It’s already a problem in Europe, but it could be crossing the Atlantic soon, if Congressional leaders like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have their way. Some Democrats are now promoting the European-style value-added tax (or VAT) to collect revenue. After all, Democrats never found a tax they didn’t like. But it has the unintended consequence of promoting billion dollar fraud and graft — Europeans have termed it “carboncarousel fraud,” because criminals take something intangible like “carbon credits” and launder it around and around.

[UK Guardian] The fraud occurs when a trader of carbon credits in one EU country buys some from another country free of VAT, then sells them on, charging the VAT to the buyer. The seller then disappears without handing the VAT to the taxman.

Some criminals re-export the credits, reclaiming VAT as they do so, then re-import them. They can do this repeatedly, reclaiming VAT many times, hence the “carousel” label.

Yet another example where even with the best of intentions government busy-bodies do more harm than good. In this case, even criminals can get behind the facade of environmentalism. Where will it end?

Environmentalism is about cash. We’ll start with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous press conference earlier this month that must have left people wondering if the Governator was preparing for his next action movie role. Mimicking the global warming doomsayers via afantasy Armageddon scenario (read: The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, etc.)  Schwarzenegger presented his constituents a map of the future in which many notable San Francisco landmarks — such as the airport — were under water.

“Within a century, Treasure Island, this place where we are right now, could be totally under water,” the governor said. “It is technology in the end that will save us.”

The Governator becomes a warming scaremonger.

Not coincidentally, Schwarzenegger has been praising President Obama’s carbon trading agenda (read: new taxes). The rationale is simple — California has a $21 billion state budget deficit, and understanding the Chicago politics style of the new administration the Republican Schwarzenegger knows he has to suck up to have any chance of overcoming his disastrous left-leaning economic strategy of the past 5 years.

Which brings us to the point: This isn’t about the environment, it’s about money, and big money at that. As many of the ClimateGate e-mails showed, proponents of global warming/climate change are using the environment as a front to tax and redistribute wealth.

The Global Warm-mongers aren’t even trying to keep it a secret anymore, their agenda is brazen.

In clear and open language, written right in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (i.e., the Copenhagen treaty) were these gems (compilation courtesy of Counting Cats in Zanzibar):

Annex 1, paragraph 33: “By 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least USD 67 billion] [in the range of USD 70-140 billion] per year.”

Annex 3, E, paragraph 17: “[[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:] (a)  Compensate for damage to the LDCs’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees; (b)  Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.”

Annex 1, C, paragraph 41: “[Financial resources of the Convention Adaptation Fund"] [may] [shall] include: (a) [Assessed contributions [of at least 0.7% of the annual GDP of developed country parties]“

Compensation for “dignity”? Could this be any less about environment and conservation and any more about collectivist, statist, socialist wealth redistribution and societal re-engineering? This isn’t planting trees and being a good steward, it’s extortion.

Worse, the Copenhagen treaty would have American taxpayers ships billions of dollars annually to an unelected board of climate change bureaucrats, who would then redistribute funds to unelected and undemocratic regimes in South America, Africa and Asia. Think a dictator in Africa might use those funds for something other than improving the environment?

People aren’t exaggerating when they say this is an attempt to sow the seeds of world government — just wrap any issue up in the cloth of “global crisis” or other such nonsense and an unelected board of bureaucrats get to decide where you should live, what kind of car you should drive, or how many miles you can drive it. Or what kind of toilet paper you should use (no joke, folks).

Tom Friedman’s most recent column (Going Cheney on Climate) seeks to champion action on (alleged) global warming on the basis of the “precautionary principle.” The idea behind precautionary principle is basically insurance — you make the investment not on the certainty of something adverse occurring, at least not right away, but on the likelihood that it may occur, particularly as time passes.

Put aside for a moment that Friedman breathlessly mimics the same fascist, strong-arm, brown-shirt tactics of the “consensus” scientists who promise “catastrophic” consequences for global warming, such as those consequences usually reserved for really, really poorly acted but special effects jaw-dropping movies like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, or Independence Day. Friedman has apparently learned nothing from ClimateGate except to double down.

Rather, consider that the precautionary principle’s most important aspect is economics.

That is, offer a population a life insurance policy for a few dollars a day and many or most will likely pay the cost. But offer them a policy like the TRILLION-DOLLAR price tags that such carbon-based treaties have had over the past decade and those same persons will wisely take their chances and use those funds for more pressing needs.

Friedman whiffs on that notion altogether. But it’s one that many smart people have attempted (while being vilified by the climate change scaremongers) to promote for many years.

Marlo Lewis wrote his great essay “Precautionary Foolishness” almost a decade ago.

Lewis actually uses the Precautionary principle against it’s proponents:

No one has demonstrated that the Kyoto Protocol [and other cap and trade schemes] won’t have harmful consequences. Therefore, we should oppose it.

