The East Anglia CRU was apparently the epicenter of AGW alarmism. Christopher Booker in the Telegraph recounts the scandal that has almost resulted in the world’s kleptocracies picking the pockets of American taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars:

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

This is an incredible scandal, and not one red cent of the taxpayers’ money should be spent in furtherance of this hoax. However, since America is currently governed by a clueless college professor (who is apparently entirely untroubled that his enablers are thugs), keep a close eye on your wallet.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 6:33 am and is filed under business, Democrats, fabrications, General, idiots!, Left of Left, Republicans, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.