For those who thought the exposed emails from Britain’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit would come and go without much play, think again. Surely the skeptics and even the agnostics wouldn’t miss an opportunity to jump on such devastating revelations, but the fact is ClimateGate is having immediate and possibly long-lasting effects all over the world.
In Australia, the emails could literally shift political powers in the land down under:
“Australian Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has been replaced by a climate sceptic, Tony Abbott, after ten of its most senior politicians resigned over its support for the Government’s plans for fighting global warming. They were, it seems, fired up by the hacked communications from the University of East Anglia. But this is not the end of it. The sceptics coup is likely to lead to a general election before long, fought on climate change.”
In the UK, the head scientist at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) is stepping down:
“The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.”
Back in the United States, Penn State University will investigate the role of Michael Mann in ClimateGate, a professor at PSU and one of the climate researchers at CSU involved in the email threads:
“Penn State officials, who will not discuss the matter, are investigating the controversy. If anything requires further inspection, the school will handle it, a spokesman tells the Daily Collegian. A panel will read every E-mail leaked and determine if climate change critics have any ground for their accusations, the report says.”
And Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is calling for hearings:
“In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the environment committee, Inhofe said the e-mails could have far-reaching policy implications for the United States. Both Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency are taking action to curb global warming based on a report that uses data produced by the Climate Research Unit.”
The American public has already cooled off on the idea of combating global warming with costly cap and tax legislation; the exposed emails are bound to raise even more eyebrows. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal offers another reason. It’s not necessarily about going green but more so about getting green:
“[T]he European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.”
Time will tell how the rest of ClimateGate plays out, but it’s only been a short amount of time since the story broke and a number of significant events have emerged since and certainly more are likely to follow. Clive Cook says it best: “The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”