Similarly, former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg frequently expresses his frustration that the cost of combating theoretical climate change is more deadly than the actual warming. Years ago he noted that for the price of the Kyoto treaty we could give every man, woman and child on the planet clean drinking water and proper sewage facilities.

But so long as we have Friedmans, Sontags, and other such well-intended liberal nincompoops with us, millions will continue to die for fear of what might be (cancer from DDT, climate change, FDA drug over-regulation) rather than what is (malaria, lack of energy, lack of drugs).

******************

P.S. — Another flaw with Friedman’s precautionary principle concept is that generally we adult consumers get to choose whether or not to buy insurance. In the case of climate change, however, our Nanny-state authoritarians on Capital Hill, or worse, unelected bureaucrats in the EPA force feed us insurance as though we were children. No thank you, Tom.

Courtesy of Prodicus:

The debate is over!

Having read many of the e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia writer James Delingpole summarizes six major categories, including: (1) Manipulation of evidence in favor of global warming, (2) Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up, (3) Suppression of evidence contrary to their views, (4) Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Skeptic scientists, (5) Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and, (6) “how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.” [Although I think that latter one could be categorized into #3].

Indeed, it is the concerted effort to politicize and demonize any scientist with a contrary view that does the most damage to scientists — that’s right, if ideologically driven scientists can manipulate not just climate change data, but also the review of that data and even the debate itself — “The debate is over!” and other such circular reasoning — then we can suspect other scientists will attempt the same on, say, health care data [but more to that in a moment]. One would think scientists everywhere would be condemning the CRU, rather than becoming apologists and excuse-makers for them.

As National Review’s Iain Murray points out, not only was there a brazen conspiracy to remove contrarians from the peer-review process, but, “There was an organized attempt to circumvent or obstruct the legal requirements of the UK’s Freedom of Information Act 2000, which appears on its face to rise to the level of criminality.” These CRU “scientists” wrote of rather destroying the data before they allowed it to be available via information act lawsuits. (Speaking of, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is suing NASA to release its raw climate change data, on the basis that NASA has previously [in 2007] extrapolated inaccurate results which Washington bureaucrats and politicians would use to effect via regulation and taxation the lives of everyday Americans).

Ironically, I’m listening to National Public Radio on my radio in the background right now talk about the latest news from the Copenhagen climate talks, and, gosh, wouldn’t ya know it, they don’t mention a word about the CRU debacle! Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.

Which leads us to how the mainstream media has become a willing abettor to this climate scandal. Here’s Jonah Goldberg:

First, the climate-change industry is shot through with groupthink (or what climate scientist Judith Curry calls “climate tribalism”). Activists would have us believe that the overwhelming majority of “real” scientists agree with them while the few dissenters are all either crazed or greedy “deniers” akin to flat-earthers and creationists. These e-mails show that what’s really at work is a very large clique of scientists attempting to excommunicate perceived heretics for reasons that have more to do with psychology and sociology than physics or climatology.

Second, the climate industry really is an industry. Climate scientists make their money and careers from government, academia, the United Nations, and foundations. The grantors want the grantees to confirm the global-warming “consensus.” The tenure and peer-review processes likewise hinge on conformity. That doesn’t necessarily mean climate change isn’t happening, but it does mean sloppiness and bias are unavoidable.

How big a scandal this is for the scientific community is being hotly debated on the Internet. But in big newspapers and TV news, the story has gotten less attention. And that’s a scandal, too. The New York Times’s leading climate reporter, Andrew Revkin (whose name appears in some of the e-mails), won’t publish the contents of the e-mail on the grounds it would violate the scientists’ privacy. Can anyone imagine the Times being so prissy if such damning e-mails were from ExxonMobil, never mind Dick Cheney?

Exactly.

Today, the UK “Climate Change Secretary,” which is about as typical but useless as any government post could get, announced breathlessly that, “We have to beware of the climate saboteurs, the people who want to say this is somehow in doubt, and want to cast aspersions on the whole process.” By “process,” one supposes he means that very process that CRU personnel used, including lying, manipulation and obfuscation. You can’t make this stuff up! The academic elitists are shouting, “never mind that the data is fudged, just have faith we know what’s best for you.” Social engineering at its precipice.

Similarly, California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer was outraged — yes outraged! — over the CRU e-mails: not their content, mind you, but that they were allegedly hacked. “You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,” said the senator.

Suddenly the liberals have discovered that leaks of private or classified information is bad? Like Goldberg above said, had the e-mails been from a Merck server and revealed that the pharma giant was hiding something about Vioxx, do you think Sen. Boxer would be so outraged?(Meanwhile, there’s equal reason to believe that the e-mails weren’t hacked but leaked by a whistle blower — something liberals used to be in favor of, but only when pertaining to the CIA or Abu Ghraib apparently).

