The Scriptures Must Be Fulfilled, Which Means a One-World Religion and Government Will Be Established

"We shall have world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or consent." - Statement by Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member James Warburg to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17, 1950 (click here for more quotes)

Despite Research Dispute, the White House Believes 'Climate Change Is Happening'

By Tony Romm, The Hill
November 30, 2009

The White House on Monday made exceptionally clear that it wants nothing to do with the furor over documents that global warming skeptics say prove the phenomenon is not a threat.

Despite the incident, which rocked international headlines last week, climate science is sound, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stressed this afternoon, and the White House nonetheless believes "climate change is happening."

"I don't think that's anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," he said during Monday's press briefing.

Climate change skeptics have asserted over the past week that the publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails and documents once housed in the University of East Anglia's computer system refutes most modern global warming evidence.

The documents, unearthed by a blogger who hacked into Climate Research Unit's (CRU) private system, have since touched off an international debate over the veracity of those scientists' works.

But the dispute is proving especially troublesome for the Obama administration as it prepares to head to Copenhagen next week for a climate change summit -- a forum the president will attend.

Not only has the White House faced criticism from the left for offering too few concessions ahead of the meet, it is now fielding dissatisfaction from the right for participating in a summit sponsored in part by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- one of the research organs touched by the CRU spat.

"I think there's no real scientific basis for the dispute of this," responded Gibbs to questions about those scientists' credibility.

Nevertheless, congressional Republicans this week hope to ramp up their criticism of both global warming policy and the science that informs it.

Most vocal seems to be Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe demanded on Friday a hearing into the IPCC's research to determine whether it "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."

"[T]his thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with," he told reporters, noting it was "interesting" the e-mails surfaced before the Copenhagen summit.

The Meaning of Climategate

By William Anderson, LewRockwell.com
December 12, 2009

Almost anyone who can read has heard about the "Climategate" scandal in which emails between the scientists that have been at the forefront of promoting the apocalyptic views of "climate change" were hacked and then made public. The snippets I have read confirm my worst fears, as we are seeing exactly what happens when the political process completely hijacks science.

As an Austrian economist, I don't worship at the feet of the "scientific community," in large part because the "scientific community" is able to engage in trickery but defend its actions in the name of "preserving science." However, because of my own experience in publishing papers in refereed journals and knowing the experiences of others, I can see what has been happening over the past decade in "climate science," and I can tell you that while it is not rigged, it is close to being so.

Modern science is all about receiving grants, and the biggest checkbooks are those wielded by governments, and governments expect certain results. For example, the government two decades ago funded research into the alleged "acid rain" problems, and the researchers reached very different conclusions than what the U.S. Government, and especially Congress and the George H.W. Bush administration (and his William Reilly-led EPA), had wanted to see.

Acid rain, apparently, was not going to destroy U.S. forests, lakes, and rivers; and the government was ticked, really ticked. The EPA attempted to destroy the career of one scientist, Edward Krug, who had a paper in the prestigious Science in 1983 that demonstrated that lakes with high acidity were located in watersheds where the soil happened to be acidic. Furthermore, as Krug and other researchers noted, acid lakes existed in many places around the globe hundreds of years before "industrial society" became the norm.
This researched "watershed-based" conclusion (which now is the accepted theory of lake and stream acidification, not "acid rain") was unacceptable to the EPA, and the agency engaged in a shameful campaign against Krug, something I documented in a January, 1992, cover story article in Reason. During my research for the article, one person told me that there would be no such government study for "global warming," indicating that the government would ramrod through the policies it wanted whether or not they actually were necessary.

However politicized "acid rain" might be, it did not fire up the environmentalist and leftist communities like "global warming" (later changed to "climate change").
 
This was not the first time that the environmentalists had tried to claim that capitalism was creating hazards with the weather. In 1975, Newsweek had a cover story in which it claimed that industrial society was pushing the globe into a new Ice Age. However, in a move that mirrored George Orwell's 1984 (in which the people of Oceania are told that they are not at war with Eurasia, but rather East Asia, and that Goldstein had tricked them), in little more than a decade, the movement had turned not from cooling but to warming.
 
