Obama mocks GOP global warming skeptics and says they 'pretend' they 'can't read' – but ignores new claims that the US has been COOLING since the 1930s



The president spoke to a partisan audience of environmental activists on Wednesday night in Washington

He claimed GOP lawmakers believe global warming is real but won't admit it because they're afraid of 'a bunch fringe elements' in their own party

'They ducked the question and said "Hey, I'm not a scientist",' Obama joked

Obama ignored new evidence that American scientists have been altering climate data for years

The US Historical Climatology Network has been adjusting its records by replacing temperatures with data fabricated by computer models



Barack Obama took aim Wednesday night at Republicans who have blocked global warming legislation, saying they 'pretend' they 'don't read' science. But the president ignored the latest claims that threaten to destroy the U.S. climate change movement.



In a speech to the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental activist organization, Obama mocked the GOP for playing dumb on global warming in order to evade the criticism of tea party groups and other elements on their right wing.

Republicans have 'ducked the question and said, "Hey, I'm not a scientist",' Obama claimed, 'which really translates into "I accept that man-made climate change is real, but if I say so I will be run out of town by a bunch of fringe elements, s o I am just going to pretend like – I don't know – I can't read".'

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President Obama told the League of Conservation Voters that Republican global warming deniers pretended they can't read in order to curry political favor on their right wing

Number-crunching: Allowing computers to fill in the gaps and replace actual temperature measurements has allegedly created a 'warming' that was never there in the first place



Obama last jabbed at climate skeptics during a speech at the University of California Irvine, saying their arguments are akin to believing the moon is made of cheese.

As he tries to rally public support around new White House rules aimed at coal-burning power plants, however, the president hasn't yet addressed a brewing scandal in the scientific community.

Global warming specialists inside the scientific community are buzzing about revelations first made Friday, which show how the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's official graph of historical surface temperatures has been quietly altered for years.

Government scientists, it is alleged, have been tweaking some of the world’s most oft-cited climate records by replacing actual temperature readings in the United States, Iceland and Australia with hypothetical numbers derived from computer models.

The result has been a distorted view of temperature trends, according to a blogger who first assembled the evidence, changing a steady temperature decline into an ominous-looking warming.



The damning graphs published on the 'Real Science' blog by Steven Goddard, the nom de plume of a self-described 'lifelong environmentalist' with graduate-level scientific credentials.

They show the impact of replacing the real measurements with computer-generated estimates, in an alleged scheme to de-emphasize temperature readings from earlier decades while giving added weight to more recent numbers.

Obama spoke before an audience of more than 800 enthusiastic environmentalists in Washington during a gala hosted by the League of Conservative Voters

Not dying off: An American climate scientist was forced into retirement after being accused of falsifying data to show polar bears were drowning because polar ice caps had melted

They are also tripped up by the changing list of temperature measurement stations, Goddard writes, as more estimates are used instead of real readings: 'As rural stations are lost, the infilling process contaminates them with warmer urban stations.'



This, he says, is how the U.S. government has claimed the earth has been steadily warming by 3 degrees Celsius per century, while the actual measurements indicate that the planet has been cooling since the 1930s.

Obama, however, steered clear of science on Wednesday and accused Republicans of ignoring global-warming evidence for political advantage.

'In Congress,' he said, 'folks will tell you climate change is a hoax, a fad, or a plot – a liberal plot.'

'If a bunch of doctors tell me that tobacco can cause lung cancer, then I’ll say, "OK." It’s not that hard,' he said to loud applause.

'Climate change' down under: This graph shows how replacing temperature data taken in Alice Springs, Australia with computer-modeled approximations has created the impression of warming



Even in Iceland: Discarding real temperature measurements from 50 or more years ago and replacing them with numbers from computer models has allegedly helped U.S. government scientists demonstrate nonexistent climate change



He said the future efforts to solidify a consensus about climate change will depend on the next generation, including his own daughters.

' You talk to Malia, you talk to Sasha, you talk to your kids or your grandkids – this is something they get,' said the president. 'They don’t need a lot of persuading.'

Other controversial hiccups have cast the climate wars into disarray in recent years.

In a 1999 email revealed following the 2009 hacking of an email server at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, the institute's director Phil Jones wrote that he had altered the famed 'hockey stick' graph in order to 'hide the [temperature] decline' shown in scientific data.

And in December 2013, an Alaska scientist whose reported observations of polar bears that had drowned in the polar Arctic helped motivate the global warming movement was forced into retirement.