The Great Shaman Shamboozle

Steve McIntyre appears to have caught NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in a slight problem with the backup data for the outfit's "2008 was the hottest October on record" globaloney. (See www.climateaudit.org/?p=4318.)

The institute's computerized maps seemed to show readings 10 degrees higher than normal all across Russia for the month in question, which seemed a bit odd, given that snow fell that month in an area of the United Arab Emirates where the people's don't even have a word for snow in their language, and that from the Dakotas to China, from the Alps to New Zealand, 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperature records were set in the month of October 2008, according to Christopher Brooker, London Telegraph, Nov. 16, 2008.

In fact, although Russia cools rapidly throughout the fall (as both Napoleon and Hitler learned the hard way) McIntyre discovered upon closer inspection that the institute's October readings were PRECISELY THE SAME for each Russian reporting station as their September readings, a statistically impossible coincidence.

Oops.

And since the institute uses a complex algorithm to convert actual temperature readings into its reported output, the error also affected previously published readings for other months, according to the Heartland Institute's Environment & Climate News, January 2009.

The discovery followed McIntyre's demonstration in 2007 that NASA had been unjustifiably adding a significant 0.15 degrees celsius to its U.S. temperature reports since 2000, the Heartland folks report.

The institute did not respond to McIntyre's e-mail pointing out their massive and obvious error, but had pulled the erroneous data off its Web site an hour later, blaming the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the London Daily Telegraph reported.

Then the institute claimed to have discovered a new "hot spot" in the Arctic, although satellite images show Arctic sea ice to be 30 percent more extensive than last year.

"The London Daily Telegraph calls this 'a surreal blunder (that) raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming,' " wrote Wesley Pruden in The Washington Times on Nov. 21.

These kind of "accidents," which keep generating "global warming" data even as mankind faces its worst winter in decades, tend to show an increasing level of desperation. Why would that be?

Because those who seek to grab political and economic control of the West's free-market economies, herding huge masses of people out of our cars and free-standing homes and into "mass transit" boondoggles and urbanized concentration ghettos where we're more easily watched and disarmed, clearly need the hysterical ululating to continue for a few more years, at least. Only hysteria and a quasi-religious jihad can get the job done. Look what they face:

1) Global warming may well be over.

2) Even if the globe continued to warm at the rate of 1 degree per century, this would be a net minor improvement, allowing us to grow wheat a bit further north. It's the next ice age that holds the real threat.

3) Carbon dioxide is not a toxin, but is natural and necessary for plant life. "Cleaning the air" of carbon dioxide is like "cleaning the earth" of topsoil.

4) If global warming were to continue and even if it were a bad thing, carbon dioxide is such a tiny part of the atmosphere -- and such a minor component among the "greenhouse gases," which also include water vapor -- that no change in climate trends would result even from shutting down man's industrial civilization entirely, overnight. Which can't be done, since most of the world only goes along with this baloney as long as we pay them to mouth the proper magic phrases.

The big rush to get all their onerous new rules and laws in place right away are part of what Andrew Thomas at The Week That Was (www.sepp.org/Archive/weekwas/2009/Jan_24_2009.htm -- scroll down near the bottom) calls the great "Shaman Shamboozle."

Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, "and his fellow witch doctors must act fast," Thomas explains. "Using the principle of the Shaman Shamboozle, the evil global warming spirits must be chased away before it is obvious to the tribal masses that the climate is actually getting cooler. In doing so, the shaman ecologists can claim that President Obama's 'green initiatives,' i.e., taxing anything that emits carbon dioxide, were successful. At that point, their political power over the tribe will be complete and irreversible."

It would all be a bit amusing if there weren't real world consequences. Thanks in part to the absurdity of turning corn into motor fuel -- a process which uses more petroleum than it saves -- "Foreign Affairs" reports world food prices have risen 83 percent since 2005, leading to food riots in 30 countries. Things would have gotten even worse if the EPA hadn't backed off its proposed "belching and cow-fart tax" late last year -- a rule which would have cost cattle, dairy and hog producers $11 billion per year, driving many out of business.

Buying into the Globaloney, the desperately poor African nation of Chad banned the burning of charcoal -- the nation's main fuel -- last month. Soldiers and police have been beating up demonstrators, who can't scrounge enough cow dung and tree branches to make up the difference.

Meantime, Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn't believe that humans are causing global warming. "I don't think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

Dr. Schmitt (geology) contends scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels. "They've seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven't gone along with the so-called political consensus that we're in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt explains.

The little boy points at the naked emperor. The little boy opens his mouth to speak. What was that? What did he say?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco KIllers," and "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/ and http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/.