by Clifford F. Thies

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has called for a Senate investigation into "climategate." While the Democrats, who run the Senate, will probably not act on the request, the global-warming industry must be nervous since polls point to a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and possibly also the Senate. Then, the issues of academic fraud, misrepresentation, and the over-statement of scientific evidence will be discussed in a forum open to the entire world.

From Pajama's Media, "Senator Inhofe to ask for DOJ investigation" Feb. 23:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.

“In [Gore's] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress.

It should not be a surprise that scientific disciplines include people with values ranging from the mainstream to any number of weird extremes. We might suppose that science is "value-free," but, this is a statement of the results of free inquiry, not a statement of individual scientists. The process of free inquiry should allow "the data to speak;" but, the domination of the academic world by the left and the arrogant assertion that certain matters are settled, threatens free inquiry.

We might also suppose that scientific findings are replicable, but, at the edges of scientific inquiry, controlled experiments may be impossible or nearly so. This is particularly true of disciplines that investigate global phenomenon, such as macroeconomics and the emerging field of climatology. When multitudes of variables are constantly changing, each potentially a cause and an effect of the other, distinguishing cause from mere correlation is a challenge.

As against free inquiry, we have the polemics of global warming. The evidence of human-induced global warming, the so-called Hockey Stick, we now know is bogus. The Hockey Stick has been massively contradicted by subsequent research. We know that there is a lot of natural variation.

What we don't know is to what extent man is contributing to variation in global temperature. I'm kind of persuaded by the climatologists who say that industrial emissions account for about one-fourth of the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, and this build-up of CO2 in the atmospheres accounts for about 3 percent of the increase of global temperature since 1970 of about 1 degree Celsius. But, I'm an economist, so what do I know?

When the Hockey Stick was found to be contradicted by subsequent research, the National Academy of Science reviewed the matter. It said that the Hockey Stick was not inconsistent with the data available at the time it was constructed. Such a thing is not uncommon in the advance of science. Somebody puts a finding out there; and, others follow-up, confirming it or challenging it. Either way, science advances.

But, we now know that the developer of the Hockey Stick filtered and truncated his own data. He discarded measurements that did not fit his preconceived views. Because of these new revelations, this fellow's colleagues at The Pennsylvania State University conducted an investigation. Here is their finding: "He did not add any false data to his sample."

They call that an exoneration?

Scientific inquiry, according to the academic community, allows excluding data inconsistent with your preconceived views. This standard is certainly a matter for the taxpayers who finance academic-based research to consider.

Editor's Note - Dr. Thies is a professor of econo-metrics and statistics at Shenandoah Univ. in Virginia.