Before the drama in Copenhagen drew to a close, the Climategate saga continued to heat up with news from a Russian institute showing further proof that climate-change scientists are manipulating data to exaggerate their global-warming claims.
The Russian news agency, Ria Novosti, reports that the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) revealed that researchers with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in England "had probably tampered with Russian climate data." The Hadley Centre is closely tied to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia where thousands of e-mails were pirated from a server and published on the Internet in November. The e-mails implicate climate scientists associated with both CRU and the Hadley Centre in conspiracy to withhold and manipulate data to forward their environmentalist agenda.
The IEA says that Hadley Centre researchers used data from only 25 percent of Russian meteorological stations, and those stations happened to be the ones with the warmest temperature readings. Temperatures reported by the remaining 75 percent showed no substantial warming during the last several decades. The press release reported, "The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming theory." The Russian institute claimed that Hadley Centre scientists tended to choose records from stations providing sporadic readings rather than those supplying uninterrupted observations. Their preference also tended toward stations in metropolitan areas where the urban heat effect influences warmer temperatures.
More than 40 percent of Russian territory was excluded in resulting Hadley Center calculations. Since Russia accounts for 12.5 percent of the world’s land mass, the IEA warns it is necessary "to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration." IEA founder Andrei Illarionov told Investor’s Business Daily, "Based on this analysis it looks like the… increase in warming [has] been artificially increased by 0.64 degrees Celsius." Illarionov published an English-version of the IEA report through the CATO Institute, of which he is a senior fellow.
The International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project (ICECAP) adds the CRU, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) all report the world’s greatest warming is in Russia. Recalculations of climate data are doubly necessary since CRU, NASA and NOAA are three of the primary sources for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Periodic IPCC assessment reports influence environmental policies of many countries around the world and are being used as an excuse to establish a multi-billion dollar fund for "environmentally vulnerable countries" under the umbrella of an energy-regulating international authority.
Robert Romano with Americans for Limited Government describes the IEA report as "an early Christmas present" from Russia, just as President Obama arrived at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen "to negotiate devastating cuts in carbon energy emissions in the industrialized world that will cost jobs, increase energy costs, and destroy lives." He calls Obama’s trip a waste of taxpayer money on a “political junket to help falsify bogus science.” It is indeed an ironic turn of events since Russian negotiators at Copenhagen refused to sign any agreement unless they can extend their unused carbon emission permits, issued in 1997 at the climate change conference in Kyoto and set to expire in 2012. Investor’s Business Daily quoted Pat Michaels with the CATO Institute as saying, "They would have a very substantial influence on the carbon market. They would be the Saudi Arabia of carbon credits." A spokesman for the Center for American Progress explained further, "Having all those credits out there would allow other countries to purchase them and then not reduce their emissions. So it undermines the whole purpose of the [Copenhagen] discussions."
In characteristic fashion, the Western media are largely ignoring the IEA report and its implications in the Climategate scandal. The news is, however, making waves on Russia television, which issued the following report:
