A computer hacker in England has done the world a service by making available a huge quantity of evidence for the way in which "human-induced global warming" claims have been advanced over the years.By releasing into the Internet about a thousand internal e-mails from the servers of the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia -- in some respects the international clearing house for climate change "science" -- he has (or they have) put observers in a position to see that claims of conspiracy and fraud were not unreasonable.
More generally, we have been given the materials with which to obtain an insight into how all modern science works when vast amounts of public funding is at stake and when the vested interests associated with various "progressive" causes require a particular scientific result.
That's nice, and possibly true, but the momentum to "Do Something" about Climate Change remains irresistable. Not to be corrosively cynical, but there are too many reputations, too much politics, and too much money riding on bogus climate treaties, carbon credits, green tech, etc. Personally, I've been telling people that I don't believe in global warming/climate change for years, often to the hail of brickbats. Do you think they're going to change now? What about Barbara Boxer? Al Gore? Obama? He did promise that his election would represent the moment when the seas would heal, after all.
The more important question is this: how can we restrain the people whom we are entrusting to, essentially, think for us in matters of science? Ultimately, the global warming fraud was able to get this far (and will continue to persist) because all those smarter-than-thou PhD's wielded their graphs, statistics, and climate models in a manner designed to fool the rubes. A lot of educated people watched An Inconvenient Truth or saw the frousy testimony of the James Hansons of the world and came away convinced that we were doomed. At least in the western world, the argument is already over. If you can name a major national politician in Europe, North America and beyond who hasn't at least paid lip service to climate change, I would like to know his name. (I said "major," so James Inhofe and Vaclav Klaus are out even if we would be much better off if these men were household names).
No, we have a major problem on our hands in that we are too easily led astray by those claiming to be our intellectual and political betters. As these people will continue to control our educational, political, and media establishments for the foreseeable future, it's hard to see how we can avoid more scams in the name of a fashionable apocalypse.
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