Same old, same old selective outrage from hypocrites on the left.

Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU [Climate Research Unit] and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review.” When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which in essence is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style.

– Mark Steyn.

For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.

– Gerald Warner, UK Telegraph.

Best summary yet. This is from the UK’s Christopher Monckton. Note his point about “an unelected government.” He’s not kidding either. And worse, right now, assisting this unelected body who champion worldwide regulation and taxation of carbon, are scores of international corporations proposing a $10 trillion treaty and “one-world” climate tax. Were something like this ever to take place, no other issue in your lifetime could potentially affect your future livelihood, standard of living, career and way of life.

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be.

Here’s Robert Tracinski on Climategate.

These e-mails show, among many other things, private admissions of doubt or scientific weakness in the global warming theory. In acknowledging that global temperatures have actually declined for the past decade, one scientist asks, “where the heck is global warming?… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” They still can’t account for it; see a new article in Der Spiegel: “Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out.” I don’t know where these people got their scientific education, but where I come from, if your theory can’t predict or explain the observed facts, it’s wrong.More seriously, in one e-mail, a prominent global warming alarmist admits to using a statistical “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the “trick” consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature “proxies” from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward “hockey stick” slope.

Confirming the earlier scandal about cherry-picked data, the e-mails show CRU scientists conspiring to evade legal requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, for their underlying data. It’s a basic rule of science that you don’t just get to report your results and ask other people to take you on faith. You also have to report your data and your specific method of analysis, so that others can check it and, yes, even criticize it. Yet that is precisely what the CRU scientists have refused.

But what stood out most for me was extensive evidence of the hijacking of the “peer review” process to enforce global warming dogma. Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be published in professional journals. The idea is to weed out research with obvious flaws or weak arguments, but there is a clear danger that such a process will simply reinforce groupthink. If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing.

And that is precisely what we find.

In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to “rid themselves of this troublesome editor”-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II’s knights. Michael Mann replies:

I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not “legitimate.”

You can also see from these e-mails the scientists’ panic at any dissent appearing in the scientific literature. When another article by a skeptic was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Michael Mann complains, “It’s one thing to lose Climate Research. We can’t afford to lose GRL.” Another CRU scientist, Tom Wigley, suggests that they target another troublesome editor: “If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.” That’s exactly what they did, and a later e-mail boasts that “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/new editorial leadership there.”

Not content to block out all dissent from scientific journals, the CRU scientists also conspired to secure friendly reviewers who could be counted on to rubber-stamp their own work. Phil Jones suggests such a list to Kevin Trenberth, with the assurance that “All of them know the sorts of things to say…without any prompting.”

So it’s no surprise when another e-mail refers to an attempt to keep inconvenient scientific findings out of a UN report: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Think of all of this the next time you hear someone invoke the authority of peer review-or of the UN’s IPCC reports-as backing for claims about global warming.

This scandal goes beyond scientific journals and into other media used to promote the global warming dogma. For example, RealClimate.org has been billed as an objective website at which global warming activists and skeptics can engage in an impartial debate. But in the CRU e-mails, the global warming establishment boasts that RealClimate is in their pocket.

I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through…. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

[T]hink of RC as a resource that is at your disposal…. We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics don’t get to use the RC comments as a megaphone.

And anyone doubting that the mainstream media is in on it, too, should check out New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s toadying apologia for the CRU e-mails, masquerading as a news report.

The picture that emerges is simple. In any discussion of global warming, either in the scientific literature or in the mainstream media, the outcome is always predetermined. Just as the temperature graphs produced by the CRU are always tricked out to show an upward-sloping “hockey stick,” every discussion of global warming has to show that it is occurring and that humans are responsible. And any data or any scientific paper that tends to disprove that conclusion is smeared as “unscientific” precisely because it threatens the established dogma.

For more than a decade, we’ve been told that there is a scientific “consensus” that humans are causing global warming, that “the debate is over” and all “legitimate” scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this “consensus” really means. What it means is: the fix is in.

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It’s the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being “confused” by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.

The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline. They appear to have no idea what they’re up against or how to confront it. Their opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary.

The greatest tragedy here is that despite many years of outright fabrication, fraud and deceit on the part of the climate change denial industry, documented in James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore’s brilliant new book Climate Cover-up, it is now the climate scientists who look bad. By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow. Hoggan and Littlemore have shown how fossil fuel industries have employed “experts” to lie, cheat and manipulate on their behalf. The revelations in their book (as well as in Heat and in Ross Gelbspan’s book The Heat Is On) are 100 times graver than anything contained in these emails.

But the deniers’ campaign of lies, grotesque as it is, does not justify secrecy and suppression on the part of climate scientists. Far from it: it means that they must distinguish themselves from their opponents in every way. No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last.

– George Monbiot, UK Guardian.