CLIMATEGATE - THE SIMMERING SCANDAL - AT 7:26 P.M. ET:  Once again, British writers are ahead of their American counterparts in nailing down the machinations of the political left, and its allies, this time its environmentalist allies.  Christopher Booker points out the importance of Climategate.  This is not a minor-league scandal.  From The Telegraph:

To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.

And which country will be expected to pay the biggest chunk of that bill?  Guess.

The scientists involved had to prove that the Earth is warmer now than ever before in recorded history:

The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced "hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it...

...Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa.

The result of the chicanery:

Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy.

This could have a devastating effect on poor nations.  If the economy of the West gets a cold from all this, poor nations will get pneumonia.

Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

Wonderfully said.  Finally:

...as we can see from the CRU's website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history.

But from the point of view of the militant left, that is entirely desirable.  Their ultimate aim is to destroy capitalism, especially American capitalism, and replace it with their socialist utopia.  To them, the loss of economic, scientific, engineering, and agricultural progress, even if it involves the loss of life, is a small price to pay for their egotistical dreams.

December 6, 2009