By Debra J. Saunders
The last few months have been cruel and wintry for global-warming true believers. The long storm began in November, when a leak of e-mails from Britain's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit revealed that key global-warming scientists tried to stifle dissent, politicize peer-review, which led to revelations that the researchers had dumped much of the raw data used to bolster the alarmist argument.
Then came the news that that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report - you know, the one that reported that man-made global warming was "unequivocal" - wrongly predicted that it was likely Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, based not on peer-reviewed research, but on an article in a popular magazine. Oh, and it turns out that the IPCC was wrong in reporting that 55 percent of The Netherlands is below sea level.
Last week, Phil Jones, the unit's director at the time of the e-mail leak, answered tough questions posed by the BBC in an interview, during which he admitted that there has been no statistically significant warming of the planet since 1995. Jones also rejected Al Gore's mantra when he said he did not believe that "the vast majority of climate scientists think" the debate over climate change is over.
Like the Wicked Witch of Oz, the global-warming machine is melting into a wretched puddle.
Tuesday, the New York Times jumped in to save the day. An editorial reminded readers that, despite "isolated errors and exaggerations," the IPCC report did win a Nobel Prize. Columnist Tom Friedman suggested that calling "global warming" by a different name, "global weirding" would change the debate. Friedman apparently believes that people who don't agree with him are so stupid that a new name will distract them from any ideas or facts on an issue.
The alarmists also have taken to scolding skeptics who have pointed to this year's record snowfalls as dimwits who do not know the difference between weather and climate. This is choice - after all the years during which the global-warming believers pointed to every warm season, low-snowfall report and storm as proof that the "tipping point" was near.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/18/EDCV1C2BNJ.DTLA good editorial, printed in the SF Gate no less!
