

The Senate report, however, noted the scientists who are expressing a dissatisfaction with such generalizations include experts in climatology, geology, oceanography, biology, glaciology, biogeography, meteorology, economics, chemistry, mathematics, environmental sciences, engineering, physics and paleoclimatology.

"Some of those profiled have won Nobel Prizes for their outstanding contribution to their field of expertise and many shared a portion of the UN IPCC Nobel Peace Price with Vice President Gore," the report said.

Besides the Nobel Gore shared over the issue of global warming, he also won an Oscar for his work on "An Inconvenient Truth," which proclaims the validity of man-made global warming and advocates urgent action.

Al Gore stars in 'An Inconvenient Truth'

And there probably would be many more scientists making such statements, were it not for the fear of retaliation from those aboard the global-warming-is-caused-by-SUVs bandwagon, the report said.

"Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," noted Nathan Paldor, professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He's authored almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, and said, "First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial revolution (about 0.8C in 150 years or even 0.4C in the last 35 years) have occurred in Earth's climatic history. There's nothing special about the recent rise!"

Members of the U.S. Senate earlier had noted an e-mail from a global warming theory supporter to a critic, threatening to "destroy your career … if you produce one more editorial against climate change."

Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, recently converted from a believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. Patterson noted that the notion of a "consensus" of scientists aligned with United Nations climate change advocates or former is false.

"I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority," he said.

The report was generated after UN IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri implied there were only "about half a dozen" skeptical scientists left in the world.

A ruling from British High Court Judge Michael Burton also has restricted the showing of Gore's film in British schools so that it includes guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.

The British court said the production includes 11 inaccuracies, including:

• The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government's expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.

• The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The court found that the film was misleading: Over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.

• The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that it was "not possible" to attribute one-off events to global warming.

• The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that this was not the case.

• The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr. Gore had misread the study: In fact four polar bears drowned, and this was because of a particularly violent storm.

• And others.

The new study includes opinions from scientists at Harvard, NASA, NOAA, NCAR, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Danish National Space Center, U.S. Department of Energy, Princeton, the EPA, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the University of Helsinki, Notre Dame, Stockholm University and others.

"Even if the concentration of 'greenhouse gases' double man would not perceive the temperature impact," said Russian scientist Oleg Sorochtin, of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He's authored more than 300 studies, nine books and a 2006 paper titled, "The Evolution and the Prediction of Global Climate Changes on Earth."

WND earlier reported more than 500 scientists were cited by an analysis of peer-reviewed literature by the Hudson Institute as having published documentation questioning an least one facet of the global-warming agenda.

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