Brit Hume: ClimateGate Suggests Global Warming May Be A Fraud

Fox News's Brit Hume Monday said the growing ClimateGate scandal suggests manmade global warming may be a fraud.

As NewsBusters has been reporting since e-mail messages from the British Climatic Research Unit were first revealed ten days ago, the only television news network that has been regularly informing viewers about this matter has been the Fox News Channel.

On Monday, Fox's "Special Report" continued this trend, and brought Hume on to offer his thoughts (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

BRET BAIER, HOST: Well, let's get some thoughts now from senior political analyst Brit Hume on the scandal some are calling ClimateGate.

Good evening, Brit.

BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Hi, Bret. As you heard Wendell Goler's report, a large collection of e-mails exchanged among weather researchers at the University of East Anglia in England have gotten out and caused a scandal. The reason that university's Climate Research Unit matters is that it has been heavily relied upon by the U.N. in reaching its alarmist conclusions about the threat of global warming. The reason it's a scandal is that the e-mails vividly portray leading scientists there scheming to suppress or discredit data and analysis contrary to their dire predictions.

The whole idea that the earth is warming dangerously and that man, by burning carbon fuels is the cause, rests on computerized projections of future temperatures based on vast amounts of previously observed climate data. But there's a huge problem.

There has been no apparent increase in global temperatures over the past 11 years, and the computerized climate models failed to predict this and the global warming alarmists can't explain it. The obvious conclusion would be that there's something wrong with the computer models.

Now it has come out that the original raw data used to create these models has been destroyed or otherwise disposed of. The response of the alarmists to these revelations has been that the e-mails were taken out of context and that the destruction of all that raw data was done for space reasons. There's a one-word answer to all of that -- Please. Bret.

BAIER: Brit, do you think that these revelations have the potential to slow or even stop the push for action on climate change?

HUME: Well, the momentum for that was already declining, because global warming, climate change has been dropping lower and lower in people's list of priorities for a long time now, and doubts about whether man is causing it and about the whole theory of it have been rising. So this can only further that and only add to the sense that this is not a politically urgent matter, and that perhaps it may all even be a fraud.

BAIER: All right, Brit. Thanks.

HUME: You bet.

In the end, if we had an honest news media rather than the advocates so prevalent on television and in print, such sentiments concerning this scandal would be quite commonplace.

Of course, the same would be true if climate change was a conservative agenda, and the Republicans controlled the White House and Congress.

Alas, no matter how you slice it, integrity in journalism is just as lacking as it is within the community of scientists advancing the global warming myth.

How sad for all of us.