All the movement needed was a figurehead, and to the forefront came two men, James Hansen, a NASA scientist, and Al Gore, who had been a U.S. Senator, Vice-President to Bill Clinton, and the loser of a highly-controversial U.S. Presidential election. Gore already had published his apocalyptic tome, Earth in the Balance, before becoming Veep, in which he claimed that industrial society was killing the planet and only a global "Marshall Plan" complete with near-dictatorship by the authorities could "save" us.

Gore had latched onto the "global warming" mantra in the late 1980s and championed Hansen, who told a congressional committee in 1988 that a drought that year was being caused by "unprecedented global warming." (The summer of 1989 was cool and wet, but the True Believers also laid that situation at the feet of "climate change.") However, the people-are-causing "global warming" advocates needed something to jump-start their campaign, and three researchers, including Michael E. Mann of Penn State, came to the rescue with the infamous "hockey stick" study.

Anyone who was familiar with the history of climate is familiar with the Medieval Warm Period of 1,000 years ago, as well as the "Little Ice Age," a period of cooling that lasted from the mid-1500s to the late 1800s. These periods of warming and cooling occurred long before what we know as a modern economy with its supposed "spewing" of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which means that both of these climate patterns could not have been caused by human activity.

Obviously, this was of huge concern to those who claim that people are causing the changes in temperature, so the "scientists" simply made the Medieval Warm Period disappear by tricking the data. In 1999, three scientists, including Mann, published a paper which showed average global temperatures to be relatively steady for thousands of years, but suddenly shooting up in the last few decades, a "hockey stick" approach. Gore and his environmental allies now had the ammunition they needed.

In his Oscar-winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth (which departed from the truth in many places), Gore used the "hockey stick" graph as "proof" that the discussion over global warming needed to end. The results were in, and now what was needed was action, ACTION! The fact that the scientists refused to release the data used in their study, which is a fundamental breach of what is supposed to be scientific method, was shooed away as being something akin to a conspiracy theory by the "deniers," who were labeled Enemies of the People. Scientists who dissented found themselves being bullied (journals refusing to publish their papers) and being denounced by environmentalists, other scientists, government officials and, of course, Gore and Hansen. (Both Gore and Hansen have called for criminal prosecutions of corporate executives of companies that have helped to fund any study that disagrees with what Gore and Hansen declare to be the truth.)

In the Climategate emails, the scientists described their strategy of reviewing each others' papers, shutting down scientists who disagreed, hiding their data, and admitting to fudging the numbers in order to obtain the results they wanted. Furthermore, because many of them were using funds allocated by U.S. Government agencies, what they did was fraud, and many people have gone to prison for much less.

Austrian economists are quite familiar with the drill here. First, the advocates of a position, be it mainstream economics or human-caused climate change, make sure that no dissenting papers can be published. Second, after having successfully shut out the opposition, they claim that the theories of the Austrians or dissenters "fail the market test" because their views don't appear in the mainstream literature. The logic is circular, but it sure appeals to the True Believers.

It is interesting to see the response of Gore, the New York Times, the White House, and others who have been demanding that modern life be shut down for an economic regime that is more to the liking of the global-warming crowd. (The economic and political elites pushing these bogus theories have wonderful futures planned for us; they just have no intention of joining us for meals in unheated buildings, while we eat our gruel. Heated and cooled residences with plenty of good food will be their future.)

So far, the response from The Usual Suspects has been a repeat of the "Wizard of Oz" in which the Wiz bellows, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" The New York Times recently editorialized:

The theft of thousands of private e-mail messages and files from computer servers at a leading British climate research center has been a political windfall for skeptics who claim the documents prove that mainstream scientists have conspired to overstate the case for human influence on climate change.

They are using the e-mail to blast the Obama administration's climate policies. And they clearly hope that the e-mail will undermine negotiations for a new climate change treaty that begin in Copenhagen this week.

No one should be misled by all the noise. The e-mail messages represent years' worth of exchanges among prominent American and British climatologists. Some are mean-spirited, others intemperate. But they don't change the underlying scientific facts about climate change.

Funny, when the Times runs stories using material that has been stolen, they never refer to it as "stolen." Indeed, as one who has published many academic papers (and I always make my data available for inspection), I can smell a fix as well as the next person.
 
