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Malicious Attempt To Derail Global Effort To Control Climate Change

By James Donahue

Has anyone wondered about the timing of the story about hacked e-mails between world scientists who allegedly claim that the climate change threat is nothing more than a government hoax? It comes just weeks before world leaders are set to gather in Copenhagen to draft an crucial agreement to control carbon emissions.

The rowdy gang of corporate-paid legislators in the U.S. have jumped on the story, as have radical radio and television pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. They have been quick to brand the climate change movement as “Climategate,” coining the old Watergate phase from the days of the Nixon scandal.

We have been smelling a rat in all of this but it wasn’t until this week that the Raw Story news website released a report by Sahil Kapur that traces the source of this kind of resistance to oil giant Exxon-Mobil. As time goes on, we suspect there will be other culprits revealed as well.

Indeed, big industry has a lot of money to lose if nations force factories to control carbon emissions from their stacks and everybody to seek alternative energy sources to operate their cars, heat their homes and plant their crops. Among the biggest losers will be the oil companies that are geared to make as much profit as possible over dwindling supplies of crude still in the ground.

Kapur’s story doesn’t link Exxon-Mobil to the hacked e-mail story, but the implications are there. His article claims the oil company is hiding behind an organization called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) that exists to raise skepticism over widely accredited climate change science.

Raw Story draws material for the story from Joseph Romm, an established climate expert who maintains a blog called Climate Progress. Romm notes that Exxon-Mobil has been a vehement opponent of climate legislation “and notorious among scientists for funding global warming skeptics,” the article said.

“It’s important for people to understand that they pay off the overwhelming majority of groups in the area of junk science,” Romm is quoted as saying. “To call global warming a hoax is to question every scientific journal, every scientific academy, and buy into the most extreme conspiracy theories.”

The Climategate issue involves a report that cyber hackers illegally gained access to the mail server of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in Norwich, England. The messages, many of them published on line and in the UK Telegraph, imply that scientific studies had been modified and the data distorted to support the belief that man-made carbon emissions were the cause of climate change.

Opponents of climate legislation charge that the scientists have been “cooking the books” for political reasons and that they are involved in a major hoax that is forcing unnecessary cuts in energy consumption and subsequently a major spike in the cost of everything.

The published e-mails were extensive, numbering 1,079 mailings and 72 documents totaling 61 megabytes of confidential files.

Does the volume of this material prove its accuracy or its importance to the overall fact that the world is experiencing extreme climate change? When you consider that Exxon-Mobile has spent hundreds of millions to battle climate legislation ever since the Kyoto Treaty was drafted in Japan in 1978, how costly would the production of that much documentation be by comparison?

Thus the question to be answered:  is the Climategate hoax a hoax? Who can we believe? And if the carbon emission issue is as serious as most world scientists claim it is, can we afford to wait any longer before doing something about it?