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The global climate
warming fuss is not principally an environmental issue but, rather, it is a manufactured
crisis supported by copious amounts of manipulated science, reinforced by
opinion leaders and promulgated by the cheerleading of the mass media. Global warming has become the mother
of all politically correct issues.
Various components of the warming cause, which
are only tangentially related to the environment, have been outlined at some
length in Part 1 (Global Warming: The Man-Made Crisis), Part 2 (U.S. and
Canada Are Global Warming Scapegoats) and Part 3 (Why Should WE Make
Sacrifices to Offset Global Warming?) of this series. However, it is important to comment on
what has been regularly presented as scientific justification for sounding
alarm bells over climate change, if for no other reason than to set the
record straight.
Global Warming is Not a
Proven Fact
Simply put, climate change – originally
an emerging new ice age, then global warming and now climate change –
is not a proven fact. To
sarcastically mimic the affected gravitas of certain warming experts, we
might call it an “anthropocentrically manufactured” issue. As mentioned in Part 2, in the late
1960’s the United Nations assigned Canadian Maurice Strong, a man
possessed of a strong belief in the merits of global governance and the need
to establish transnational governmental institutions, to head up what
subsequently came to be known as the global climate change initiative.
Mr. Strong, aptly named in spite of possessing
the forgettable demeanour of a faceless bureaucrat,
has had a successful career as an entrepreneur, businessman and government
executive building impressive business and political connections throughout
the world. His skills and contacts have made him personally wealthy. He has been able to knit together an
extremely effective network of the world’s decision makers in both
government and business. While
ideologically anchored, he is a master pragmatist in the pursuit of his
objectives.
Because of his attributes he was the perfect
person to place in charge of an issue designed to further advance his goals and
those of other believers in global governance. He moves with ease between and within
the world’s governments and business sectors. He isn’t threatening...merely
effective. In fact, he is so
effective that few people even know his name. People in the know such as Kofi Annan,
former Secretary General of the United Nations, published an open letter
carried on Mr. Strong’s personal website lauding the man’s
Homeric attributes. Not least is
that he says Mr. Strong is among the world’s leading environmentalists. Google goes even further to designate
him “the world’s leading environmentalist.”
Among Mr. Strong’s first tasks was to
obtain and distribute funding to the scientific community for climate change
research. Credibility provided by
science experts, coupled with their academic credentials and computer models,
was critical to the success of presenting and portraying global warming as a
factual crisis. He made himself
its champion. In other words, global warming was presented as a certitude
casting about for the scientific imprint to endorse it as fact.
Needless to say, scientific process is
corrupted if it isn’t free to explore where the data takes it. Moreover, the data and processes must
be freely available and fully open to challenge if its results and
conclusions are to be validated.
Because scientific research into global warming became a veritable
gusher of ever more and larger government and UN funding, the process became
corrupted at record speed.
Individual scientists exhibiting normal human
frailties frequently tilted their findings to what was expected. Many
succumbed to the lure of ever more research funding and professional
status. Those at the climate
research apex became celebrities whose status and research findings were
cited as unassailable proof for the urgent claims of global warming
doomsayers. Scientists who wouldn’t pitch to the predetermined
conclusions of the warming playbook were elbowed to the fringe only to
witness their research funding evaporate as quickly rain water in a desert.
Climate change as an issue was well managed
and effectively lubricated with ample funding. Its central operatives were
able to turn it into a crisis of truly global scope and proportions
publicized by opinion elites everywhere.
Anyone exhibiting the temerity to challenge its received wisdom was
cut from the climate warming corral.
No debate of consequence was welcomed or countenanced regarding the
scientific merits of global warming. Everyone was repeatedly assured that the
“science proves” that global warming is indeed a fact.
If or when pushed, questioners were informed
that “peer review” by scientists had confirmed the conclusions
and settled the issue. There was no debate because there was no need for
one. Case closed.