Of course, with the Times, it only gets better. The public editor who defended the newspaper's abysmal and utterly dishonest coverage in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Non-Rape Case, had this to say about the recent events:

As for not posting the e-mail, Revkin said he should have used better language in his blog, Dot Earth, to explain the decision, which was driven by advice from a Times attorney. The lawyer, George Freeman, told me that there is a large legal distinction between government documents like the Pentagon Papers, which the Times published over the objections of the Nixon administration, and e-mail between private individuals, even if they may receive some government money for their work. He said the Constitution protects the publication of leaked government information, as long as it is newsworthy and the media did not obtain it illegally. But the purloined e-mail, he said, was covered by copyright law in the United States and Britain.

This is a howler, a real howler. This is the same New York Times that gleefully published illegal leaks from federal prosecutors in the Michael Milken and Martha Stewart cases, which meant that the newspaper was aiding and abetting the commission of real felonies. The Times is a newspaper that does what it wants from publishing illegal (and untrue) material to seizing property by eminent domain so the paper could build a brand new headquarters in Manhattan. The idea that the paper suddenly decided to be "law-abiding" by not breaking "copyright law" is a joke, a real joke. Please do not tell me that the 800-pound gorilla is afraid of a few mice!

As governments are meeting in Denmark for yet another "climate change" summit, I am reminded that what really is happening is that the economic and political elites have decided they have had enough of the rabble and are going to put us in our places. That their actions are violent and fraudulent and have been duly exposed clearly is not a hindrance to them.
 
Keep in mind that I am not presenting my own "hockey stick" view of global temperatures. Indeed, for the last century or so, global temperatures have risen, but one must remember that the period preceding them was very cold, and cold weather means crop failures and starvation. Furthermore, the issue is not whether we have seen changes in temperatures around the world, but whether or not the human issuance of a gas that makes up approximately 0.4 of one percent of the atmosphere is the cause.

However, instead of wanting to know the truth, the elites have decided what we are supposed to believe as the truth. In my view, the release of these emails is as important in exposing the dishonesty of the "climate change" crowd as the Pentagon Papers were in exposing the dishonesty of the U.S. Government as it was ravaging Vietnam. 

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given. 

Climate Smokescreen At the New York Times

By K. Daniel Glover, Accuracy In Media
November 25, 2009

When holier-than-thou New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin decided not to publish e-mails that expose climate scientists as frauds because they were obtained illegally, Times watchers (including this one) rightly cried “Hypocrisy!”

One recent and one distant case of the newspaper rejecting Revkin’s new standard of journalistic ethics leapt to mind. In December 2005, the Times ran a front-page expose on the Bush administration’s covert wiretapping program against presumed terrorists even after being warned that it could jeopardize national security. And in 1971, the Times made history by publishing the Pentagon Papers about U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

But a far better example of the paper’s hypocrisy has escaped notice — until now. In May 1994, the Times published a series of stories about the tobacco industry that were based on the pre-Internet equivalent of leaked e-mails. The paper’s coverage later led to a book by reporter Philip J. Hilts titled Smokescreen: The Truth Behind The Tobacco Industry Cover-up.

The circumstances surrounding the tobacco industry then and the climate science community now are remarkably similar, yet the Times reached exact opposite conclusions about how to cover the news. This time Revkin and the paper, as well as much of the mainstream media, have created a smokescreen to protect fraudulent scientists whose agenda they support.

Tobacco Under Fire

Democrats began targeting the tobacco industry after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., led the charge as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment.

Waxman’s probe led to a dramatic April 14, 1994 hearing where top executives from tobacco companies swore under oath that nicotine is not addictive. At about the same time, a whistleblower contacted Hilts and handed over internal memorandums that proved the Brown & Williamson tobacco company had known the health dangers of tobacco for decades.

Like “hide the decline” from the hacked global warming e-mails, the Brown & Williamson documents had a memorable money quote:

“Moreover, nicotine is addictive… We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.”

Hilts described the revelations in an interview with PBS for its “Smoke In The Eye” special:

Once we got these papers in hand, it became very clear that they knew a lot very early on, that they were deliberately hiding things, and that they were deliberately trying to keep them out of court and so on — at the same time saying these things were not true, saying cigarettes are not addictive, and yet they have their own studies which show how addictive it is and exactly how the addiction works and so on… They did all kinds of studies on the hazards of cigarettes and inhalation of tobacco and so on and found a lot of problems. Well, we never heard about this, but they knew it all early on.

Brown & Williamson, along with the rest of the tobacco industry, understandably wanted to quash publicity of the documents. The company convinced a judge in tobacco-friendly Kentucky to impose an injunction against their release because Merrill Williams, a temporary paralegal assigned to Brown & Williamson, allegedly stole them.

