Climategate Gets Bigger

The Washington Times reported a few days ago that NASA is now being sucked into the Climategate data-fudging fiasco by virtue of the fact that it has been requested to divulge information via the Freedom of Information Act and is refusing. This will soon become legal, with all the disclosure laws that apply.

Over the last two weeks, the Obama administration and Algore and Barbara Boxer (who wants to investigate . . . the leakers!!) all have claimed “it doesn’t matter” because “other scientific bodies,” including NASA, NOAA, and the UN (!) have “come to the same conclusions.” Well, yes they have. And apparently, yes, they also have been . . . ah, lying.

NASA has refused Freedom of Information Act “requests” (actually, these eventually become legal orders to produce documents) to open up specific data to researcher Chris Horner (the author of Red Hot Lies, about why NASA at one time said 1998 was the warmest year of the 20th century, then said, “oops, 1934 was” (that would be long before the auto had any effect on anything), then in 2006 reversed itself again and said 1998 and 2006 were tied for hottest in the last 100 years.

Does this make NASA look suspiciously like a “political” agency? Absolutely. Because it is, and always has been. I recall working on a joint Air Force-NASA program in the late 1980s to develop a hypersonic aircraft capable of reaching orbit. NASA strongly resisted the program—even as a participant—because if successful, the hypersonic jet threatened to wipe out the clumsy Space Shuttle program. So NASA did everything it could, including having its scientists produce any study they could disputing the possibility of hypersonic travel.

Now NASA and the UN—another “objective” and “disinterested party, right?—are both under scrutiny for buying into the Global Warming hoax in the most literal sense. The UN stands to gain massive power at the expense of national sovereignty, and to grab control over trillions of dollars worth of western wealth that it can dole out to “developing” countries (most of which have failed to develop despite a transfer of $5 TRILLION since WW II. NASA is in a fight to retain its place as the scientific holy altar of knowledge.

What Climategate may do—and there is a long way to go—is force a long-overdue wave of skepticism about and retreat from government-funded science, which since the 1950s has given us the obesity epidemic (courtesy of its war on meat and fats), the “heterosexual AIDs epidemic (that never materialized), and “global warming.” Maybe people will begin to realize that for all its failings, private sector science is far less dangerous that politicized science in the hands of big government.

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