November 17th, 2009, Fairfax, VA—Amid the growing “Climategate” scandal over data manipulation and suppression by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today joined Senator Jim Inhofe in calling for Congressional probes into the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that Wilson said “used CRU’s data as the primary foundation for ‘man-made’ climate change science.”
“Our worst fears have been realized,” said Wilson. “The Climatic Research Unit gathered much of the primary data that has been used by the IPCC to promote ‘man-made’ climate change for years. It is because of the data CRU reported that there is any ‘consensus’ on climate change at all. Climate scientists worldwide have depended on that data to formulate their conclusions.”
“If that data was cooked, as it appears to have been, the whole ‘man-made’ global warming theory is cooked,” Wilson added.
Senator Inhofe, in an interview with Washington Times radio, said, “on this thing, it is pretty serious. And since, you know, Barabara Boxer is the Chairman and I’m the Ranking Member on Environment and Public Works, if nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation.”
The scandal began after computer hackers broke into the servers of the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Climatic Research Unit. There, they found and published emails showing that researchers deliberately manipulated climate “change” data to hide the actual decline of the Earth’s temperatures. According to the UK Telegraph, “Around 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents were stolen from UEA computers by hackers last week and uploaded on to a Russian server before circulating on websites run by climate change sceptics. Some of the correspondence indicates that the manipulation of data was widespread among global warming researchers.”
One particular email from CRU director Phil Jones in 1999 stated, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
“A full investigation is needed,” Wilson declared. “That must include the release of any and all of CRU’s originally gathered data to Congress, and a comprehensive comparison to published IPCC reports.”
According to National Review’s Patrick J. Michaels, that data is not publicly available. In his piece, “The Dog Ate Global Warming,” when Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded, “Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.”
“They’ve demanded that we bring the global economy to a grinding halt for something that is not even real,” Wilson said, adding, “The IPCC reports have been used for years, first to justify the Kyoto Protocols, and now the upcoming Copenhagen Protocols, cap-and-trade legislation, radical EPA regulations, and even Supreme Court decisions ruling that carbon dioxide is somehow a ‘pollutant.’ Under these treaties, bills, and regulations, the UN has been attempting force industrialized nations to reduce carbon emissions and the use of fossil fuels.”
According to UEA’s website, CRU’s data sets are “widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system.” And CRU “is widely recognised as one of the world’s leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.”
According to CRU history, the IPCC was set up “under the United Nations Framework (later the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC) and led to assessments being produced in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007. CRU staff have been heavily involved in all four [IPCC] assessments, probably more than anywhere else relative to the size of an institution (see IPCC AR4 Authors).”
“It is the duty of Congress to investigate what could be the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in human history,” Wilson concluded.
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