Rex Murphy on Climategate

jrobi's thoughts on Climategate:

1. If scientists at the top echelons of the global warming movement have been cooking the data (no pun intended) for years to maintain and bolster their agenda, I can't see how anyone could rationally endorse their views and theories.

2. Given that the earth is cooling as opposed to heating up, instead of trying to blame it on carbon (which would "theoretically" be an insulator heating the globe)the focus now needs to shift to what is actually causing climate change (i.e. the sun, etc).

3. Countries like Iran are helping propagate the climate movement because at the core it means that western democracies will have to hurt their economies to reduce emissions. I don't see Iran, China, or Russia for that matter making any moves towards substantial reductions themselves, so it's fairly straight forward to understand that some countries are using climate change to hurt nations that they are ideologically opposed to while continuing to merrily raise emissions themselves. This, in my opinion, is a form of economic warfare.

China is now the largest polluter in the world, with coal plants taking off on almost a weekly basis. However, the vast majority of non-democratic nations continue to focus exclusively on western nations (i.e. the United States, Canada, and European countries) when laying the blame and pushing for economic changes based on climate change. Economic changes that of course don't hurt their own economies, yet will greatly hurt the economies of western nations.

These are just a few of the points I have been thinking about since the information was leaked that the upper echelons of the climate change movement have been willingly cooking the data to propagate their agenda. Don't get me wrong, I am all for responsible living when it comes to things like taking care of the environment, but to cripple economies and cause massive job losses based on cooked data is completely illogical. After all, we're already in a less than ideal economic reality.

The climate change movement has an agenda: hurt western economies under the guise of morality. Millions of well-intentioned people have taken up the cause for carbon reduction based on this sense of morality, even though the leaked data shows that the globe is cooling, and not heating up. These people can't and shouldn't be blamed - their intentions were good. However, the fact of the matter remains that we all need to get sensible about the situation and turn the scientific community's focus to finding out what is actually impacting the changes we see in our climate.

Carbon is most likely not the culprit. In fact, plants love C02 and recent studies have found that plankton (the backbone of the oceanic ecosystem) grow faster and larger when Co2 levels are increased. The worry was that C02 would destroy the base of the oceans food chain, but low and behold this just isn't the case. (source)

So what's causing the change? I have no clue! I would wager it's just the natural state of affairs. After all, I live in Canada and millions of years ago we used to be tropical, and now we're one of the coldest nations on the planet, so something has already happened before to cause major climate change and it wasn't people pumping CO2 into the atmosphere - so what was it? Lets focus on that question now instead of needlessly hurting our economies based on flawed and cooked science. The findings might show us a way we can prevent it, or they might show us that it's inevitable, but nonetheless it will be based on fact and not manipulated data.