The company felt compelled to fight release of the documents.

“They’ve been hiding this for years,” Hilts told PBS. “It would make them lose case after case in court.”

But the Times, motivated by a commitment to journalistic integrity and the First Amendment, defied the injunction and published its stories.

“Oddly enough there were virtually no legal concerns at the Times,” Hilts said, adding that “all the way along, the lawyers … were very supportive. They really wanted to see the stories in the paper.”

Hilts criticized ABC for not reporting on the documents even though the network had them before he did.

“Lawyers for the entertainment business are more skittish, are more difficult,” he told PBS, “and in fact they get involved in the news more, probably more than they should… I don’t think, in newspapers, reporters would put up with that.”

Hot Global Warming E-mails
 
Print reporters without links to the entertainment industry may well be more committed to battling media lawyers in order to break major news, but they clearly are not immune to self-censorship. Unlike Hilts, Revkin chose not to post the global warming e-mails.
His defense:

“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye.”

If Hilts and other journalists had neglected their duty like Revkin and company are in covering “ClimateGate,” the tobacco industry never would have been forced to settle with state prosecutors in 1998 and might not have been subjected to federal regulation this year.

Michael Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general who led the legal fight against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, called the Brown & Williamson papers “probably still the most damming documents ever produced against the industry.” Hilts said they “probably are the single-most important pieces of paper in the history of tobacco versus public health.”

The global warming e-mails revealed last week are just as significant. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” climate expert Patrick Michaels said. Even British writer and environmental activist George Monbiot acknowledged that the e-mails are a “major blow” and urged Phil Jones, the head of the climate research unit that was hacked, to resign. 

The timing of the climate e-mail hacking also is reminiscent of the tobacco timeline in 1994 — and thus equally newsworthy. Just as whistleblowers started pushing documents into the media while the Food and Drug Administration and Congress weighed tobacco regulation, the global warming e-mails were posted online days before world leaders gather in Copenhagen next month to ponder draconian rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

And as with the tobacco documents, the global warming e-mails focus on scientific research.

“These behind-the-scenes discussions among leading global-warming exponents are remarkable both in their candor and in their sheer contempt for scientific objectivity,” Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ivan Kenneally wrote in The New Atlantis.

“There can be little doubt after even a casual perusal that the scientific case for global warming and the policy that springs from it are based upon a volatile combination of political ideology, unapologetic mendacity and simmering contempt for even the best-intentioned disagreement.”

It’s the News Judgment, Stupid
 
The hacking angle to ClimateGate is a legitimate one to pursue, but it is not the most important angle. The appropriate response is for journalists at The New York Times and elsewhere to behave as they did after Hilts exposed the stolen tobacco documents in 1994.

“We had more papers after that,” Hilts said. “We went around and found more stuff. More people started coming out of the woodwork and so on. So it was a pivotal moment.”

Fourteen years ago, the Times scolded CBS for self-censorship when it decided to spike an interview with tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, who later became the central character in the 1999 movie “The Insider.” The network later reversed course and aired the interview.

Hopefully Andrew Revkin and the Times will redeem themselves and do likewise by giving the global warming e-mails the scrutiny they deserve.

(Author’s note: I covered the 1994 tobacco debate for Congressional Quarterly and attended the game-changing hearings with Hilts. Thanks to blogger James Joyner for jogging my memory.)

K. Daniel Glover is the online communications strategist for Accuracy In Media. He has worked as an editor, writer and new media specialist in the Washington area since 1991, spending most of that time at National Journal and Congressional Quarterly.

Who’s to Blame for Climategate?

By Gordon Rayner, Telegraph
November 27, 2009

The drab, drum-shaped home of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit is an anonymous little outpost, blending seamlessly with its chunky concrete neighbours on a windswept campus just outside Norwich. To the uninitiated, it has the look of a Seventies bus station waiting for the council to pull it down.

Unlikely as it may seem, however, this little corner of East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy which just might influence the entire future of our planet.

A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained by a hacker and posted on the internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.
At first, the fallout was restricted to a row between climate change experts, played out in scientific journals and specialist internet blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, “Climategate” has become a white hot political issue which has been seized upon by global warming sceptics and now threatens to overshadow next month’s crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen...

