As a scientist I am appalled at the lengths that global warming alarmists with go to prove they are “right.”
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy, also known as “Climategate,” began in November 2009 when emails hacked from the server at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University unambiguously proved that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics.
Now we learn that the duplicity goes far beyond the above controversy. The article below by Kenneth Richard shows the extraordinary lengths to which “the religion of climate change” will go to smother data that disagrees with their ardent position.
Beginning in 2003, software engineer William Connolley quietly removed the highly inconvenient references to the global cooling scare of the 1970s from Wikipedia, the world’s most influential and accessed informational source.
It had to be done. Too many skeptics were (correctly) pointing out that the scientific “consensus” during the 1960s and 1970s was that the Earth had been cooling for decades, and that nascent theorizing regarding the potential for a CO2-induced global warming were still questionable and uncertain.
Not only did Connolley — a co-founder (along with Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt) of the realclimate.com blog — successfully remove (or rewrite) the history of the 1970s global cooling scare from the Wikipedia record, he also erased (or rewrote) references to the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age so as to help create the impression that the paleoclimate is shaped like Mann’s hockey stick graph, with unprecedented and dangerous 20th/21st century warmth.
A 2009 investigative report from UK’s Telegraph detailed the extent of dictatorial-like powers Connolley possessed at Wikipedia, allowing him to remove inconvenient scientific information that didn’t conform to his point of view.
“All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.“
After eviscerating references to 1970s global cooling scare and the warmer-than-now Medieval Warm Period from Wikipedia, and after personally rewriting the Wikipedia commentaries on the greenhouse effect to impute a central, dominant role for CO2, Connolley went on to team up with two other authors to publish a “consensus” manifesto in 2008 that claimed to expose the 1970s global cooling scare as a myth, as something that never really happened.
Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck (2008, hereafter PCF08) published “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, hoping to quash once and for all the perception that there were scientists in the 1960s and 1970s who agreed the Earth was cooling (and may continue to do so), or that CO2 did not play a dominant role in climate change.
And thanks to HP for sending this to me.
Roy Filly
The Rugged Individualist 
I’m also appalled, like you a physician, scientist and professor, but not surprised. It is what we have come to expect from the left. If they don’t like the truth, they distort it or cover it up. And if they can’t do that, they name call or demonize those who tell the truth. They should abide by John 8:32 “…you will know the truth and the truth will set you free”. Do you suspect they really don’t want “to be set free” as freedom from their liberal prejudices would undermine the very agendas set in stone over the decades?
One also has to ask the deeper question which is why it is so darned important for us to “believe” in human caused, devastating global warming. Why not just view it as a hypothesis or a theory that needs further scientific investigation. The fact that there is an unhealthy obsession with forcing all to “believe” should set off alarms as to the motives, either conscious or unconscious. My theory is that only with linking our behavior and healthy need for energy as causing something bad will permit our rulers under the guise of protecting us to have the imprimatur to control our behavior.
Thank you! Who stands to gain what?
For one thing, the third-world savages stand to gain from this — by bankrupting the civilized nations’ industry through UN-imposed CO2 regulations, they give themselves a chance to get ahead and become dominant! Especially since the green lobby’s energy source of choice, solar power, gives them an advantage over the civilized nations because they get more sunlight!
To agentorange153: How will that work? If they haven’t figured out solar power by now, later is going to be better? Civilized nations are just that, civilized. If nothing else, they can think up stuff better than anyone else. I suppose you’re right.