Republicans say no national consensus on climate change

Amid accusations that scientists had exaggerated the climate change crisis, top Republican lawmakers today asked US president Barack Obama to refrain from engaging in any treaty negotiations at the Copenhagen meet, arguing that there is no national consensus on it.

"In the worst recession in 26 years, in the midst of an academic scandal and questionable science revealed in 'climate gate' and in absence of a national consensus about policies that would bear upon the category known as climate change, we gather here to say, Mr president, don't make promises in Copenhagen that we can't keep," Republican Congressman Mike Pence told a news conference along with six of his colleagues.

The Republicans' call came against the backdrop of the climate gate scandal, wherein hackers gained access to documents of the climate research centre of the UK-based East Anglia University and leaked confidential data, including thousands of e-mails and documents between scientists in UK and US over the past 10 years which led to accusations that researchers had exaggerated the crisis.

Pence said those gathered here believe that the president should refrain from engaging in treaty negotiations at the Copenhagen climate change meet or making commitments at the summit in the interests of the American people against the backdrop of this widening scandal known as climate gate and in the absence of a national consensus.

Obama is scheduled to attend the summit on December 18.  "America lost a lot of credibility when then vice president Al Gore promised the international community in Kyoto something that he knew that could never be passed by the Congress of the United States.

"I would hope that president Obama will not repeat Al Gore's mistake when he goes to Copenhagen at the end of next week," said Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner; Ranking Member of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Noting that the climate gate scandal is expanding, Sensenbrenner said the UN should take it upon itself to step backwards and not make any concrete recommendations until they get to the bottom of the scandal and why the professors whose e-mails ended up being put up on the Internet said what they said.

"This could be a conspiracy basically to shut out any contrary scientific opinion," he said. Calling it scientific fascism, he said: "We should not be making decisions that will cost the American rate payer billions or even trillions of dollars in higher electric and natural gas bills based upon scientific fascism."

The UN should throw the red flag, it should call a timeout. "If it takes a year or two to get to the bottom of the climate gate scandal, so be it," Sensenbrenner said. 

Charging that the UN relied on these scientists unjustifiably, Sensenbrenner said: "It's now time for us to get real scientific information, scientific information that has been fairly and vigorously peer reviewed, rather than having United Nations and its scientific agencies end up being a huge propaganda organ for a preconceived notion."

Congressman Joe Barton said: "If Copenhagen was the culmination of the environmental 'nirvana' and we were signing this treaty that was binding on the United States and our President ... we would be putting our economy in a straightjacket that would cost millions of jobs per year, every year for the next 20 to 30 years."

Barton claimed that the whole theory of manmade global warming is not a fact. "The climatologists that believe it should be a fact have spent the last 20 years trying to prove that, in fact, it is a fact and they can't do it," he said.

Sensenbrenner said the US senate will not ratify any treaty that is not international in application. "That means that China and India and Brazil and the other Third World countries are going to have to sign up mandatory greenhouse gas cuts, may be not at the same rate as the US and Europe and Japan, but up until now, the position of those countries has been that there should be a get out of jail free card and they may slow down their growth rate, but they're not asking the same thing of us and that's unfair and it makes the treaty unratifiable," he said.