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Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.... as this is nothing more then coverup deflection of the truth,

Climategate, as readers of any honest internet news hub know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails and rigged computer programs from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate-change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.

Here in the Midwest State of Michigan, we know a thing or two about climate change. Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes. It'll change. Perhaps it's my casual attitude about weather generally, or maybe my cynicism about big science, but the revelations of data doctoring by climate scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit didn't come as a surprise to me.

With so much at stake, one must only follow the massive money and political power trails to assume there's more to this issue than an uptick in the temperature. Climate change is the issue through which citizens of the U.S. could be forced to subject our Constitution and ourselves to the sovereignty of a worldwide governing body. The ramifications for our liberty and lifestyles of an international treaty on climate change are truly frightening - much more so than melting ice caps.

So while I wasn't shocked to learn that the leaders in the epic "Chicken Little" fable better known as global warming have, for some years, compromised the scientific veracity of their research to uphold their dubious and dire claims, it occurred to me upon learning about "climategate" that once again our children are left holding the bag.

Those of us raising families know too well the drumbeat of fear that is used to manipulate our children into serfs for the environmental left. As a parent, it's taken a concerted effort to counter the onslaught of political propaganda that passes for the science curriculum, not only to help my children learn the truth, but to quell the anxiety it's meant to stir up.

I can't count the number of dinner-table conversations we've devoted to eye-opening information such as the prediction some 30 years ago of an impending ice age, or that the Earth's cycles of warming and cooling happen naturally, or that there is a corresponding relationship between Al Gore's Oscar award and Al Gore's bank account.

It is disheartening to realize that the nation's science curriculum has been hijacked by environmentalism. Is it any wonder that the United States ranks near the bottom of industrialized countries in assessments of science students, or that the National Center for Education Statistics finds our high school seniors scoring lower in science in 2007 than in 2000? It seems during those seven years that they didn't learn much hard science, but I'm betting the vast majority wrote essays on corporate America's responsibility for climate change.

It is further a disgusting display of stupidity and blind faith that Obama is even going to Copenhagen Denmark for the fiasco Climate Change summit pressuring other countries to buy into this fraudulent warmist religion with billions in pledges to continue funding moonbat science and marxist/socialist motivated university scientists. Of coure John Kerry is pushing for a immediate Global Warming Cap & Trade Bill passage with 10 billion to 100 billion in annual payments from the US treasury to continue GM research at foreign universities at the heart of the largest money and power grabing scam in world history.  Where to the democrats come up with these people like Al Gore, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Alan Greenspan and those running the Red States like Calif and Michigan into bankrupsy.
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