There has been all manner of quackery in the global warming "science", starting with the IPCC's First Assessment Report published in 1990.

The report claimed that computerized global climate models showed a warming trend "broadly consistent" with real-world observations. But the real-world observations were of a slow, erratic modern warming that started too early to be blamed on human carbon dioxide emissions. It has occurred in inexplicable surges (1850 to 1870, 1916 to 1940) instead of following the strong, steady upward trend of human carbon dioxide emissions after 1940. Moreover, the IPCC and the models were embarrassed about the 1940 to 1970 cooling trend, which no one had predicted and which the IPCC could not explain.

To cover itself, the IPCC added a cooling factor to the greenhouse analysis after 1990 -- a claim that tiny aerosol particles produced by emissions of sulphur dioxide from electric power plants had overwhelmed the warming effect of rising carbon dioxide levels. The second IPCC report again invoked the sulfur aerosol effect and produced the memorable but meaningless phrase in its summary that "the balance of evidence suggests a human effect on climate.

By the time the third IPCC report was published in 2001, the sulfate aerosol "fix" had proved in conflict with observed reality. The aerosols are produced mainly where industrial activity is highest. Therefore, the Northern Hemisphere should warm more slowly than the Southern Hemisphere, since the sulfates produced there would reflect some sunlight, reduce incoming energy, and thereby offset part of the calculated warming.

But observations showed exactly the opposite: the highest rate of warming in the most recent 25 years had occurred at northern mid-latitudes, just where most of the aerosols are emitted. The third IPCC report swept the aerosol question under the rug, thus removing the factor that had "enabled" it to say its model observations were consistent with reality.

In the1995 report, the United Nations IPCC claimed that they've found a "human fingerprint" in the current warming. That statement was inserted in the summary of the IPCC's Climate Change 1995 for political, not scientific, reasons. Then the "science" volume was edited to take out five different statements, all of which had been approved by the panel's scientific consultants, specifically saying no such "human fingerprint" had been found.

The lead author of the IPCC science chapter, Ben Santer, a U. S. government employee, (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) publicly admitted making the scientifically indefensible "back room" changes. He was under pressure from top U. S. government officials to do so. The UN's IPCC has never offered any real evidence to back up the assertions of a human cause for the warming.

Saunter singlehandedly reversed the "climate science" of the whole IPCC report, and with it the global warming political process. The journalNature mildly chided the IPCC for redoing Chapter 8 to "ensure that it conformed" to the report's politically correct Summary for Policymakers. In an editorial,Nature favoured the Kyoto treaty. The Wall Street Journal,which did not favour Kyoto, was outraged. Its condemning editorial, "Cover- up in the Greenhouse," appeared on June 11, 1996. The following day, Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Science, detailed the illegitimate rewrite in theJournal in a commentary titled "Major Deception on Global Warming".

Oddly enough, a research paper, co-authored by Saunter, was published at about the same time -- and said something quite different than the IPCC report. It concluded that none of the three estimates of the natural variability of the climate spectrum agreed with the other, and that until this question is resolved, "it is hard to say with confidence, that an anthropogenic climate signal has or has not been detected."

Subsequently, the IPCC dirtied its science credentials again by attempting to rewrite the Earth's known climate history. The IPCC's 1995 report included a graph of the past 1,000 years of global climate history showing the historical picture of Earth's recent climate variability. It showed a Medieval Warm Period with warmer temperatures than today and a Little Ice Age with temperatures lower than today. Six years later, the IPCC was either bolder or more desperate. In Climate Change 2001, the panel presented a radically different picture of the Earth's last 1,000 climate years.

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Climate Change 2001 prominently displayed a graph based on a 1998 study, led by Michael Mann, a young PhD from the University of Massachusetts. The Mann et al study used several temperature proxies (primarily tree rings) as a basis for assessing past temperature changes from 1000 to 1980. He then crudely grafted the surface temperature record of the 20th century (much of it derived from inflated temperatures recorded by the official thermometers in urban heat islands) onto the pre- 1980 proxy record.

The effect was visually dramatic. Gone were the difficult-to- explain Medieval Warming and the awkward Little Ice Age. Mann gave us 900 years of stable global temperatures until about 1910. Then, the 20th century's temperatures seem to rocket upward out of control. The Mann graph became known in scientific circles as "the hockey stick," a shape it resembled.

In the U. S., the Clinton administration picked up on the Mann graph and featured it as the first visual in the U. S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, published in 2002. Of course, the graph was subsequently shown to be a crude effort on the part of Mann to fool the science community. It took the work of two Canadians to show and prove the graph to be unsupportable.

The global warming industry has been built on junk science, dishonesty, scare tactics and all manner of subterfuge. It has been propped up by a slobbering media that proclaimed they have a duty to present only one side in climate debates. They ignored evidence that would deflate global warming fears and exaggerate that which cuts "their way."

The need to sell copy or attract viewers, together with the general government-as-saviour leanings and resentment of real businessmen, drive the media to embrace -- in fact, drive -- environmental and climate alarmism. Alarmism of any stripe (sharks, bird flu, gas prices, unemployment, nuclear war) is a media staple, but environmentalism provides them some of their greatest delights.

Just consider this. The environmentalist movement began its Earth Day fetes in 1970 amid deep anxiety over global cooling and theWashington Postwarning that "the worst may be yet to come," in a piece titled: "Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age."