Mark Landsbaum: Is it time to end climate alarmism?

Five allegedly independent investigations claim to have cleared U.S. and British climate scientists of chicanery in their global warming research. It’s more likely the investigations will be among the final nails in the coffin for the global warming alarmist movement. That’s a position shared not only among respected skeptics in the scientific community, but increasingly in the mainstream press and even by some global warming believers.

Sure, government funding for climate change research probably will continue for a while. And propagandists will continue to crank out new studies claiming we’re cooking the planet to death. They will hold more international confabs and issue more dire proclamations, but to less and less avail.

Most likely, this was the tipping point. Global warming zealots have lost. It’s only a matter of time until they realize it and move on to a new contrived catastrophe, where doubtless they’ll be warmly received by a compliant press and amply rewarded with more tax-subsidized grants. It seems there are insatiable appetites and never-ending tax dollars for the proper causes.

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Climategate whitewash. We’re shocked!

Some so-called “investigations” have concluded and the buddies found their buddies innocent of wrongdoing in the ongoing Climategate and related scandals.

Sort of like the fox conducting an inquiry into what went wrong in the hen house. “Innocent!” the fox sputtered, feathers flittering from his mouth.

We will deal with these “investigations” in more depth in coming weeks in a column. But for now, some highlights (lowlights?):

This is what Patrick Michaels at the Wall Street Journal says of investigations into scientific professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called “a nice, tidy story” of climate history

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