[COLUMN] Global warming suffering a meltdown

While you may know who Phil Jones is, you can be forgiven if you were unaware of his latest revelations. The mainstream media in the United States has, predictably, all but ignored the story.

Jones is the British climatologist at the center of the so-called climategate scandal. He is the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and has temporarily stepped down from that post after the leaking of e-mails that show scientists were manipulating data.

The e-mails also show that Jones did not properly respond to British Freedom of Information Act requests for his data.

The data in question is crucial to the so-called "hockey stick graph" used by climate change alarmists to support the hypothesis. The hockey stick graph supposedly shows temperatures that are relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

This data were also used extensively by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Now, for the news.

Jones admitted to the BBC in a Feb. 13 interview that he is guilty of sloppy recordkeeping (and sloppy work in general?), the globe might have been warmer during the Medieval Warm Period than it is today, and that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.

Wow.

The world's leading global warming alarmist admits that recent warming is not unprecedented and that there has been no warming in 15 years and the American media do not cover the story?

Amazing.

Of course, global warming apologists were quick to mitigate Jones' comments. At a news conference Wednesday, Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, brushed aside Jones' comments and would only say that it "is inappropriate to look at any particular short period of time to discern a long-term trend."

However, that is exactly the house of cards upon which the entire global warming movement has been built. Global warming alarmists are relying on a short period of warming at the end of the 20th century as proof that man must be destroying the world.

Equally as provocative as Jones' admission about the lack of warming during the last 15 years was his acknowledgement of the possible scope of the Medieval Warm Period, which occurred from about 800 to 1300.

Global warming apologists typically brush aside the Medieval Warm Period with unproved assertions that it was only a regional, rather than a global, phenomenon. After all, to admit that the Earth was warmer at a time when there was no human industry to speak of destroys their hypothesis that man caused the warming during the last quarter of the last century.

Global warming alarmists also forget that after the Medieval Warm Period came the Little Ice Age from about 1400 to 1850.

What happens to the globe after an ice age? It warms!

These scientists who have pushed global warming on the rest of the world are guilty of scientific misconduct. They have let politics, rather than science, guide how they interpret data and they have made grand pronouncements that have little bearing on reality.

Manmade global warming is a hoax and like all hoaxes, it is finally being exposed.

With the leaked e-mails in November, the world learned of the pattern of data suppression, manipulation of results, and efforts to keep contradictory studies out of peer-reviewed journals, all in an effort to manipulate a consensus on a scientifically dubious hypothesis.

Then the world found out that, among other errors, the IPCC's 2007 report wrongly predicted that it was likely Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. That was based not on peer-reviewed research but on a popular magazine article. The IPCC was also wrong in reporting that 55 percent of The Netherlands is below sea level.

Now, with Dr. Jones' revelations, we learn that not only is the debate not over, as former Vice President Al Gore ignorantly claims, it has been rigged the whole time.

We are seeing nothing less than a global warming meltdown.

Let's hope it melts even more before the politicians meet at climate summit in December in Cancun, Mexico, and sign some economically devastating treaty to fight what is essentially a natural global weather cycle.