[COLUMN] Global warming hoax unraveling

Is the biggest hoax in human history finally collapsing?

In light of the revelation late last year -- thanks to the unauthorized (stolen?) release of e-mail correspondence among themselves -- that climatologists have been essentially lying to the rest of the world for years, it came as no surprise that other manmade climate change claims would begin to unravel.

A key U.N. climate change panel member said a projection by the group on how fast the Himalayan glaciers are melting appears to lack scientific evidence.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report says the Himalayan glaciers are very likely to disappear by 2035 if the present melting rate continues.

However, Chris Field said it was not exactly clear what the source was for the claim.

Field is co-chair of one of the panel's working groups. He told The Associated Press that the panel was working hard to clarify the situation.

Additionally, many scientists, including Field, are claiming several other errors in the IPCC report, including one dealing with losses from disasters and another on the subject of Amazon forests, though the IPCC refuses to back away from its claims.

Several groups that support the idea of anthropogenic climate change, including Greenpeace UK, want Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, replaced because he refused to acknowledge the mistakes in the report.

Meanwhile, in Great Britain, the Information Commissioner's Office, the nation's data-protection watchdog, reported that the aforementioned stolen e-mails at the University of East Anglia's climate research unit demonstrate that the university was illegally hiding data from the public.

The watchdog said it received complaints about the university from David Holland, a retired engineer, in 2007 to 2008, but it has only recently become known that his requests for data were ignored.

"The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr. Holland's requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation," it said in a recent statement.

As the e-mails demonstrate, many climate scientists, including Michael Mann at Penn State University, who was a key contributor to the science cited by President Barack Obama's administration in pushing for cap-and-trade energy tax legislation, seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research.

Mann and other scientists put their political agendas ahead of science and fact in an effort to manipulate discussion and suppress dissenting views on climate change.

Finally, the kicker in recent carbon-scare news was that Obama, in his State of the Union address, said there was "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change."

In his latest message to the world, Osama bin Laden said that climate change "is not an intellectual luxury but an actual fact."

It looks as though the leftists have something in common with the elusive al-Qaida leader, belief in a fantasy.

Hopefully, the carbon scare is finally collapsing and we can get past this shameful era in human history.

The fact is the science behind the idea of global warming simply does not support the conclusion pushed by leftists whose real motivation is greed and power. For example, Obama's cap-and-tax plan would generate billions of dollars for government coffers that could then be used to fund entitlement programs such as socialized medicine.

The problem, however, is that the globe has been cooling despite man's continued use of greenhouse gases that emit carbon.

What the leftists and other manmade global warming adherents ignore is that weather changes and ice melts. During every minute of the Earth's 4.6 billion year history, the globe has been either in a state of cooling or a state of warming. That is how the Earth, and, indeed, most planetary bodies with an atmosphere, works.

It is the height of hubris to claim now that this cycle of change, which has been occurring for billions of years, is the result of human activity during the last century.

It is especially more so when the conclusion is based on just a few years of data that have admittedly been manipulated to achieve the desired result.

It is time to file anthropogenic global warming in the same drawer as the alien autopsy, Piltdown man and the Cardiff giant. Hoaxes all.