The US Congress’ most ardent global warming sceptic is being accused of turning the row over climate science into a McCarthyite witch-hunt by calling for a criminal investigation of scientists.

Climate scientists say Senator James Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation into American as well as British scientists who worked on the UN climate body’s report or had communications with East Anglia’s climate research unit represents an attempt to silence debate on the eve of new proposals for a climate change law.

Inhofe’s document ends by naming 17 “key players” in the controversy about CRU’s stolen emails, including the Britons Phil Jones and Keith Briffa.

The former vice president apparently finds it inconvenient even to answer calls to testify before the U.S. Senate. You can call him Al . . . but he won’t call back.

Senator Inhofe wants to put Al on the hot seat:

On Tuesday, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe — a prominent skeptic of global warming theory and the Republican leader of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee — issued a request for Gore to come testify on global warming. In an interview with FoxNews.com, Inhofe said he wants Gore to appear because “it will be interesting to ask him on what science he based his movie,” a film the senator considers “science fiction.”

If there’s money involved, evidently Al will come out of his bomb shelter:

On Jan. 16, he spoke at the American Library Association conference at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, and he signed copies of his newest book, Our Choice: How We Can Solve the Climate Crisis.On Feb. 22, at the IBM Pulse Conference in Las Vegas, Gore commented on how the environment was a fantastic business opportunity.

“We are in the presence of one of the greatest opportunities in the history of business to become much more efficient and eliminate waste, pollution and losses all at the same time,” he said.

I’d personally substitute the word “opportunities” with “scams,” but that’s just me (and millions of other suspicious minds).

Even the MSM is starting to wonder where Al is:

“The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels — this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up,” the editors of Investors Business Daily wrote on Tuesday. “We’ve not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses.”

The Senator wants a full confession, he thinks Al has helped create some gigantic piles of BS:

“First Climate-gate happened, before Copenhagen, and everything unraveled on the global warming front,” the senator said. “It appears that the scientific community has been deliberately falsifying science for years, whether it’s the melting of the Himalayas or the melting of the polar ice. All of that was in his movie. So we tried to reach him.”

“When his movie came out,” Inhofe added, “parents of small children told me their kids had to go to the psychiatrist over bad dreams about global warming. We owe it to the public to find out where the science came from. This is the greatest scientific scandal of our generation.”

Al isn’t the only person he wants to testify either:

He said he has issued calls for the inspectors general of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to come to his committee and testify. He said criminal law may have been broken in the U.K. when scientists there refused to comply with requests for information in a timely fashion, and he worries that untoward acts may have been committed in the U.S. as well.

“What other kinds of unethical or criminal things have happened?” he asked.

I wish the Senator is success in getting these people to testify.  I also hope it is broadcast worldwide.  These people need to come out of their basements, bomb shelters or out from under their rocks and face the music.

Another attack on those questioning climate change, and another swift knock out punch by Lord Christopher Monckton. This time the opponent is Scientific American, which has attacked James Inhofe, one of the few US Senators fighting the battle against global warming quackery.

Here’s the slamming introduction, before he really gets into it.

In December 2009, Scientific American, once a respected popular-science journal and now a pulp science-fiction picture comic, viciously attacked US Senator James Inhofe because he had proclaimed 2009 to be the Year of the Skeptic. By skepticism, he meant “standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism”.

Venomously, Science Fiction American’s editorial comment continued: “Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists.” Yah-Boo! This name-calling marks the depth of unscientific desperation to which the proponents of the “global warming” nonsense have now sunk.

Unscientific American pompously continued: “Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.”

Politicized American, following a host of similarly left-leaning bodies such as the Royal Society and the unspeakable BBC, proceeded to parody and then condemn the now-overwhelming scientific case against the notion that CO2 is the principal driver of the past half-century’s “global warming” by setting up and then knocking down seven feeble straw men – childish, dishonest simulacra of the true scientific arguments against “global warming” hysteria. It described its straw men as “only a partial list of the contrarians’ bad arguments”. Yah-Boo!

Read it all: Scientific American’s Climate Lies @ The SPPI Blog.

Fox News aired a special report on climate change/cap-and-trade with Bret Baier interviewing U.S. Congressman Edward Markey, Steven Hayward, Senator James Inhofe, and Myron Ebell.

Republican Inhofe says there is not a chance in hell that cap-and-trade will pass. Democrat Markey disagrees. We hope Inhofe is right, but as we’ve seen in the healthcare bill this weekend, never doubt the ability of a Harry Reid/Nancy Pelosi congress to buy off as many votes as they need.

Discuss: here

December 14, 2009

DOE Litigation Hold Notice

DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.”

As a reminder, this Litigation Hold preservation obligation supersedes any existing statutory or regulatory document retention period or destructive schedule. The determination of what information may be potentially relevant is based upon content and substance and generally does not depend on the type of medium on which the information exists. The information requested may exist in various forms, including paper records, hand-written notes, telephone log entries, email, and other electronic communication (including voicemail), word processing documents (including drafts, spreadsheets, databases, and calendars), telephone logs, electronic address books, PDAs (like Palm Pilots and Blackberries), internet usage files, systems manuals, and network access information in their original format. All ESI should be preserved in its originally-created, or “native” format, along with related metadata. Relevant backup tapes and all indexes for those tapes should also be preserved. Further, information that is reasonably accessible must nonetheless be preserved, because such sources will, at the very least, need to be identified and, under compelling circumstances, may need to be produced.

If you have any doubts as to whether specific information is responsive, err on the side of preserving that information.

Any employee who has information covered by this Litigation Hold is requested to contact Madeline Screven, Paralegal, SRNS Office of General Council, 5-4634, for additional instructions.

Michael L. Wamsted
Associate General Council

Full story:  What’s Up With That | Discuss: here