US House member charges ‘science fascism’ in global warming

02 December 2009 21:54  [Source: ICIS news]

WASHINGTON (ICIS news)--A leading US House committee member on Tuesday accused global warming advocates of “scientific fascism” and called for broad congressional hearings on the validity of science underlying pending climate bills.

Representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican member of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said that recently disclosed e-mails between climate scientists “show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy” that “read more like scientific fascism than the scientific process”.

Sensenbrenner was referring to e-mails and other documents stolen two weeks ago from computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, a principal centre of global warming scientific research. The e-mails and documents were posted on the Internet.

Speaking at the opening of the committee’s Tuesday hearing on the status of climate science, he said the e-mails indicate that climate scientists engaged in “manipulation of data and models, and possible criminal activity to evade legitimate requests for data and underlying computer codes”.

He quoted some of the e-mails in which climate scientists discuss an inability to account for the “lack of warming at the moment” and using computation tricks to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, among other things.

“While the e-mails don’t undermine everything we know about climate change, their contents are shocking,” Sensenbrenner said, adding that they betray intellectual corruption.

He said the some 1,000 e-mails and 2,000 other documents lifted from the UK climate research centre justify additional consideration by Congress.

Noting that the Democrat majority of the House Global Warming Committee would not allow him to invite witnesses on the University of East Anglia data controversy to Tuesday’s hearing, Sensenbrenner said the minority Republicans on the panel have formally requested a separate day of hearings on the matter.

The data from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in part underlies climate change legislation that has been approved by the House and parallel bills being considered but now delayed in the US Senate.

Many in the US chemicals industry and the broader manufacturing sector oppose the climate bills pending in Congress - which typically impose a federal cap-and-trade mandate on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions - on grounds they will raise energy and operating costs sharply.

The committee chairman, Representative Edward Markey (Democrat-Massachusetts), cited the 2007 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in saying that “global warming is unequivocal and this warming is primarily due to human activities”.

The principal witness at the hearing, John Holdren, special assistant to President Barack Obama for science and technology, charged that the claims of global warming sceptics do not conform to reality.

“The reality is that both the drivers and the symptoms of climate change have been growing more rapidly since 1997 than before,” he said.

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By: Joe Kamalick
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