This has been coming for some time, but Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who has been the principal opponent of anthropogenic global warming advocacy in the U.S. Senate for quite some time, has now gone on the offensive in an attempt to debunk the AGW movement once and for all and knock the foundation out from climate legislation like the Cap And Trade bill Senate Democrats are considering taking up this spring. Inhofe released a report today from the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee, of which he is the ranking minority member, accusing key climate researchers involved in the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit of:

– Obstructing release of damaging data and information;
– Manipulating data to reach preconceived conclusions;
– Colluding to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science “consensus”; and
– Assuming activist roles to influence the political process.

Inhofe calls the Climategate affair “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” and is demanding that the Obama administration, through its Justice Department, begin an investigation into the American scientists implicated in the East Anglia e-mails and “the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).”

Inhofe wants to haul former Vice President and climate profiteer Al Gore in front of the committee as well, as he says each one of the assertions made in Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth have been proven false. Inhofe wants to grill Gore on the subject, as well as Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science – both of whom were implicated in the East Anglia e-mail disclosures.

The crux of Inhofe’s efforts is to change the administration’s policy on climate and energy…

“The report also shows the world’s leading climate scientists acting like political scientists, with an agenda disconnected from the principles of good science. And it shows that there is no consensus-except that there are significant gaps in what scientists know about the climate system. It’s time for the Obama Administration to recognize this. Its endangerment finding for greenhouse gases rests on bad science. It should throw out that finding and abandon greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act-a policy that will mean fewer jobs, higher taxes and economic decline.”