Our National Climatic Data Center has been manipulating weather data by dropping the number of weather stations used to calculate global surface temperatures from 6000 to 1500 (keeping the warmer-region ones). The British Climate Research Unit is currently being investigated by the British Parliament for destroying e-mails and manipulating data to hide a decline in global temperatures.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change has already admitted it fabricated data. Its chief, Rajendra Pachauri, apparently is more interested in writing novels about the spiritual and sexual past of a retired bureaucrat than scientific truth.

India is forming its own agency to study global warming because it can't rely on the IPCC (which won a share of the 2007 Nobel Prize along with Al Gore). Al, incidentally, advises the president on global-warming issues while owning investments that benefit economically from spending government money on ameliorating this so-called problem. His private jet also contributes quite a bit to Al's "carbon footprint."

Politics obviously trumps science when it comes to "climate consensus." The federal budget for 2011 calls for spending $2.6 billion on global climate change, more "hot air" for your tax dollars. Of the $2 billion the US has spent on wind power, 80 percent went to foreign companies which manufacture wind turbines, especially Chinese manufacturers.

ALAN GLASER, ROCHESTER