2009 ended with a flurry of important events on the climate-change front.

In November, the Climategate scandal broke. An anonymous whistle-blower released over 1,000 e-mails from key scientists (both British and American) in the alarmist climate-change camp. The e-mails revealed a shocking pattern of the abuse of science by both American and British scientists collaborating at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University—the source of various global-warming “studies” that have formed the alleged scientific justification for capping human CO2 emissions.

E. Calvin Beisner wrote that the e-mails showed: “serious scientific malfeasance—the fabrication, corruption, destruction, hiding, and cherry-picking of data” as well as “intimidation of dissenting scientists and journal editors—and efforts to evade disclosure under Freedom of Information Laws in the United Kingdom and the United States.” James Delingpole’s blog found “Conspiracy, collusion … manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.”

The incriminating e-mails were followed in December by charges from Russia’s Institute of Economic Analysis that Britain’s Meteorological Office deliberately skewed Russia’s temperature data.

With the underlying climate-change “science” so thoroughly compromised, did policymakers pause to reconsider the need for colossally expensive CO2-curbing policies? No. Instead they are locked into automatic-pilot mode.

In the United States, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) dismissed Climategate’s revelations as irrelevant and continued to push her expensive cap-and-trade proposal (potential cost: trillions of dollars; potential climate impact according to its own proponents: a few hundredths of a degree). Internationally, last month’s U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen ignored it. The delegates didn’t skip a beat in pursuing a multi-trillion-dollar transfer of wealth from developed to undeveloped countries.

Could it be that climate-change politics is more about wealth and power than science? That would explain why those paragons of environmental stewardship—Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe—received standing ovations in Copenhagen when they denounced capitalism and called for a massive global redistribution of wealth.

Actually, the green movement has been anti-capitalist and pro-socialist for many years. Over 15 years ago, for example, environmentalist activist Dr. Helen Caldicott declared at a gathering of fellow greens that “capitalism is destroying the earth,” whereas “what Castro’s done is superb.” The green group Ecotage fumed, “We must make this [earth] an insecure and uninhabitable place for capitalists and their projects.” The Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides proposed “eradicating capitalism from the face of the earth.”

Such sentiments explain why environmentalists are known as “watermelons”—green on the outside, but bright pink (socialistic) underneath. Thus, long-time environmentalist guru, Lester Brown, has called for “restructuring the global economy, major shifts in human reproductive behavior and dramatic changes in values and lifestyles.” Alarmist superstar Paul Ehrlich has asserted, “Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure,” which explains why he also has called for a central plan to “dedevelop the United States.” And two years ago, a Friends of the Earth spokesperson announced, “A climate-change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.”

What agency can accomplish such radical changes except a global political body? Former French president Jacques Chirac stated in a Nov. 2000 speech that an international CO2 emissions control agreement “represents the first component of an authentic global governance.”

Notice the absence of any reference to science in environmentalists’ unambiguous pronouncements. In fact, many of those leading the push for CO2 emissions controls disdain science. Examples:

1) Former U.S. Senator and Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs in the Clinton-Gore administration, Timothy Wirth, stated in 1990, “We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we will be doing the right thing.”

2) In the mid-1990s, a State Department official wrote a letter that included the statement, “A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no evidence to back the greenhouse effect.”

3) Stephen Schneider, a scientist and activist who has advocated greater concentrations of government power since the 1970s (back then, because of the purported threat of global cooling, more recently because of alleged global warming) has admitted, “I don’t set very much store by looking at the direct evidence.”

Clearly, climate-change science is a pretext for a political agenda. Al Gore, writing in “Earth in the Balance” nearly two decades ago, candidly wrote, “we must dramatically change our civilization,” and explicitly appealed for “a wrenching transformation of society.”

Okay, that was then; what about now? In 2008, President Obama promised during his presidential campaign “nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy.”

Herein you have the green agenda expressed in its own words. How will that agenda fare in 2010?

Perhaps Climategate will awaken more people to the fraudulence of climate-change alarmism and begin to explode the myth that humans can regulate earth’s temperature.

Maybe the antics in Copenhagen will convince people that these characters have no respect for scientific integrity, but would exploit science in the pursuit of power and money.

At the very least, let us hope that a majority of voters clearly understand that there is no reason to bludgeon our economy with pointless cap-and-trade schemes.
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Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove CityCollege