"I can't recall the wheels coming off the bus of any expert-driven hysteria as fast or as completely as they are now coming off the global-warming scare. ... News of the manipulations, distortions and frauds perpetrated to advance and preserve the environmentalists' cause celebre are so numerous and coming so fast, it's hard to keep up.

First, of course, there were the e-mails and computer files leaked from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) -- one of a handful of climate-research centres around the world that are the pillars of the United Nations' claims about impending climate doom. ... Then a couple of weeks ago came the news that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN's climate-change arm, had based its most recent findings on Himalayan glacier melt on an old study that had never been peer-reviewed or even published and which was based entirely on the speculation (not research) of a single Indian scientist who now works at the environmental think-tank run by the head of the IPCC, economist Rajendra Pachauri.

This by itself wouldn't be devastating, except that the scientist in charge of the glacier chapter of the IPCC's latest assessment report (AR4) admitted he had known the melt estimate was wrong but had included it anyway because 'we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.' That's not climate science, it's environmental activism, pure and simple....

Another revelation of malfeasance this week was the discovery that the chapter on Amazon rainforests in the IPCC's AR4, the one that included the often-repeated claim that 40 per cent of the forest is under imminent threat from climate change, was written not by climate scientists but by an policy analyst who works for environmental groups and a freelance environmental author. ... In all, so far, at least 16 major claims made in AR4 (the report for which the IPCC won a Nobel Prize) have been shown to have originated with environmental groups rather than scientists.... Does all this prove global warming is a hoax? I believe it does. But at the least, it shows the science is far from settled." --Edmonton Journal columnist Lorne Gunter