To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (16 page)

These grants were no small potatoes: CRU director Phil Jones, who temporarily resigned that position after the emails were published, received an astounding $19 million in grants between 2000 and 2006
⁵
—including money from the U.S. Department of Energy, according to Britain’s
Daily Telegraph
.
⁶
As Professor Ross McKitrick, a climate change skeptic who was mentioned in some of the CRU emails, noted, “Climate sceptics are always accused of taking money from industry but it is now clear the money is on the other side. . . . [Climate change scientists] are enjoying a funding gravy train.”

The emails also suggested CRU scientists manipulated data to exaggerate warming trends. In the most famous email, Phil Jones discussed a “trick” to “hide the decline” in recent historical temperatures. When pressed, CRU admitted it had deleted the raw climate data from its servers. The lack of raw data justifying many of the CRU’s findings has been a key complaint of skeptics, who rightfully argue that normal scientific practice requires scientists to make this information available for scrutiny by other scientists.

In a further blow to the CRU’s credibility, the emails showed scientists discussing ways to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, for example, by deleting correspondence and other information that might be sought. That seems to have been a particular concern for Phil Jones. In one email he writes, “Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same. . . . We will be letting Caspar to do likewise.” Another email from Jones is even more damning:

The United Kingdom Information Commission found that the efforts to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures may have been illegal, but they could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.

The Climategate scandal, as it became known, led to increasing scrutiny of the IPCC report. This resulted in new revelations undermining the report itself.

Several sources used in the report were not scientific or peer-reviewed studies, but talking points lifted from political organizations or recreational magazine articles. For instance, the report argued 40 percent of the Amazon’s forests could be drastically affected by drier weather created by global warming—a claim taken from the World Wildlife Fund, an activist group that lobbies for big-government environmental policies like cap and trade.

One of the report’s most controversial claims—that climate change was increasing the number and severity of natural disasters—also came from a non-peer reviewed source at the time. When the study was finally published in 2008, it included a key addendum: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses.”
⁸

Equally embarrassing were the sources of the report’s claims that ice is rapidly melting on the world’s mountaintops, and that there is a “very high” possibility the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035. The first claim was based on anecdotes from a
Climbing
magazine article and a student paper. The second claim once again came from the World Wildlife Fund.

The warning of disappearing Himalayan glaciers was particularly startling, since it could potentially affect hundreds of millions of Asians who depend on the glaciers as a source of water. The scientist who put the claim in the report, Dr. Murari Lal, later admitted it was included for purely political reasons: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

Unfortunately, the corruption of climate science goes beyond the IPCC and the CRU. A computer programmer named E. Michael
Smith recently discovered that NASA’s Goddard Science and Space Institute and NOAA’s Climate Data Center in North Carolina reduced the number of their temperature data stations from 6,000 in the 1970s to 1,500 in 1990. Most of the lost stations were in colder climates, creating a bias toward warmer readings.

If politics were poker, you could say the Left went “all in” on global warming, willing to use any means necessary to achieve their goals.

The distressing corruption of climate science is intended to justify intrusive and coercive policies that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. Americans don’t want to be banned from using our own natural resources, we don’t want our companies bankrupted by suffocating regulations, and we don’t want cap-and-trade energy taxes. But these are key goals of the secular socialists, because these policies centralize power in their machine.

Allowing American individuals and businesses to develop a vast, cheap supply of energy, as occurred throughout most of American history, doesn’t further socialist goals. To the contrary, this kind of independent initiative threatens the machine. They say our energy development must be carefully planned, strictly regulated, and vigilantly overseen—and they just happen to be the planners, regulators, and overseers.

Secular socialists claim to champion science, yet they debase, distort, and deny the scientific process to further their political agenda. Science is supposed to be an open process of discovery and peer review, yet the most influential global warming alarmists worked furiously to hide their data and silence dissenting views. Meanwhile, the Left point to these scientists’ corrupt, politicized research as “evidence” that the earth faces an imminent environmental apocalypse unless we adopt their extremist green policies.

In the end, secular socialists view science much like they view morality: it’s just another tool to exploit for gaining and maintaining power.

 

 

 

T
he United Nations was formed after World War II as a vehicle for world leaders to promote peace, human rights, and economic development. Tragically, from these noble origins, the UN has evolved into a corrupt, inept, bureaucratic machine that protects the world’s worst dictatorships.

In some ways, the UN machine is even worse than the machine of the American Left; first, since even the most despotic governments are entitled to UN membership, the UN is not limited by elections or the need to keep up democratic appearances. And second, lacking America’s legal framework for government transparency, the organization is even more prone to corruption than is the American Left.

