UN Threatened by ClimateGate

The United Nations is digging in its heels and has decided that ClimateGate won't slow down their goal of a one world government:

There is "virtually no possibility" of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN's top global warming body, its chair said today.

Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel's fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007.

The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university.

Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered.

"The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report," he said.

"Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening."

There's one major problem with that - the East Anglia laboratory where all this was happening is not just "a few scientists", they were the leading voices promoting global warming. Other scientists disagreed with their findings at their own risk, and consequently, they were driving the whole discussion. Some clown at the IPCC is not going to be able to just wave them away as inconsequential.

This is how Christopher Booker at the UK Telegraph describes the scientists involved:

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The UN will continue to push for a new global warming treaty that will have punishing effects on the United States and other developed countries, but politically the ClimateGate scandal will make it very difficult to get an agreement at the Copenhagen meeting. The story broke just in time to effectively kill it.