Corruption is as corruption does, as the news comes out that a “comprehensive tax scam” centred in Denmark revolving around the sale of carbon credits.  Looks like Algore isn’t the only one with his nose at the trough,

First, there were those infamous hacked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Now, a mere seven days before the Copenhagen Conference on climate change, this breaking news story takes the breath away. The whole ‘global warming’ shambles is falling apart. Today, The Copenhagen Post declares: “Denmark Rife With CO2 Fraud”:

“Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.”

And the fraud may be of massive proportions:

“Ekstra Bladet reporters have found examples of people using false addresses and companies that are in liquidation, which haven’t been removed from the register.

One of the cases, which stems from the Danish register, involves fraud of more than 8 billion kroner. This case, in which nine people have been arrested, is being investigated in England.”

Not related to Climategate, necessarily, except for the common denominator of abject corruption that is increasingly coming to characterise all of this “global warming” nonsense.  Speaking of nonsense, the Australians, at least, are too smart to fall for it.  [Australian] Senate kills off emissions trade laws,

Opposition and crossbench senators have handed the Government a trigger for an early election on climate change by voting down its emissions trading scheme for the second time.

Liberal Senators Sue Boyce and Judith Troeth defied new Liberal leader Tony Abbott and crossed the floor to vote with the Government this morning.

But it was not enough to push the scheme through, with the Greens, Independent Senator Nick Xenophon, and Family First Senator Steve Fielding joining the Opposition in voting down the scheme.

Hopes of getting the legislation through were dashed yesterday when Mr Abbott reversed the Coalition’s position as his first act after ousting Malcolm Turnbull.

BTW, in Australia, the Liberals are conservative, and they just tossed their former leader – Malcolm Turnbull – out on his ear for being such a fanatical AGW pansy.  As usual, the global warming supporters have their panties in a bundle, promising to fight another day while castigating people who rightly refuse to buy into the AGW mythology as “anti-science.”

I find it sadly amusing.  You’re “anti-science” if you actually expect science to follow its own rules and give reproducable results while refraining from dropping inconvenient data into the dumpster.  Yet, you are “pro-science” if you are fully supportive of the efforts by some scientists to completely destroy the reputation that science has in the mind of the common man by cooking data, manufacturing fake results, and then trying to use them to scaremonger people into going along with the implementation of massive governmental regulatory schemes that will cost the average person thousands of dollars a year.

Right.

Here’s an interesting, if not entirely accurate, look at how Climategate exposes global warming supporters as practitioners of faith-based science.  It would be more accurate if he pointed out that Galileo’s accusers, and the ones who actually instigated his persecution for believing in heliocentrism, were Galileo’s own fellow scientists.  Scientists were the ones who hounded Galileo for rejecting the Ptolemaic model, the Catholic church only got interested when the matter was framed in terms of a challenge to its own authority.  Ironically, the pope at the time actually thought Galileo’s writings were pretty snazzy.   Anywise, today, “scientists” are the ones desperately doing anything they can to save their obviously flawed AGW model from facts and truth.

Reason magazine laments the damage that Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and the rest have done to the name of science, 

Consider researcher Tom Wigley’s email describing his adjustments to mid-20th century global temperature data in order to lower an inconvenient warming “blip.” According to the global warming hypothesis, late 20th century man-made warming was supposed to be faster than earlier natural warming. But the data show rapid “natural” warming in the 1930s. Adjusting the 1940 temperature blip downward makes a better-looking trend line in support of the notion of rapidly accelerating man-made warming. Collecting and evaluating temperature data requires the exercise of scientific judgment, but Wigley’s emails suggest a convenient correction of 0.15 degree Celsius that fits the man-made global warming hypothesis. The adjustment may be reasonable—changes in instrumentation might need to be accounted for—but all raw data and the methodologies used to adjust them should be publicly available so others can check them to make sure. 

In another set of troubling emails, the CRU crew and associates discussed how to freeze out researchers and editors who expressed doubts about the man-made climate change. For example, an email from CRU’s leader Phil Jones saying that he and Kevin Trenberth would keep two dissenting scientific articles out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” In addition, the CRU crew evidently plotted to remove journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppress the publication of articles that they disliked. If they actually succeeded, this compounds the tragedy. Eliminating dissenting voices distorts the peer review process and the resulting scientific literature. The world’s policymakers rarely enjoy access to complete information, but the Climategate emails suggest they have been robbed of the chance to get the best information available.

Dude.  In science, there are just certain things you don’t do, and Phil Jones and the rest managed to do most of them.  Which explains why yet another grand high muckety muck in the world of climatology is calling for Phil Jones, among others, to be excluded from the IPCC (link at top).  The guy’s still a True Believer, but at least he recognises the pressure that the AGW cult puts on scientists to toe the line or else face the iron maiden.

That’s it for now, more to come as it comes.