Despite the fact that a handful of Western democracies pay the vast majority of the UN’s annual budget (the United States alone
pays 22 percent), the UN’s most influential voting block is a group of 130 undeveloped countries called the G-77. Using the UN’s one country-one vote system, the G-77 has hijacked the UN to turn it into a mechanism for redistributing wealth from developed to developing countries.

The most recent and dramatic example came out of the December 2009 UN Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The agreement emerging from the conference called for transferring $100 billion a year from developed to undeveloped countries, a move ostensibly meant to repay the so-called “climate debt” that rich countries owe poor ones. One of the proposed methods for transferring this money is a 2 percent global tax on international monetary transactions among industrialized countries—in other words, taxation without representation.

Redistributing wealth is not some side project at the United Nations; it is the organization’s main purpose today. In November 2009, a resolution sponsored by a number of oppressive and Marxist states, including China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Sudan, and Venezuela, and passed largely thanks to the G-77 block, called for, among other things, “the promotion of equitable access to benefits from international distribution of wealth.”
¹
It also reaffirms the need “to work urgently for the establishment of an international economic order . . . which shall correct inequalities and redress existing injustices, [and] make it possible to eliminate the widening gap between the developed world and the developing countries.”
²

Pursuing this agenda, it’s unsurprising the G-77 uses its voting muscle to empower deeply anti-American, anti-Israel, and avowedly socialist activists within the UN bureaucracy.

For instance, a current member of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee is Swiss national Jean Ziegler, who calls the United States an “imperialist dictatorship” whose trade embargo against Cuba constitutes “genocide.” Another top UN diplomat is
Nicaraguan Miguel d’Escoto, President of the UN General Assembly for the 2008-2009 session. A former foreign minister in Daniel Ortega’s far-left Sandinista government in the 1980s, he called Ronald Reagan a “butcher” and Israel an “apartheid” state. He also deemed Evo Morales, the staunchly socialist and anti-American Bolivian president, “World Hero of Mother Earth,” and declared Fidel Castro “World Hero of Solidarity.” D’Escoto claimed these human rights abusers “embody the virtues and values worth emulation by all of us.”

These are the kinds of figures who run the UN bureaucracy. Attempts by Western democracies to elect responsible people with successful track records are routinely stymied, since we’re outnumbered at the UN by the various interest blocs of the developing world. As a result, the UN has descended into an abyss of anti-Western extremism that will almost certainly grow even worse before it ever gets better.

Like all socialist machines, the UN is rife with corruption. It starts with the budgeting process. The UN website says the budget for 2008-2009 was $4.171 billion.
³
But this number does not include “extra-budgetary” items such as peacekeeping operations or UN organizations such as the UN Development Program and the World Food Program, which consume as much as $12 billion a year.

In fact, the UN’s finances are so opaque that nobody knows what the annual budget really is. In 2009, when pressed by
Forbes
magazine about budget figures, the spokesperson for the Secretary General shockingly admitted that the budget is “not something that we keep track of in any systematic way.”
⁴
Predictably, this lack of transparency facilitates massive corruption, the most infamous scandal being the Oil-for-Food program, from which Saddam Hussein’s
Baath Party siphoned off an estimated $10 billion. A UN committee later found that the program’s head, Benon Sevan, had received bribes and illicit kickbacks from the Iraqi government.

Since then, numerous reform efforts have been blocked or rendered toothless. The Procurement Task Force, an anti-fraud unit created in 2006 following the Oil-for-Food scandal, is a great example. After identifying fraud and waste in numerous UN programs, the program was shut down in 2009 due to pressure from Russia and Singapore, whose citizens had been cited by the task force for corruption.

Simply put, corruption is accepted and expected at the UN. And like the Left’s political machine in the United States, reform efforts run up against systemic resistance. UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon has yet to approve a permanent director of investigation for the Office of Internal Oversight Services after more than two years. In fact, he has repeatedly blocked the person recommended by an independent panel, apparently because he’s American.

Consequently, even after the Oil-for-Food scandal, corruption still runs rampant at the UN. For instance:

The UN’s culture of corruption begets more severe acts of lawlessness. UN personnel have been accused of sexual exploitation, including rape, in eleven countries. The worst cases were in the Congo, with thirty-eight allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation reported in 2008 alone. Additionally, the BBC
¹¹
and Human Rights Watch
¹²
have both reported the UN has suppressed evidence of crimes committed by their peacekeepers in the Congo, including arms trafficking with the Congolese militia.