Illinois Valley News

Renewed and valid debate regarding man’s possible role in global climate change has been prompted by the leaking of internal e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of Great Britain’s University of East Anglia.

That issue was discussed by Illinois Valley resident Dr. Arthur Robinson during a Wednesday, Dec. 2 interview on the KAJO Radio talk show based in Grants Pass.

Robinson was educated at the California Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in chemistry, and the University of California-San Diego (UCSD). He served on the UCSD faculty and at Stanford University, and is the head of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM).

He founded Cave Junction-based OISM in 1980.

Approximately 12 years ago, Robinson began collecting signatures from U.S. scientists urging the federal government not to take any action based on the claims of global climate change. More than 32,000 scientists have participated in the petition project.

Introducing politics into climate science began during the Clinton administration, Robinson said, as then-vice president Al Gore and his allies pushed for further environmental regulations.

“Pretty soon we had a political movement going along with the science,” Robinson said. “The problem was, there was not a shred of scientific evidence to support this claim.”

Members of the environmental community latch onto “doomsday scenarios” regarding climate because it aids them in their fund-raising and prestige, Robinson said. But “those kinds of claims had been made 20 years earlier” by many of the same people under the guise of global cooling, he added.

Robinson said that the science supporting manmade global warming has “been given by a relatively small handful of scientists, just a few hundred, and not even a few hundred prominent ones.”

The contents of the leaked e-mails were no surprise to scientists who have long examined the political motives of the science behind global warming, Robinson said, and enabled the public to see the scientists involved “for what they are.”

“These people should never work in science again,” he said. “These people don’t belong in this profession.”

Robinson said that the e-mails prove that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s CRU deliberately discarded the raw temperature data on which global warming predictions were based so that other scientists could not check it. The scientists suppressed weather records from before the past 200 years to try and show a temperature increase during that time, he said, in order to support the famous “hockey stick” model put forth by Michael Mann.

“What they have is the data after they did the calculations,” Robinson said. “That’s not the way science works. You have to let other people see your data.”

The CRU scientists used “skullduggery” to prevent access to that data, Robinson said, and they spent three years fighting requests made under the Freedom of Information Act.

CRU Director Phillip Jones has stepped down from his position pending an investigation. In one of the leaked e-mails, Jones promised to spike studies casting doubt on the relationship between human activity and global warming. And he pledged to keep them from being published as part of a report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones wrote, adding that he had to “keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is.”

Robinson stated that Jones has received $16 million in government grants during the past five years to fund his global warming studies.

A report, “Climate Money,” showed that $80 billion has been paid by U.S. taxpayers throughout the past two years on global warming efforts. Of that, $32 billion was allocated for research.

By contrast, Robinson said, the Exxon Mobil Corp. has contributed $7 million during the same time period, “and that’s the biggest funder on the other side.”

“Almost 1,000 times more money been spent promoting the hypothesis than has been spent examining the hypothesis from the opposite point of view,” he said. He added that OISM does not receive any money from the energy industry.

“There’s been practically no money on this side of the issue,” he stated.

Scientists like Robinson often are referred to as “skeptics” of global warming theory. But Robinson said that phrase has been introduced by proponents of the theory, and does not consider him or the other 32,000 petition project participants as such.

“A skeptic means you’re not sure of it,” Robinson said. “The people who know about this subject are not skeptical.”

Robinson said that efforts also were successfully made to prevent scientists doubting global warming to be published in climate research journals.

An international climate change conference is set to occur in Copenhagen, Denmark this week. Robinson said he anticipates that the event will be little more than a “big show.”

“I doubt the conference will lead to much,” he said.

That conference comes as the U.S. Senate is scheduled to debate a cap-and-trade bill that narrowly passed Congress earlier this year. Robinson described the proposed cap-and-trade policies as a “gigantic tax increase” that ultimately would lead to energy rationing and cause food costs to rise dramatically.

“It’s not a tax on the rich,” Robinson said. “In fact, it’s a tax on the poor.”

Robinson added that the Australian parliament recently rejected similar cap-and-trade legislation.

It is possible for mankind to cool the Earth, Robinson said, by adding fine particulate matter into the upper atmosphere. However, he said that there is no political interest in doing so.

“This approach is not being taken, because the goal is not cooling the Earth,” he said. “The goal is massive government taxation and power. It’s a political goal.” Robinson also expressed doubt about whether or not mankind is capable of warming the planet.

“Man has no ability to warm the Earth, with carbon dioxide or anything else,” Robinson said. “It is impossible by any technological means we know.”

Overall, Robinson said that the leaked e-mails reveal what he and other scientists have maintained all along about global climate change theory.

“The science on this is now so strong that the hypothesis is known to be totally wrong,” he said. “It should have been discarded long ago.”

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