WEBCommentary(tm) - Taxpayer Robbery Gate

Senator Barbara Boxer is doing her level best to divert attention from the Climategate scandal, cover up the fraud, obstruct justice – and ram through yet another legislative power grab called "cap and trade" to limit our access to energy and further destroy our already weakened economy. Ignoring the likely probability that CRU information was released by a whistleblower from the inside, the California Democrat yelps. “This isn’t Climategate, it’s email theft gate.” Wrong. It’s Taxpayer Robbery Gate. Taxpayers paid billions of dollars for bogus climate “research.” We have been ripped off – robbed. And the perpetrators need to be investigated, arrested and severely punished.

Aside from ideologues, hydrocarbon haters, Gaia worshipers, profiteers and power-grabbing politicians, most of the sentient world is beginning to realize that the hysteria over global warming disasters is based on dubious to fraudulent temperature data, analyses, models, reports and peer reviews.

Climate Research Unit emails, HARRY_READ_ME.txt computer memos, and blatant tampering with Australian, Russian, UK and US temperature data make the scandal impossible to ignore or explain away. They also helped ensure that Copenhagen descended into an expensive, carbon-emitting gabfest – and that China and India rejected any deal that would force them to curtail their energy generation, economic growth and poverty reduction programs.

Senator Barbara Boxer is an exception. She is ignoring the obvious and doing her best to divert attention from the scandal, circle the alarmist wagons, cover up the fraud, obstruct justice – and ram through another legislative power grab.

“This isn’t Climategate,” the California Democrat insists. “It’s email theft gate.” The problem isn’t the fraud; it’s that a hacker or whistleblower revealed the fraud.

She needs to wake up and smell the cesspool. It’s not theft gate. It’s Taxpayer Robbery Gate.

We, the taxpayers, We the people – paid for this bogus “research.” We paid billions of dollars for it – and providing the data, computer codes and analytical methods is a condition of the employment and research grants for these scientists. The work belongs to us. We own it.

We the People, our elected representatives and our climate realist scientists have a right to examine this supposed evidence of planetary disaster, to ensure that it’s driven by science, and not ideology. That it’s complete, accurate – and honest. That it backs up the alarmist scientists’ call for draconian, life-altering restrictions on energy use. That the CRU cabal did not alter, lose, ignore, toss or destroy “inconvenient” data and evidence that might get in the way of their agendas and predetermined results.

Not only were we stonewalled for years, while these UK and US scientists refused to divulge their data, computer codes and methodologies. Not only did the scientists who wrote these emails and did this phony research refuse to let taxpayers, other scientists, and even members of Congress and Parliament see their raw data and analyses. Not only did they prevent debate and replace peer review with a perverted system that allowed only a small network of like-minded colleagues to examine – and applaud – their work. They also excluded, denounced and vilified anyone who asked hard questions or challenged their actions.

Even worse, the Taxpayer Robbery Gate scientists are working hand-in-glove to pressure the United States, Great Britain and world into spending trillions of dollars fighting “catastrophic manmade climate change” … slashing our energy use, living standards and employment base … enacting unaccountable global government … redistributing wealth and technology … restricting our liberties and civil rights … and keeping millions of families deprived of energy and in permanent destitution.

This is the same California Senator who berated an Air Force general for calling her Ma’am. Who treated scientist, physician and author Michael Crichton like a child molester, for daring to disagree with her on global warming and suggest that double-blind climate studies would guard against errors and fraud. Who displays an un-American intolerance for any witnesses who question her views.

The Boxer-White House effort makes the Watergate cover-up and obstruction of justice look like a juvenile prank. It’s paving the way for cap-tax-and-trade laws that would nationalize the entire US economy – by the same divisive, dictatorial elements that are nationalizing our banking and healthcare systems. They understand, even if the general populace still does not, that by controlling carbon they will control our lives.

Just imagine the Boxer, White House and media outcry and denunciations if these emails and fraudulent actions had involved oil companies and climate disaster “deniers.” But of course, if Boxer & Co. didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards

“We’re honest. We have nothing to hide,” the accused scientists keep saying. That’s wonderful. But then they need to back up their protestations with action.

They need to come clean. Stop manipulating data and hiding documents and emails. Cooperate with investigators. Honor FOIA requests. Share data and computer codes. Stop attacking scientists who disagree with them. Make all climate studies, for and against manmade global warming disaster claims, subject to real peer review and open to public examination. They need to engage in full-blown public debates with climate change realists and skeptics.

The profiteering scientists, their highly suspect work and the institutions that sponsor them need to be investigated – thoroughly, by an independent, incorruptible team of knowledgeable scientists, modelers, statisticians and law enforcement officials. If they are convicted, they need to be penalized for defrauding and robbing us. They deserve jail time, dismissal and permanent bans from any future federal grants to them, their research labs and their universities or government offices.

The hacker or whistleblower should get a Congressional Medal of Freedom or Nobel Peace Prize – not a congressional investigation. At the very least, he has revealed how petty, shameful and corrupt the four-alarm climate “research” establishment is, and how the hypothesis of manmade climate chaos is a house of cards built on a foundation of sand. In so doing, he may have prevented further unjust enrichment of the perpetrators of this billion-dollar funding and science scam.

This bogus science is behind every US, EU and UN proposal to restrict and control our energy, economy, living standards and fundamental liberties – in the name of preventing computer-conjured global warming disasters. By inaugurating Climategate, the whistleblower may have forestalled or prevented wars over increasingly scarce energy and resources caused by this phony science.

We need to start over on the global warming science – with honest scientists who do everything in the open. Or just scrap the entire process, accept that climate change is mostly natural and cyclical, and adapt to it the same way our ancestors did, using the wealth and technology that hydrocarbon fuels have given us.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org). He received his J.D. from the University of Denver College of Law.