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EPW POLICY BEAT: CONSENSUS EXPOSED, PART 1Link to 'Consensus' Exposed: The CRU ControversyThe Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works recently released a new 84-page report, titled, "‘Consensus' Exposed: The CRU Controversy."  Recognizing the severe time constraints of interested readers-how can one read 84 pages amidst the daily maelstrom over global warming?-EPW Policy Beat will issue a series of excerpts from the report over the next several days.  We hope this provides our readership with the report's essential findings, and a clear understanding that the CRU email controversy is more than just "a little email squabble."  To...

Al Gore resurfaces in an op-ed to say that nobody's perfect, everybody makes mistakes and climate change is still real. And he has some oceanfront property in the Himalayas to sell you. If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore's op-ed in Sunday's New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face "an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it." Perhaps he's trying to protect his investments...

The "Climategate" scandal, which broke in November 2009, revealed what many skeptics had privately suspected. Prominent climate scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) had collaborated to keep data out of skeptics' hands, subverted the peer review process, and used questionable methods to construct the temperature record on which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) based its recommendations. Now a new "Climategate" scandal is emerging, this time based on documents released by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in response to several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suits filed by the Competitive Enterprise...

States' Rights: A revolt against economic hardship imposed by unelected bureaucrats based on junk science is brewing. This Tea Party movement wants the faulty finding on carbon dioxide to be reviewed and dumped. They say you shouldn't mess with Texas, and on Tuesday the state filed suit to overturn the "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that must be regulated. CO2, the basis for all plant and therefore all animal life, was targeted early by environmental activists as the root cause of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW). But the Earth has cooled...

Climate alarmists conjured a world where nothing was certain but death, taxes and catastrophic global warming. They used this presumed scientific certainty as a bludgeon against the skeptics they deemed "deniers" -- a word meant to have the noxious whiff of Holocaust denial. All in the cause of hustling the world into a grand carbon-rationing scheme. Any questions about the evidence for the cataclysmic projections, any concerns about the costs and benefits were trumped by that fearsome scientific "consensus," which had "settled" the important questions. A funny thing happened to this "consensus" on the way to its inevitable triumph, though:...

Can You Always Count on a Consensus of Experts? Maybe not When it Comes to Man-Made Global Warming! When you turn to "experts" and "authorities" the first thing that has to be done is to establish the credibility of those sources. History is full of examples where the ’consensus’ isn't only wrong, it is deadly. Some classic historical examples are the flat earth theory and the prevailing belief that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo discovered "it is often dangerous to be right when the authorities are wrong." The Galileo discoveries had threatened the "consensus" view of...

Global Warming: The Alaskan governor who knew polar bears weren't endangered says the planet isn't either and challenges the oracle of climate change. Al Gore says despite the CRU e-mails, the situation is of the utmost gravity. In a Dec. 9 Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin noted that the Climate-gate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia "reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures and tried to silence their critics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." This did not sit well with Gore. "The entire North...

The science showing that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are causing a dangerous warming of the world's climate is sound, President Barack Obama's top scientists said on Wednesday, despite controversial e-mails stolen from climate researchers. E-mails from Britain's University of East Anglia, made public last month after being obtained by hackers, show climate researchers deriding global warming skeptics, who argue that the messages show that the researchers manipulated data to make climate change appear more definitive.

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning. As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard. The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd...

ClimateGate: Britain's Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication? In a statement released Saturday by the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is located, it was announced that all unit data, including data that had been denied climate skeptics, would soon be released to prove this is much ado about nothing. Unimpressed by the news is David Holland of Northampton, a grandfather with a background in electrical engineering, who is seeking prosecution of the CRU scientists involved in suppressing and even destroying...

Junk Science: Hacked e-mails from Britain's Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA's James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact. For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests. Now, it turns out, it's the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth. We don't know who "Deep Throat" is. But according to an interview in Investigate Magazine's...

In case you have not yet heard, the scientists behind the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have been exposed through their own email conversations. At this time, it is not known who or how the emails were obtained, though much speculation has been done. From the servers at the University of East Anglica in the UK being illegally broken into and hacked, to a whistle blower protected by UK laws as well as US laws, to an insider job, a person with legitimate access to the emails have all been discussed. More will be revealed certainly. What is known...

Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”. Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”. “The files contain so much material that...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

Environmentalism: As polls show belief in global warming is dropping, a new study suggests that dogs and cats, like people, are a plague upon the earth. They say people should have edible pets. Here, kitty, kitty. A new Pew Research Center study conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 says the number of Americans who think there's solid evidence the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades has plummeted from 71% in April 2008 to 57% today. Over the same period, there's been a comparable decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising...

Public Discourse: Our energy secretary applauds and encourages companies to leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its position on climate change. Should any Cabinet secretary, with the powers of government behind him, be threatening U.S. companies? Part of the climate-change mantra is that the debate is over and the science is settled. Just to make sure, environmental groups have sought to pressure businesses to go green or at least keep silent. Now it would appear the whole weight of the federal government is being thrown behind this campaign to coerce and silence real and potential opposition. On Thursday, Steven...

Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, delivered the closing keynote address at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, praising those in attendance for holding fast to their scientific ethics and speaking truth to power. Where are they all today, those bed-wetting moaning Minnies of the Apocalyptic Traffic-Light Tendency--those Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds?The main message of this conference to the bed-wetters is this. Stop telling lies. You are fooling fewer and fewer of us. However many lies are uttered, the scientific truth remains unalterable.The Forces of Darkness, with their “global warming” chimera, came perilously...

‘High school kids watching Gore’s movie today will be nearing AARP’s retirement age by the time warming allegedly resumes in 30 years’ WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, today delivered a floor speech on the latest global warming poll data and the continuing inconvenient science developments refuting man-made climate fears. See: Inhofe: ‘Consensus’ Continues Freefall: Science and Scientists Challenge Man-Made Global Warming Fears & Inhofe Speech: "Gallup Poll: Record-High 41% of Americans Now Say Global Warming is Exaggerated"Inhofe Speech Highlights: I come to the floor today with breaking...

I've been reading through President Obama's much touted Recovery.gov web site and thought I would share the Frequently Asked Questions part of the site. It is in fact, the Delphi Technique in action. Through the whole of that web site, the Consensus and Facilitation of the Hegelian Principle is at work. To fight this phenomenon in our country, Freedom Lovers need to understand the forces at work, and master the language and techniques that will allow us to overcome the Barrage of facilitators and change agents who have just overtaken our country, fully, at the federal level. Please take some...

From Pres. Obama’s just-concluded remarks at the big health-care forum in DC, kicking off his administration’s efforts to achieve major reform this year, come three examples of the kind of hype that portend . . . ill. PRES. OBAMA: I know people are skeptical about whether Washington can bring about this change. Our inability to reform healthcare in the past is just one example of how special interests have had their way and the public interest has fallen by the wayside. And I know people are afraid we’ll draw the same old lines in the sand and give into the...