The United States government has shelled out huge sums of money to universities, think tanks, and businesses to study global warming climate change.  The government is poised to dole out even more money for climate-change “solutions” like the cap-and-trade scheme.  With the revelations about the lengths to which the leading group of global warming doomsayers went to “hide the decline” in temperatures in their seminal studies – studies that themselves spawned an avalanche of government spending – the world is seeing that the entire enterprise may be based on a fraud.

In a normal scandal where the government appears to have been ripped off, someone in the legislative or executive branch can usually be counted on to investigate the alleged fraud, if for no other reason than advancing their own political career.  In the case of this scandal, however, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have calculated that their political interests are best served by ignoring ClimateGate.  This is sure to continue as new scandals emerge.

That leaves only the judicial branch as a place where climate change fraud can be unmasked in a government forum.

Individuals with inside knowledge about scientists, businesses, or any organization who knowingly used false statements to get (or keep) government money to perpetuate the “climate change” machine should consider a lawsuit under the federal False Claims Act.

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As the USS Obama Administration slowly starts to settle into the waves, future historians will be kept busy searching for the source of the iceberg that holed it below the waterline on its maiden voyage to the land of Hope and Change.  Was it the non-stimulating “stimulus”?  The ludicrous Nobel Peace Prize?  The decision to try the Sept. 11^th plotters in lower Manhattan?  The Afghanistan speech at West Point this week, splitting the difference between surging and surrendering as the photo-op cadets nodded off in the background?  It’s a tough call, and the first year’s not even over yet.

But this administration is more than simply its swivel-headed Fearless Leader, ping-ponging between his teleprompters as the law of diminishing returns exerts its iron grip on his poll numbers.  It’s also the executive officers, the governing party’s top senators and congressmen, the palace courtiers who enforce discipline among the spear-carriers as they split up the swag.  In this, the Obama Administration is especially blessed, featuring both the frozen rictus of Anunciata d’Alesandro Pelosi as the speaker of the house and Harry “the Horse” Reid, an innocent Mormon virgin wandering among the fleshpots and real-estate deals of Las Vegas, as the Senate majority leader.  The Right is, indeed, fortunate in its enemies.

Still, the prize for the dumbest Democrat currently extorting a salary from the taxpayer (check out what her staff costs you here) remains where it long has been, in the grip of Barbara “Call Me Senator” Boxer, née Levy, the pride of Brooklyn and, latterly, of Marin County, Calif., and former relation-by-marriage to Hillary Rodham Clinton during the brief marriage between her daughter, Nicole, and Hillary’s sterling brother, Tony.  Tony Rodham, you may recall, is a former prison guard and repo man who managed to get himself into hot water over a hazelnut deal in the republic of Georgia, got caught up in Pardongate, was assaulted in flagranteby a man who claimed Tony was boinking his girlfriend, got caught up in bankruptcy court and battled his ex over child-support payments.

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By now you’ve likely forgotten the name of Josh Steiner, the Bill Clinton aide who feebly testified that he had lied to his own diary when recording events of the time. But you haven’t forgotten the pitifulness of the spectacle. I suggest we may have just passed that one in ClimateGate, with the following passage from John Tierney’s column in the New York Times, discussing “Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline”:

“In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of ‘grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,’ immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:

‘No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.’

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word.”

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Yesterday, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “ClimateGate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material and that sought for years by CEI go to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

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