Everyone knows that the richer a society is, the better off its people are. Compare the U.S. and Europe with Africa, China and India. No wonder those people want more electricity; they need it.

However, the Copenhagen discussions about "climate change" seem aimed at keeping poor nations in check while making richer nations a lot poorer and global bureaucracies much more powerful by controlling energy usage everywhere.

The aim of the Copenhagen conference was said to be "stopping climate change." Its actual intent is to put energy consumption under centralized control worldwide. A big, uncontrolled bureaucracy will tell you how much and what kind of energy you can use.

In poor nations, this would be a catastrophe, preventing people from improving their lives or even getting electricity and water. For richer nations, it would be the end of freedom. And this whole charade is supposedly based on "stopping global climate change." But, like Al Gore’s fraudulent film about global warming, most of this charade is deception and deceit.

The deceptions began in high places. Nearly 20 years ago, a university climatologist pushing the CO± catastrophe story said, "Each of us (climatologists) has to decide what the right balance is between being effective (politically) and being honest (scientifically)."

The recent "Climategate" e-mails show that some scientists chose deceit. One of them fiddled with some data to make it support the "global warming" fraud. He aimed to make the medieval period look cooler than today. Of course, it actually was warmer then than it is today.

Remember Vikings in Greenland? However, he used his phony data to produce the infamous "hockey stick" graph of temperatures. This graph purports to show that temperatures over the past thousand years were fairly steady or declining until the late 20th century. You can see the graph being used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change several years ago.

A real climatologist posted this phony graph for all to see on his blog on Dec. 10 at feeds.feedburner.com/RogerPielkeJrsBlog. There is the "hockey stick" in the background, a display of deceit. This "hockey stick" thing has been thoroughly discredited, because the data are phony.

This fraudulent part of climatology is now in the open. I applaud this exposure of fraud. I hold a degree in atmospheric physics (U.WA-Seattle, 1964), and in my opinion, this dishonest science is not worth any money at all.

So do not believe it when you hear claims that man-made carbon dioxide causes global problems. You will hear this from Gore, President Barack Obama, George Soros and so forth. Their advisers are in on the scam, or get money from it. The "climate change" threat is not man-made because human beings cannot do anything about the sun, ocean currents or earth’s orbital mechanics.

But the political threat of draconian controls on our relatively free economy is real. The foundation for "cap-and-trade" carbon dioxide controls is not science but a deceitful political stratagem that will impoverish us all.

Contact your representatives and senators. Climategate is too scandalous to be treated like a college prank. These power-hungry leftists must be stopped now. Then, vote them out, forever.

W.T. "Ted" Hinds
Gainesville