Carbon emissions targets had to be set and
assigned, and trading in carbon credits needed to begin immediately if the
globe’s population was to avert pending climate calamity. The recent Copenhagen, Denmark UN climate
conference held in December 2009 was intended to have national governments
sign off on their assigned CO2 emissions targets as presented and endorsed in
the Kyoto, Japan Protocol of 1997.
Full implementation would begin virtually immediately.
Global Warming Science
Deception Revealed
Unfortunately, from the perspective of climate
change believers and advocates, the equivalent of an atomic bomb blew up in
their faces in late November 2009 just prior to the Copenhagen confab. It seems a disgruntled insider at the
Climate Change Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England hacked
their computer and released some 3,000 documents involving data, research
findings and email communications among climate research insiders. What makes this treasure trove so
damning is that these particular researchers are among the inner guard of the
climate change cause. They are some of the leading figures comprising the
UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Email communications among these climate
expert insiders discusses how to prevent sceptics
from publishing their contrary findings in peer reviewed journals. They plotted to destroy and suppress
the raw data supporting their findings and conclusions and discussed methods
to manipulate inconvenient data to be more supportive of their perspective. These scientists also attempted to
hide or delete temperature data when that data didn’t show rapid
warming.
IPCC scientists had become super sensitive
following conclusions reached independently in 2003 by two Canadian
researchers, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.
Their analyses debunked the infamous “hockey stick” graph,
popularized by the research and computer models of Penn State climate
scientist Michael Mann, which purported to prove that the mean temperatures
in the northern hemisphere over the past millennium remained flat until 1900,
after which temperatures showed a sharp and continuing rise.
After that scientific and public relations
debacle, climate research insiders became increasingly paranoid causing them
to quietly suppress and replace numbers and undertake whatever measures
necessary to prevent the publication of studies which arrived at conclusions
different from those deemed to support the warming consensus.
More troubling yet are quotes like these from
the East Anglia University papers.
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming
at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t....” “We will keep them out somehow
even if we have to redefine what peer review literature is....” “If they ever hear there is a Freedom
of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather
than send it to anyone.”
Global Warming’s Climategate is a Slippery Slope
Fallout from the East Anglia University papers
continues, with the moniker “Climategate”
now usually attached. It has been
adopted as the handy abbreviation for this most unfortunate chapter in the
corrupt use of the scientific process. Climategate
may ultimately prove to be a watershed in the battle for public opinion
simply because, until now climate warming advocates had the distinct
advantage of claiming most scientific opinion was on their side. That badge of pride seems now to be
eroding faster than air escaping from a tire punctured by a sharp spike.
Rapidly rising ocean levels caused by shrivelling polar ice caps had science on its side, until
recently. As this piece was being
written, the crumbling cascade of scientific certainty has been dealt another
lethal blow. Two years ago the
UN’s IPCC claimed with great fanfare that climate change would melt
most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035.
That high profile prediction by the climate science establishment was
taken as fact emanating as it did from the citadel of so many august
climatologists.
What happened to this prediction? Graham Cogley,
a Canadian geographer, initiated a process which ultimately revealed that
this dramatic prediction was nothing more than a decade old speculative
opinion by little known Indian scientist, Syed Hasnain, eight years earlier while responding to a query
by the New Scientist magazine.
There was no research of any kind behind the opinion.
So why and how is so much conventional
scientific wisdom being so thoroughly discredited? Clearly, the scientific
process is being shown to have been corrupted, hence the faulty methodology
and conclusions but why errors on such a grand scale?
Lord Acton once said:
“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Could it be that access to seemingly
unlimited quantities of research money, shielded by the consensus of a cause,
might also have the same effect as monopoly power? Perhaps Lord Acton's words
should be updated to read that “power and money corrupts, and a
manufactured crisis of global proportions is guaranteed to be corrupt.”
Arnold Bock
Arnold Bock is a Canadian living abroad retired from a career in
government. He has a substantial
background in partisan politics and public policy development as well as in
project and program management within the public sector.
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