The climate change movement is being rocked by another major ethical scandal that journalists and some climate scientists say could serve to expose the movement as “one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.”
The latest blow against the credibility of the of those demanding urgent, sweeping political change in response to human activity allegedly threatening the sustainability of earth appeared in Saturday’s edition of the London Daily Telegraph. Columnist Christopher Booker cites the work of Paul Homewood on his “Not A Lot of People Know That” climate blog.
Two weeks earlier, Booker noted that Homewood compared the original temperatures recorded at weather stations in Paraguay over a 60 year period with the numbers now being used in climate reports.
“In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming,” wrote Booker.
In the new piece, Booker reports on Homewood’s research into the original and revised data at many other South American weather stations.
“In each case he found the same suspicious one-way ‘adjustments,'” reported Booker.
According to Booker, Homewood is now studying similar data from arctic stations from Canada to Siberia.
“Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded,” he wrote.
Homewood’s research shows a consistent changing of temperature data and always in a way that makes it appear the earth is getting warmer. Moreover, these changes were not made by obscure organizations. They were done through the U.S. government’s Global Historical Climate Network. Additional responsibility lies with the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Climate Data Center.
Climate scientists who do not buy into the global analysis on climate change say this manipulation is a devastating indictment of the movement.
“It’s enormously significant because the whole thrust of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is supposedly the official source of climate change data, have been saying that currently it is warmer than it has ever been in the historic record or the instrumental record,” said Dr. Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology and author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”
Ball says while Homewood’s discoveries does not amount to breaking news, the reporting by the Telegraph is monumental.
“There’s nothing new about this, other than that it’s finally got into the mainstream media, but only into the conservative mainstream media because the Telegraph is a conservative newspaper in Britain,” said Ball.
Dr. Ball elaborated on the temperature fudging that he says has been going on for some time.
“This adjustment of the historic record has been going on for a very long time. It started with the elimination of a period known as the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago, when it was warmer than today,” he said.
Nonetheless, he says Homewood has uncovered valuable evidence of a massive scientific and political con job.
“What is now being disclosed by Homewood, but has been disclosed by others long before this, is that they are adjusting the modern instrumental temperature record so that the older records appear colder than they actually were. What that does is that it changed the gradient or slope of the temperature increase, making it look like the warming is much greater than it actually is. So this is what’s going on,” said Ball.
Ball says the scientific history of events like the Medieval Warm Period are a major problem for activists looking to convince people that human industrial activity over the past few hundred years is responsible for record-high temperatures. So he says they’ve determined to rewrite history.
“They’ve got to keep saying, ‘Oh no, it’s warmer now than it’s ever been.” So anything that suggests it was warmer in the past must be eliminated. So they created the infamous ‘hockey stick,’ which essentially rewrote the historic record,” said Ball.
Homewood’s research and Booker’s reporting have the potential of making this the biggest scandal since the revealed emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, in which climate scientists allegedly admitted to manipulating data to reach preferred conclusions. Ball says this new potential scandal could actually be bigger. He says most people couldn’t decipher the contents of the emails very easily but the temperature changes are a very different story.
“This kind of thing is much more clear. When you start changing numbers and you can show that it’s clearly deliberate and it’s clearly all in one direction…this is much more understandable to the public,” said Ball.
Ball expects even more evidence of unethical science to be revealed before long.
“It isn’t just that they lowered the historic temperature. They also reduced the number of stations that they were using to determine the global temperature. They argued that in vast areas, where you only have one or two stations, that one station was representative of the temperature in a 1,200 kilometer radius. I mean it’s absolutely outrageous what they’ve done,” said Ball.
But far from deflating the climate change movement, Ball says revelations like the ones from Homewood will only intensify efforts to enact sweeping policy changes in the U.S. and beyond.
“Look for a cover-up because there’s huge volumes of money involved. There’s political implications with this with Obama with climate change as the key thing. Now they’ve got the pope involved in it. So there’ll be a scramble to counteract this. I mean a real vigorous scramble,” said Ball.
So how will climate change activists fight back against these revelations? Ball expects the same tactics he’s witnessed through the decades in this debate.
“They tell lies. They come out and say severe weather has increased when it hasn’t. They say that the temperature is continuing to increase when it hasn’t. They just tell lies about it and that’s what’s going on. Of course, as everybody knows, it’s not the original crime that gets you in trouble. It’s the cover-up,” said Ball.
“Once the cover-up is exposed, you’re done,” he said.
At the end of his column in Saturday’s Telegraph, Booker says, “This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.” Ball agrees.
“I do think this is the greatest deception in history as I say in my book. There have been scandals in history but they’ve been regional or they’ve only impacted certain areas. This whole climate thing has had a global impact on energy and government policies around the world. So it really is the biggest deception in history. There’s so much money and so many political careers riding on this that it’s going to be a battle royale,” said Ball.
