Climate alarm runs cold and hot.

As previously discussed in my March 20 column, following three decades of cooling from the mid-1940s to late '70s that prominent scientists and media sources warned was a terrifying harbinger of the next Ice Age, a mere decade of warming temperatures later became trumpeted by some of those same experts as a reverse threat, one dramatized by then-Sen. Al Gore during his theatrically staged 1988 U.S. Senate hearings on the matter.

For example, a 1978 New York Times headline had urgently warned that an "International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling in Northern Hemisphere."

Star witness James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a small climate-modeling shop located in a Manhattan office building, testified, believing that human activities contributed to warming.

Attributing this new "global warming crisis" to unfair fossil-fueled prosperity of industrialized nations, the U.N. organized an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which branded human-related ("anthropogenic") fossil-fuel carbon emissions as the dastardly culprit from the get-go with the purpose of pushing a Kyoto Treaty carbon cap-and-trade scam.

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: "... one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world's wealth ..."

The late Stephen Schneider, who wrote "The Genesis Strategy," a 1976 book warning that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity, later changed that view 180 degrees when serving as a lead author for important parts of three sequential panel reports.

In a quotation published in Discover, Schneider said that since scientists are humans who want to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change, "we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination."

He clarified, "That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

The climate scare community got a big boost from an infamous hockey stick-shaped chart prepared by Penn State researcher Michael Mann that was featured in the IPCC's First Assessment Report.

The 1,000-year-long graph was cobbled together using various proxy data derived from ice cores, tree rings, and written records of growing-season dates, switching to surface ground station temperature data in 1961 when global temperatures are suddenly shown rising at a spectacular rate presumably due to man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

Why did data sources change in 1961?

It may be because that's when tree ring proxy data calculations by Keith Briffa, a scientist at the U.K.'s East Anglia University Climate Research Unit (CRU), began going the other way in a steady decline. After presenting these unwelcome results to Mann and others, he was put under pressure to recalculate them. Briffa did, and the decline became even greater.

Briffa's tree ring data suddenly disappears on Mann's chart in a spaghetti clutter of colored lines at the 1961 date.

According to a large file of email records— now collectively characterized as constituting evidence of a "Climategate" scandal — Briffa's contrary results presented what Mann referred to as a "conundrum."

Emails reveal that the late 20th century decline indicated by Briffa would be perceived by IPCC as "diluting the message," was a "problem," and posed a "potential distraction/detraction."

Mann went on to say that the warming skeptics would have a "field day" if Briffa's declining temperature reconstruction was shown, and that he would "hate to be the one" to give them "fodder."

An email exchange from CRU Director Phil Jones to other parties refers to "Mike's Nature [Journal] trick" to "hide a decline," which has been broadly presumed to refer to Mann's omission of Briffa's tree ring-derived data.

Raymond Bradley, co-author of Michael Mann's hockey stick paper took issue in an email with another article jointly published by Mann and Jones, stating: "I'm sure you agree — the Mann/Jones GRL [Geophysical Research Letters] paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don't want to be associated with that 2000-year reconstruction."

Jonathan Overpeck, a coordinating lead IPCC report author, suggested, "The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what's included and what is left out."

Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research warned in an email to Mann, "Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive ... there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC ..." 

Another scientist worries: "... clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer."

Still another observed: "It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability."

One researcher foresaw some very troubling consequences: "What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They'll kill us probably ..."

And although the hysterically hot hockey stick predictions have since chilled along with other hyperventilating mainstream media Climategate cover-ups, America has indeed paid a huge price: trillions of dollars wasted on green energy fantasies, hundreds of millions of impressionable children terrified, and rampant public distrust of scientific objectivity.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.