By Stephan Dinan

The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.

Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.

Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.

“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”

Read the rest of this story at the Washington Times.

Global Warming Hysteria Might be a Crime

By Steve Milloy

Are academics some special subspecies of humans who are beyond suspicion and above the law? That’s the question being played out in a drama between Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the dead-end defenders of global warming’s poster junk scientist, Michael Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli is under assault by the climate-alarmist brigades for launching an investigation into whether any fraud against taxpayers occurred with respect to Mr. Mann’s hiring by the University of Virginia and his receipt of government grants. Mr. Cuccinelli recently sent the university a civil investigative demand requesting e-mails and other documents pertaining to Mr. Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s rationale is simple to understand: Mr. Mann’s claim to fame – the infamous “hockey stick” graph – is so bogus that one cannot help but wonder whether it is intentional fraud.

Developed in the late 1990s, while he was at the University of Massachusetts, Mr. Mann’s hockey-stick graph purports to show that average global temperature over the past millennium was stable until the 20th century, when it spiked up, presumably because of human activity. The hockey stick was latched onto by the alarmist community, incorporated into government and United Nations assessments of climate science and held out to the public (particularly by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth”) as proof that humans were destroying the planet.

But by the mid-2000s the hockey-stick graph was revealed for what it was – pure bunk.

Skeptics first became suspicious because the hockey stick failed to show two well-known periods of dramatic swings in global temperature – the so-called Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Mr. Mann’s indignant refusal to share his data and methods with skeptics only added fuel to the fire. Eventually, skeptics discovered that the hockey stick’s computer model would produce a hockey-stick graph regardless of what data was input. But it gets worse.

Mr. Mann apparently created the hockey stick by cherry-picking data he liked and deleting data he didn’t like. While the vast majority of the hockey stick is based on temperature data extrapolated from tree rings going back hundreds of years, the tip of the blade (representing the late 20th century) was temperature data taken from thermometers. Beyond the obvious apples-and-oranges problem, Mr. Mann appended the thermometer data to the hockey stick at a point at which the tree-ring data actually shows cooling. This cooling trend data was then deleted. This is what is referred to by the now-famous “Climategate” phrase “Mike’s Nature trick to … hide the decline.”

Read the rest of this piece at the Washington Times.

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.
Since then, however, The Sunday Times has discovered that the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI.

One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie.

Read the rest of this story at the Sunday Times.