Remember when you were a child and your Mother discovered through hearing about it from the neighbors that you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing? Remember how instead of taking responsibility for your actions you cried that it wasn’t right that someone narced on you? Well, that is the same sort of childish, facile reasoning that the UN has employed to explain away this climaegate scandal.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recently said that the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were obtained and hyped by Russia in order to “destroy public confidence” in the “science” of man-made global warming… or is it now “climate change”? It’s hard to keep up with their constant name changing as they look for more sellable rhetoric.

Just like that kid that’s mad at getting caught but can’t see that he is at fault in the first place, the UN is now trying to get everyone to consider this as “hackergate” instead of climategate. Various UN folks are in essence telling us not to look “here,” but to instead look “over there.”

A few quotes:

“This is not ‘climategate’ it’s ‘hackergate’. Let’s not forget the word ‘gate’ refers to a place where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so. So the media should direct its investigations into that.” — Achim Steiner, director of the UN Environment Program

“We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators.” — Jean-Pascal van Ypersele

Yes, like a bad magician telling us to look at his right hand while his left hand is fishing around in his pocket for the “magic” card, the UN is trying desperately to make us forget about the actual contents of the emails while continuing to parlay its particular brand of economy-killing “magic” with its IPCC climate policies.

Skepticism against global warming is growing. Fortunately, it seems that the UN and these “climate change” salesmen are now fighting a rearguard action to try and keep their big government, nanny state plans rolling forward. The sad truth is that all their nanny state styled, economically inviable policies are little different than the sort of anti-capitalist (read anti-American) policies that have been pushed by the UN since it first met.

It’s all just another effort to eliminate local control and custom and vest all power in a central, singular body. And that goal is the most tyrannical idea of them all. Without custom, the unitary state without question devolves into tyranny. Without these intermediary institutions, these strong and voluntary associations outside of governmental control, there is no way to maintain civil liberty. But with them in place there is no way for far off masters to fully control the people. The UN and other nanny staters, therefore, must destroy these institutions.

For its part, the UN would see these local interests and even local governments squelched leaving itself as the arbiter of man’s relations, his education, his field of work, even his very soul. And the policies of “carbon trading” and the other prescriptions emanating from the global warming true believers are intended to do just that.

But people are starting to wake up. India has let it be known that it rejects Danish climate proposals. Australia has had a major party shake up over the issue with the result that its own cap and tax plan has arrived still born. And a recent Rasmussen poll found that more Americans than ever are skeptical about the science behind global warming. Cracks are appearing in the credibility of global warming.

So it’s no wonder that the UN is trying to make this into “hackergate” instead of “climategate.” Just as the refrain from the “well informed” during the Cold War was that an inordinate fear of communism, a red scare, was discreditable — even as they lost that fight when communism fell — now the same sorts of people are trying to substitute the old red arguments with green ones. And in a similar vein these folks are trying to discredit skeptics of their green policies. So, green is the new red, indeed. Let us strive to defeat these attempts as well.

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.’s upcoming Copenhagen conference–which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol–collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama’s magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a “communications” problem, but after Al Gore’s Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails–more than 1,000 of them–reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”

As in the furor over Dan Rather’s fabricated documents about George W. Bush’s National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the “fake but accurate” defense–what these scientists did may be unethical or deeply biased, they say, but the science is settled, don’t you know, so move along, nothing to see here. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who in the past has trafficked in the most extreme climate mongering: “It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow,” Monbiot wrote in a November 23 column. “The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. .  .  . I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them. .  .  . I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.” Monbiot has joined a number of prominent climate scientists in demanding that the CRU figures resign their posts and be excluded from future climate science work. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, announced last week that he will temporarily step down pending an investigation.

Hayward’s conclusion:

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world’s energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so. But even before Climategate, the campaign was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it’s closing time for the climate horror show.

Read the whole article here.

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.

Standing not quite five feet tall, Boxer has consistently distinguished herself in the discharge of her duties, including trying to prevent the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes during the 2000 election, attacking Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearings, racially patronizing Harry Alford of the Black Chamber of Commerce, and dressing down my namesake, Brig. General Michael Walsh, for an act of what she considered lèse majesté. The general had to bite his tongue, but the righteous contempt with which Alford treats the senator’s plantation racism was one of the feel-good stories of the year.