Phil Jones, the 57-year-old director of the CRU, is the man who has suddenly found himself the number one target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the emails exposed by the anonymous hacker.

In one message, dated November 1999, he wrote:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline.”

Gotcha! say the global warming sceptics who have argued for years that average temperatures on Earth are, in reality, either stable or going down. Professor Jones defended himself by claiming the word “trick” was used out of context and simply referred to a legitimate method of handling data. But there was more.

An email sent by one of Prof Jones’s colleagues said:

“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.”

Prof Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another email in which he said:

Sceptics “have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone.”

By chance, he now admits he has “accidentally” deleted some of the raw data.

Another message said the CRU’s method of collating data “renders the station counts totally meaningless… so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”
Prof Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the emails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said:

“My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well.”

On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.

Although Prof Jones is not what you could call a household name (though he soon might be) he is, without doubt, one of the world’s most influential proponents of the theory of man-made global warming.

The CRU has the largest archive of global temperature data in the world, and its research formed the basis of the United Nations’ key document on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007.

But Prof Jones has been embroiled in controversy before. Three years ago, a report commissioned by the US House of Representatives energy and commerce committee claimed that a clique of just 43 scientists, including Prof Jones and one of his CRU colleagues, was stifling open debate on climate change.

Little wonder, then, that climate change deniers are hailing the emails as final proof that global warming is nothing more than a hoax which is being covered up by governments who have themselves been duped.

Suddenly, Phil Jones is the name on the lips of every Right-wing commentator in the US, some of whom have warned that President Obama is being tricked into making the most expensive mistake in history by backing emission caps and carbon trading legislation that will cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has described the emails as a “game-changer” for Obama cap and trade bills. Fox’s climate change commentator, John Lott, suggested that Prof Jones was guilty of an “unprecedented co-ordinated campaign to hide scientific information.” Meanwhile Matt Drudge, arguably the most influential reporter on the internet and the man who broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, has helped direct millions of hits to websites reporting on the email scandal by featuring it prominently on his Drudge Report website...

Prof Jones is in little doubt that the timing of the leak – two weeks before the start of the Copenhagen conference – was a “concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change” at the most sensitive possible time. Next month’s Copenhagen conference has been billed as the last chance for world leaders to prevent an irreversible change to the planet’s climate. Unless they can reach a binding agreement on reducing global emissions, mankind could face a bleak future, according to the majority of the scientific community.

The hacker who exposed the emails no doubt hopes Climategate will tip the scales decisively against an agreement – an outcome which is likely to be supported by a minority of hardliners in the US, such as Bryan Zumwalt, legislative counsel for Republican senator David Vitter, who said earlier this week that:

The CRU emails were evidence of what “could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history” and suggested that “nearly all of the international data and models supporting the theory of global warming would have been influenced by data corruption and fraud.”

However Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, believes world leaders will pay little attention to the scandal surrounding the CRU, arguing that politics, not science, will decide the fate of the Copenhagen summit.

“The politicians won’t be swayed by this,” he said. “It’s basic physics that the world is being warmed by greenhouse gases, and politicians can see through the sceptics’ arguments. If Copenhagen fails to produce an agreement, it won’t be because of these emails. And in the US, President Obama’s cap and trade bills will be decided by 12 or 13 Democratic senators who represent states with large coal and oil reserves.”

Mr Ward does not believe the emails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported Lord Lawson’s calls for an independent investigation so the matter can be cleared up. He said:

“I don’t believe there is any evidence here of fraud, but it’s regrettable that this has happened and I regret the fact that some members of the research community have dismissed out of hand those who have tried to make a counter-argument.”

Whether or not Climategate influences the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, it seems that its long-term legacy will be to make the ongoing war of words between “warmists” and “coolists” more poisonous than ever.

Related:

• United Nations to Probe Climate E-Mail Leak
• UN says climate finale may have happy ending
• Copenhagen: 'long way to go' to convince sceptics
• Ambitious carbon pricing won't hurt recovery, says IMF
• U.N. summit in Copenhagen to pave way for global government
• Obama to Use EPA to Declare CO2 a Dangerous Pollutant
• Historic EPA Finding: Greenhouse Gases Harm Humans
• Climate treaty endangers U.S.
• Climategate: Obama’s rule by EPA decree is a coup d’etat against Congress, made in Britain
• UK’s richest man could make more than £1bn from carbon trading scheme