CROSSVILLE — Here we go again. Eco-loons, led by the president, are fanning the great global warming hysteria anew urging new spending to “save the planet.” This hoax began with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of May 4, 2007, based on geoscientist Michael Mann’s 1998 publication of his famous “hockey stick” plot which purports to show that the Earth’s temperature remained “flat” for a millennium and then suddenly began to heat up 100 years ago just as industrialization in America began.

The 2007 Fourth Assessment report was actually the result of a small coterie of Third-World leftist. Socialists around the world are banking on global warming as their last great hope to mount an assault on capitalism. Global warming or global change as they now refer is the new religion. Never mind any scientific evidence; it’s a matter of faith.

Adding credence, Presidents Bush and Obama bought into this phony science. In the case of Bush it may have been pure ignorance but Obama quickly recognized that global warming was the perfect scheme to dismantle America’s capitalist system; he has been openly hostile to capitalism and the captains of industry. With government’s authoritative stamp on global warming, a herd mentality was created. Millions of people around the world woefully untrained in scientific matters jumped on the bandwagon mindlessly believing, “If so many important people believe it, then it must be true.” Invariably I find the perpetrators are liberals which are suckers for junk science and bogus economic principles.

But alas, Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick were the first to expose Mann’s fraud. The Canadians created some absolutely random data and applied Mann’s phony algorithm. And sure enough, the hockey stick popped up. Mann manipulated climate data such that his chart obscured the Medieval Warming Period (1200AD) and the Little Ice Age (1650AD).

The Fourth Assessment was so radical that many IPCC contributors resigned in protest. Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute had to sue to have his name removed from the author’s list. Lead author of IPCC, Professor John Christy, said, “I’ve heard the claims but this is one scientist who disagrees." Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, one of the oldest environmental movements, said in disgust that environmentalism is no longer about science.

The change in the IPCC web page is amusing as it is revealing. The web’s introduction to the Fourth Assessment report read, “2500 scientists support the report.” The media exaggerated the statement to read, “A majority of scientists believe that global warming is caused by man’s activities,” ignorant verbiage repeated still today. MIT Richard Lindzen, an IPCC contributor, said, “Looking at the bibliographies, there is no way you could stretch the author’s list to 2500 scientists.” The IPCC then revised its web to read “2500 expert reviewers.” When pushed further, the IPCC admitted that it does not carry out climate research but merely bases its assessment on peer review of published technical literature.

The hoax was moving along at lightning speed until some of the “experts” got caught in series of big lies — “Climategate.” First it was discovered that Dr. Michael Mann had misapplied statistical techniques and manipulated raw data. Then computer hackers discovered that the “experts” were brazenly discussing among themselves the massaging and falsifying data and the hiding of conflicting data. Then Climategate got much, much bigger when Russian scientists discovered that British Meteorological officials had tampered with Russian-climate data. Thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders were gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

During the Climategate debate, I wrote a Stumptalk article listing the alarmists’ pack of lies and to my surprise hockey stick Mann responded. The famous scientist took time out from his busy university work to write a letter to the Crossville Chronicle to call this columnist by name a liar. Mann didn’t know me from Adam; he didn’t know that I had been a researcher in California for decades and that I was very familiar with the mathematics that he used to fabricate his bogus hockey stick; In fact I used the same methods to evaluate some of our nation’s intelligence satellites. He falsely stated that a particular NOAA thermometer located in Sierra Nevada showed a warming trend at high elevations. From a reliable source I learned that the particular thermometer he referred was actually located on the beach of San Diego. So I wrote back revealing the real liar. Mike hasn’t been heard from since.

Refutable evidence to Mann’s thesis by reputable scientists flooded technical journals. According to famed climatologist Ian Clark of the University of Ottawa, ice core samples going back thousands of years show indeed there is a link between the rise in carbon dioxide levels and temperature as Al Gore said in his movie Inconvenient Truth. But Gore inconveniently failed to mention he had the science backward. The samples show that the rise in CO2 lags the rise in temperature by 800 years and cannot be the cause of global warming. In fact it is the rise in temperature that causes CO2 to rise, not the other way around.

Scientists don’t dispute the existence of global warming (and cooling), only the cause. Probably the best explanation is by weather scientist Henry Svensmark of the Danish Space Center who showed experimentally why the Earth is warming. He showed that cosmic rays influence cloud formation which have a net cooling effect. But for the last three decades there have been fewer clouds than normal because the sun’s magnetic field, which shields us from cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual. So the Earth, and in fact the entire solar system, heated up for the period (SUVs on Jupiter?).

It is simply preposterous to think that by reducing man-made greenhouse gasses, which is less than 1 percent of the total, could change the climate of the earth.