The climate-change con artists

Global-warming alarmists have been hot under the collar since the still-unfolding Climategate controversy involving The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first erupted in 2009. The emails leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) brought into question the legitimacy of its climate data and and the catastrophic warming hypothesis they're hyping.

The money quote from the original batch of leaked Climategate emails was "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," from IPCC scientist Kevin Trenberth to Michael Mann of "hide the decline" fame. In the running for the new money-quote honors comes from another IPCC scientist: "I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run."

What Climategate has shown is that scientists involved with the IPCC harbor a political agenda designed so that CO2 continues to be seen as the major cause of global warming when the obvious answer could be that CO2 may not make any significant contribution to climate change.

The IPCC's failure would be the best news the planet's inhabitants could receive. An expanded Climategate scandal may just save the world from committing ecological and economic suicide.

See the full documentation explaining how your life could be changed by climate-related laws, taxes and regulations: "Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes The Global Warming Scam"

Al Gore, Earth's pre-eminent pseudo-scientist, expressed the frustration of the movement with an expletive-laced rant at the Aspen Institute in August. Previously supported by a willing media, their efforts are now being dismantled by scandal, new data and continued questioning by skeptical scientists. Gore laments no longer being able to mention "climate change" in mixed company.

Global-warming alarmists realize they desperately need a lifeline. They thought they got it in a new study out of the University of California at Berkley. In October, purported former data skeptic professor Richard Muller "confirmed" that global warming is real with a study partially funded by the Koch brothers – not known for their support of manmade global-warming theories.

The UC Berkley study seemed to have it all: solid evidence, fawning media coverage, a semi-skeptic who's seen the light and opponents with egg all over their faces.

The problem, of course, is that the study does not tell us anything new. We already know Earth's climate is in a constant state of change and has been in a warming cycle for three centuries. What the study did not address was "why?" – and apparently, it never was intended to.

After the initial media blitz, professor Muller told the Wall Street Journal: "How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that." How can this study end the debate over manmade global warming if it never assessed man's impact?

Another issue with this study is the convenient, yet misleading, media narrative that Muller was a former skeptic. How do I know? I debated professor Muller three years ago. He was a manmade-warming believer at that time but said he was going to do a study – one the audience assumed would be to see if the climate has indeed warmed and to also ask if manmade CO2 was the likely culprit.

He, like all climate-change con artists, has avoided answering the following critical questions that are at the heart of climate change and CO2:

Why can't warming alarmists produce a single legitimate example of empirical evidence to support the manmade global-warming hypothesis?
Why has Earth been warming for 300 years when man has only emitted measurable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere for the last 150 years?
Why did Earth cool for 500 years before the recent 300 year warming and warm for several hundred years before that when even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says CO2 levels did not change?
Why was the Medieval Warm Period, a thousand years ago, warmer than today even though the CO2 level was 38 percent lower than today?
Why did many of Earth's major glaciers in the Alps. Asia, New Zealand and Patagonia begin to retreat nearly half a century before the Industrial Revolution and man's CO2 emissions?
Of the last five interglacials, going back 400,000 years, why is our current interglacial the coolest of the five even though Earth's CO2 level is about 35 percent higher?
Why has our current 10,000-year-long Holocene epoch been warmer than today for 50 percent of the time when CO2 levels were about 35 percent lower than today?
Why are correlations of Earth's temperature with natural factors such as sunspot numbers, solar cycle lengths, solar magnetic variations and changes in major ocean currents all better than the correlation of Earth's temperature with CO2 levels?

Until the alarmists can adequately address these questions, their quest to destroy the economies of the world, while feeding at the trough filled with taxpayer subsidies and grants, will remain in jeopardy.

If we force ourselves to use the most expensive energies in the world – currently solar and wind – and succeed in actually lowering the level of atmospheric CO2, economic devastation and mass starvation awaits. As CO2 levels fall, so will food production. This is not a model projection but based on hundreds of peer-reviewed studies showing the effects of atmospheric CO2 levels on plants.

To quote another just-released Climategate email: "What if climate change turns out to be a natural fluctuation? They will kill us all." Is that motive for fraud? You be the judge.

Leighton Steward is a geologist, environmentalist, author and retired energy industry executive. He currently heads up the organization Plants Need CO2 and is a veteran of television and talk radio where he helps educate the public and politicians about the benefits of CO2 as it relates to the plant and animal ecosystems.