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Some of us at Scragged remember the 1972 Watergate burglary. A group of Republican supporters were caught breaking into the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex. Although dismissed by President Nixon as a "third-rate burglary," which it was, the crime eventually led to his forced resignation.
He had to resign, not so much because of the crime itself, but because of the actions he took trying to cover it up. Although many people worked to find out what had happened, popular credit goes to Woodward and Bernstein, two persistent reporters for the Washington Post. They loathed Mr. Nixon and were more than happy to play a part in his undoing, which took over two years of full-time investigation from beginning to end.
Scragged has been watching the same sort of slow-moving unraveling pick apart the global warming conspiracy. We've believed it to be a scam for a long time. As more and more details of the various emails and computer programs which were copied from the University of East Anglia computer system emerge, it's pretty amazing how simple a scam it was.
Most of the American mainstream media love the very idea of human-caused global warming, if only because it gives them something about which to feel guilty. They won't touch the story of the fraud behind it, but the Wall Street Journal has learned that the scientists faked the data for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks - they wanted the money. In "Climategate: Follow the Money," the WSJ reports:
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
The Journal listed a number of sources which are providing funding for climate "research" like Mr. Jones':
European commission - $3 billion, not counting member governments' contributions
NASA - $1.3 billion
NOAA - $400 million
NSF - $300 million
State of California(!) - $300 million
HSBC bank reports that a total of about $94 billion has been spent this year on what the bank calls "green stimulus." This includes projects like ethanol and the subsidy-devouring alternate-energy schemes from which Al Gore expects to profit.
As one would expect, groups have sprung up from all over to help governments spend all this money. These groups have formed a spending cartel of their own. They have to believe in man-caused global warming or they'll get thrown out of the club.
Their money depends on proof that human activity is causing global warming. Absent that proof, their money disappears. That's what's called a "vested interest." It's no surprise that with nearly $100 billion per year at stake, they'd fake the data; far worse has been done for far smaller reward.
Now that the incriminating emails are on public view, a handful of politicians are demanding investigations. The British press is fulfilling its public duty to inform far better than our media, but the word seems to be getting out via the Internet.
Although climate science is too complicated for most people, anybody can understand programming a computer to generate fake data and then lying about it. Anybody can understand the email which said, "We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
As far as we can tell, Mr. Obama has ignored Climategate just as Mr. Nixon ignored Watergate as long as he was able to.
Even before the emails came out, it was clear that there wasn't going to be much of an agreement out of Copenhagen. Developing countries simply can't afford to generate the energy they need with anything renewable.
The Chinese have to push forward with economic development or their citizens will rebel. Neither the Indian nor the Chinese government dare agree to anything that prevents economic development. CO2 generation will double or triple as India and China industrialize regardless of anything the United States does.
Given that, Mr. Obama could point out that since the science is now known to be far from settled, he's going to ask the Senate to sit on the cap-and-trade global-warming bill currently under consideration until there's been a thorough investigation taking at least a year or two. If he did that, he'd put a firebreak in place so that cap-and-trade would be all he'd lose. The research funding for other groups is already in place, and man-made climate change might be proven after all by some more honest means.
The trouble is that if he admitted that the science is as unsettled as it is, the taxpayers would probably demand that ethanol requirements not increase and that we stop pouring so much money into expensive alternate energy projects when we have plenty of coal and natural gas which are much cheaper. That would de-fund all these lovely new environmental groups which overwhelmingly support the Democratic party because big government is where big money comes from.
Although Mr. Obama can deliver an excellent speech, he doesn't think on his feet all that fast. Joe the Plumber flummoxed him with an unexpected question; more recently, when he heard that a friend of his had been booked for disorderly conduct, he called the cops "stupid" without waiting for any facts at all.
Knowing he had the media in his pocket, he ignored the news of his allies from ACORN working to make child prostitution tax-deductible. Paying attention to Climategate would question the funding streams which support many of his allies, so he's probably hoping it will just go away.
After all, the media are continuing to churn out alarmist articles about the necessity of turning control of all energy use over to the government so they can Save the Planet. It's possible, he may think, that Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and the Internet combined won't be able to keep this scandal alive long enough to hurt him.
But what if he's wrong? If this unwinds, Americans may conclude he should have known about the scan and backed off from his carbon tax. They may conclude that all of his schemes for expanding government power are as bogus as global warming.
Mid term elections are a year away; that's plenty of time for the British press to force their government to investigate. Thanks to Al Gore's increasingly inconvenient invention, the whole world is watching whether Mr. Obama likes it or not.