Not for nothing has she earned the people’s choice award as America’s Stupidest Senator and against some stiff competition. Now, the Terror of Tiny Town has stepped into the steaming pile of Climategate, the recent revelations via leaked/hacked emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  But is “Don’t Call Me Ma’am” Boxer upset that a scheme designed to siphon trillions of dollars away from the western economies, reduce their standard of living to Third World levels and enrich crackpot global-warming enthusiasts like Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.?  Of course not.  What’s got Barb’s panties in a bunch is “E-mail-theft-gate.”  ”You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate.  Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not… This is a crime.”

Her agita comes as no surprise.  Gangsters always get antsy when threatened with exposure of their rackets, and Climate Fraud is a hell of a racket, a grand bargain among greedy science whores, malevolent government officials and a supine but protective media – Americans who get their news from The New York Times or the networks basically have no idea what we’re talking about here – who are all in this together.  As Mark Steyn noted Wednesday over at NRO:

Whatever your views on the merits, if you’re an “environmental journalist” this ought to be news. The reviled “skeptics” and “deniers” have forced Prof. Phil Jones in East Anglia to step down “temporarily” and prompted Penn State to investigate Prof. Michael Mann. Yet you’d have no idea of what the story was about from reading the AP reports in the average American monodaily…  As Jonah [Goldberg] has said, this is not just a science scandal but a journalism scandal — worldwide.

With the Copenhagen Climate Conference coming up, the ruinous Waxman-Markey bill rattling around Capitol Hill, and the investigation into climate data-manipulation starting to head to these shores, the Democrats are heavily invested in “hiding the decline,” so naturally they’re changing the subject. Leaving aside for the moment the sheer counterintuitive insanity (did I mention Al Gore?) of carbon-constraining a civilization of carbon-based life forms, it’s awfully convenient for the Left to discover its High Dudgeon about leaks right about now.  For leaking, in all probability, is what we’re dealing with here: an insider who, faced with the specter of Copenhagen, decided to go public, rather than some crazed right-wing “denier” brazenly hacking into the system.  Indeed, the BBC had the files a month before they were posted on a handy Russian server – but naturally suppressed them.

Leaks are as old as the republic, and one man’s leaker is another man’s heroic whistle-blower.  And, in the end, it all comes down to one’s interpretation of the First Amendment.  The leak of the Pentagon Papers by a disaffected Daniel Ellsberg not only set the gold standard, but the subsequent Supreme Court decision, a 6-3 ruling in favor of The New York Times, which had published the purloined material, also firmly established the First Amendment principle of no prior restraint on publication.

Closer to our time, there was the 1996 cell phone call between embattled Speaker Newt Gingrich and some of his supporters strategizing about how to handle various ethics charges brought against him by the Democrats, which was intercepted and taped by a pair of Democratic activists, John and Alice Martin, who just so happened to be driving around in their car that day, monitoring the police scanner.  They leaked the tape to radical left-wing congressman “Baghdad” Jim McDermott, who helpfully passed it over to reporters.  Sued by John Boehner (R-Ohio), one of the phone call’s participants, for invasion of privacy, McDermott stonewalled for five years before finally admitting he was the source of the press leak. The case went to the Supreme Court, which remanded it because it had already decided, in a similar case, that the principle of no prior restraint also applied to the airwaves, no matter how the tape was obtained.  ”A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens.

So nothing is likely to come from Barbara “I’m Not a Madam, I’m a Senator” Boxer’s idle threat to get to the bottom of “E-mail-theft-gate.”  Like the rest of the Democrats, she has too much invested in the scam, and with electoral disaster looming for Obama and the Democrats next year, she’s and the rest of the executive officers are going full speed ahead with their radical agenda, and damn the icebergs dead ahead.

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.”

But wasn’t it “Mike’s trick” to do this that is being discussed here, grasped and described as such by CRU’s Phil Jones as having been performed on Mike’s graph, by Mike? So, his defense is that no one had told him that that’s what he was doing?

These guys really need to call for a RealInvestigation to get the the bottom of their actions, as the more they stumble around the worse they’re making themselves look.