Patrick J. Michaels

[This was published in National Review Online on September 23, 2009.]

Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

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Mary Beadnell

[29 January 2008:] Two more lonely deaths in Sydney have shed further light on a disturbing social trend. Frail and aged, living alone, suffering from ill health and with few personal resources, increasing numbers of elderly working class people are being left to fend for themselves with little or no support, following years of government cuts to social welfare programs.

Residents of a public housing estate at Yagoona, in Sydney’s western suburbs, expressed outrage at the discovery of the badly decomposed body of their neighbour, Jorge Chambe-Coloma, a 64-year-old retired factory worker, on January 8. Chambe-Coloma, originally from Ecuador, had no family in Australia. He had worked as a process worker at the B&D Roller Door factory in nearby Revesby, until his retirement some years ago. It is believed Chambe-Coloma died more than 12 months earlier. Even though his electricity had been cut off for at least six months, the New South Wales Department of Housing took no action because his rent had continued to be paid by direct debit from his bank account.

When neighbours noticed his mailbox was overflowing, they alerted police, who made the grisly discovery.

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Julian Assange & staff

"The use of chemical weapons by US forces was explicitly banned by President Gerald Ford in 1975 after CS gas had been repeatedly used in Vietnam to smoke out enemy soldiers and then kill them as they ran away. Britain would be in a particularly sensitive position if the US used the weapons as it drafted the convention and is still seen internationally as its most important guardian. The [UK] Foreign Office [Minister of State, Mike O'Brien] said: "All state parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention have undertaken not to use any toxic chemical or its precursor, including riot-control agents. This applies in any armed conflict." [1] — US Prepares to Use Toxic Gases in Iraq, The Independent (London), March 2, 2003"

The United States has been caught with at least 2,386 chemical weapons deployed in Iraq. The items appear in a spectacular 2,000 page leak of nearly one million items of US military equipment deployed in Iraq given to the government transparency group Wikileaks. The items are labeled under the military's own NATO supply classification Chemical weapons and equipment.

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Doug Westerman

Photo: This child was born in Iraq in the years since the Gulf War, when over three hundred tons of highly toxic depleted uranium were fired in weapons at Iraq. While there is no direct evidence (or research for that matter) linking depleted uranium exposure with such birth defects, doctors in Iraq report a tenfold increase in certain kinds of birth defects (including webbed or fused fingers and toes, missing eyes and vital organs, and severe brain damage) since the end of the war--and many US Gulf War Veterans have parented children with similar birth defects. Picture courtesy of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's Campaign against Depleted Uranium.

Depleted Uranium Dust – Public Health Disaster For The People Of Iraq and Afghanistan

In 1979, depleted uranium (DU) particles escaped from the National Lead Industries factory near Albany, N.Y.,which was manufacturing DU weapons for the U.S military. The particles traveled 26 miles and were discovered in a laboratory filter by Dr. Leonard Dietz, a nuclear physicist. This discovery led to a shut down of the factory in 1980, for releasing morethan 0.85 pounds of DU dust into the atmosphere every month, and involved a cleanup of contaminated properties costing over 100 million dollars.

Imagine a far worse scenario. Terrorists acquire a million pounds of the deadly dust and scatter it in populated areas throughout the U.S. Hundreds of children report symptoms. Many acquire cancer and leukemia, suffering an early and painful death. Huge increases in severe birth defects are reported. Oncologists are overwhelmed. Soccer fields, sand lots and parks, traditional play areas for kids, are no longer safe. People lose their most basic freedom, the ability to go outside and safely breathe. Sounds worse than 9/11? Welcome to Iraq and Afghanistan.

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