Renowned meteorologist Dr. William Gray tells Newsmax that a possible new conspiracy regarding global warming has been uncovered in the U.S.He also said environmentalists, socialists, governments and businessmen are trying to take advantage of climate change concerns for their own benefit, and declared that cap-and-trade legislation would do “very little” to improve the climate.Dr. Gray is a pioneer in the science of forecasting hurricanes and a critic of the theory of human-induced global warming. He is a professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Colorado State University and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at the university’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences.Gray told Newsmax.TV’s Kathleen Walter about a new report out of San Diego calling into question the accuracy of “the data that they’re basing global warming on — that this is the second or third warmest month or year of the last 100 years and that sort of thing. [Investigators have] been digging more and more into the data bases and they’ve been finding that there are inconsistencies there.”Manmade global warming proponents in the government “are handling the data in ways to obtain data that shows the globe is warming more than it really is.“They drop certain data out of their averaging, and the data they’ve dropped out tends to make the globe cooler. You’ll probably be reading a lot about this in the next few weeks or so.”Gray called the new findings “Climategate U.S.A.”Climategate refers the scandal that began when hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. The e-mails suggested that data that didn’t support the global warming theory was being altered or ignored.With many people suffering through a very harsh winter, reports have surfaced that a mini-ice age is on the way, Walter noted. She asked Gray: “What should we believe?”He responded: “I think we should believe that the climate is not changing much. There’s not an ice age coming for perhaps many thousands of years.”The climate moves in decades-long cycles “that I think are driven a lot by global ocean deep circulation currents, and we’ve been in kind of a warming trend from the middle 1970s to the turn of the century,” he continued.“From about 1999 on there hasn’t been much of a warming trend. Some reports have shown that the earth is beginning to cool. But in my view this is natural . . .“In the last two or three years we have been seeing around the globe slightly colder winters and I think that’s an indication that human-induced global warming that’s so talked about is really not progressing.”Gray, who has previously called claims of manmade global warming “the greatest scientific hoax of all time,” added: “Humans are probably doing something [to affect climate] and the CO2 may be warming [the globe] a bit but it’s not doing near what the alarmists have been telling us — that the Greenland ice cap is going to melt, the sea ice near the North Pole will not be there in another 20, 30 years. All these wild claims, there’s no basis for. The ice cap is not going to melt in the next 20, 30 years.”Walter asked why global warming alarmist Al Gore and his allies refuse to consider any contrary evidence and insist that human-induced global warming is a fact.“They want to use this to push other hidden agendas they have,” Gray said.“The environmentalists want to push environmental things and people will become more sensitive to the environment if they think the globe is really warming. There are socialists who want to push a leveling of living standards around the globe. There are governments that want to control peoples’ lives more. There are businessmen who want to get into the new renewable energy. They want to make money on this.“There’s a whole set of people out there who don’t know much about how the atmosphere ticks but see how they can profit from this global warming hypothesis, and they want to convince the world that this is true.”He also noted that “those who are advancing global warming get better grants and get well funded by our federal government compared to us who are skeptical.”Gray declared that there is absolutely no connection between global warming and more frequent and powerful hurricanes, as some alarmists claim.He also said cap-and-trade legislation restricting C02 emissions, which is supported by President Obama and many Democrats, would do “very little of significance to improve our climate, and we will pay an enormous economic price for it.”Cap-and-trade will drive up the price of energy, he added, and “the standard of living in the Western world will go down. No one is going to agree to that in the belief that the climate will get slightly better.”