COP21 in Paris ended with a legally unenforceable but politically dangerous agreement among about 180 countries to reduce their CO2 emissions or slow their growth. Here in the United States Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) stands by his claim that manmade global warming is our greatest security threat, while President Obama treats it as a greater threat than radical Islamic terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a thermonuclear North Korea, and restive Russia and China. The mainstream news media continue to play lapdog to the spinmeisters of the UN IPCC and the Obama Administration. Meanwhile, more and more innocent bystanders—called ordinary citizens—seem to be paying attention to the debates (which of course the alarmists say aren’t occurring) over “climate change.”

Case in point:

Someone posted a story on Facebook reporting that a university had returned to Coca-Cola a $1 million grant when it learned that the money had been used to establish an advocacy group downplaying the link between soft drinks and being overweight. (Kudos to the university—it did the right thing.) The FB user introduced the post with the words, “Another example of capitalism skewing research.” Right. That happens, and it’s wrong when it does. (Except that in our civil order that recognizes the importance of adversarial proceedings in criminal and civil court to arriving at a solid judgment—each side making its best case and trying to undermine the other side’s case—I’m not so sure that when everything comes out in the wash it’s such a problem.)

My friend Oliver Burrows, host of the radio program Christian Economic Perspective, commented on that post: “It happens on the other side from government grants too.” The original poster replied, “But is the government paying to skewing research? Recently?” Then followed some back-and-forths, Oliver assuring that it does, the other asking for some concrete examples.

Oliver mentioned me in one of his comments, which brought the whole thing to my attention. So I provided just a relative handful examples, and then thought, “Hey, I should make these readily available elsewhere, too.” So, here you go:

• Larry Bell, “Data Tweaking Heats Up Climate Hype“
• Stephen Goddard, “Mind-Blowing Temperature Fraud at NOAA“
• Christopher Booker, “The Scandal of Fiddled Global Warming Data“
• Anthony Watts, “NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center caught cooling the past—modern processed records don’t match paper records“
• Ronald Bailey, “Did Federal Climate Scientists Fudge Temperature Data to Make It Warmer? Practicing the Dark Art of Trend Adjustment“

Then I focused in on the news about temperature data adjustments in just one country, Australia:

• Euan Mearns, “Temperature adjustments in Australia“
• Joanne Nova, “A mess of adjustments in Australian capital cities—The inexplicable history of temperatures“
• Joanne Nova, “Blockbuster: Are hot days in Australia mostly due to low rainfall, and electronic thermometers—not CO2?“

And then I went to the attempt earlier this year by Tom Karl and co-authors at NOAA to erase “the pause”:

• Bob Tisdale, “Open Letter to Tom Karl of NOAA/NCEI Regarding ‘Hiatus Busting’ Paper“
• E. Calvin Beisner, “‘The Pause’ Survives NOAA’s Assault“
• E. Calvin Beisner, “NOAA Study Takes World by Storm: No Global Warming Pause!“

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. The frequency and magnitude of temperature fabrications, exaggerations, faultily done homogenizations, etc., to prop up panic about global warming are scandalous—among the greatest scandals in the history of science, I’d say.

Finally I posted: “President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the dangers of the mutually corrupting influence of government on science and science on government should the two become too closely intertwined—as they have indeed become,” and linked to my blog post about that speech, which contains its full text: “The Dangerous Linkage of Government and Science—Ike was Right.”

So keep this little article in mind the next time you have a conversation about the reliability of global temperature data, and the pernicious effect of corporate, and government, funding of scientific research. (You do that all the time, don’t you?)

Featured image courtesy of Bob Tisdale.