Climategate and The Church of Gore

I've been too long, not writing... I know! But I've been busy with my music and acting careers. However, I have been keeping up with current events.

The most interesting, in my mind, has been the eruption of Climategate. It seems that either a hacker or an insider whistleblower released thousands of emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The various documents (you can read them here) show the most important proponents of Manmade Global Warming (also known as the Dogma of the Church of Gore) to be obsessed with showing manmade warming regardless of the data, denying skeptics of The Dogma peer review or inclusion in the IPCC reports, trying to prevent their data from being disseminated through the Freedom of Information Act, and other unseemly and unscientific behavior.

Now, I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories, as these newly liberated documents seem to demonstrate. It is precisely because there was a leak that leads me to discount most, if not all, conspiracy theories. After all, someone will eventually screw the whole thing up and blow the secrecy of the conspiracy apart.

That said, I'd like to offer a second hypothesis to explain why so many scientists, politicians and bureaucrats seem to be true devotes of The Church of Gore. I wrote the following in Scientific American, in response to an article entitled Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense. Among other points, the author whitewashed the Climategate scandal as much ado about nothing and relegated the skeptics to the fever swamps of conspiracy theories. It is with that weak attempt at shoring up the crumbling edifice of The Church of Gore in mind that I wrote the following explanation of how we can have what appears to be a conspiracy, and yet have no conspiracy at all:

Well, it took SciA long enough to get to the Climategate story!

Unfortunately, it only resulted in a child plugging his ears and yelling, "La, La, La! I can't hear you!"

I won't claim there has been a Warmist conspiracy. However, one can't deny that there has been, shall we say, a confluence of agendae. It works like this:

1. Scientists, by and large, depend on government financing.
   
   
2. Governments, by their very nature, strive to increase their power over the people that they govern.
   
   
3. Bureaucrats are the primary mechanism of government. Generally they are immune to the checks and balances that elected officals are face with. Even dictators are hemmed in by "the will of the people" at some point. Bureaucrats, too, have an insatiable appetite for power. And they are the ones holding he purse strings.
   
   
4. Government, by its very nature, will be more predisposed to funding research that will further its ambitions to power than research that does not.
   
   
5. Scientists, therefore, have a financail stake in the sort of research they pursue. Dissent is quietly "defunded" and a "consensus" appears.
   
   

If there is any doubt of my observations, one needs merely to consider the proposed "solutions" to the "problem" of AGW/ACC:

1. Strict control over the people regarding their energy usage, the types of cars they drive, mass transit plans, etc.
   
   
2. Carbon taxes, which will ensure that economic activity will be sharply curtailed.
   
   
3. A "world government", which makes interaction between the government and the governed even more tenuous than it is today.
   
   
4. "Wealth redistribution", not only from the developed world to the Third World, but from industry to the new, burgeoning class of "Carbon Billionaires", like Al Gore. This will also have the undesirable effect of turning the Third World into backwards welfare clients, with no hope of joining modernity and freedom.

Sorry, Mr. Rennie. Your claims that there is no "cospiracy" do nothing to address the fact that there are agendae which dovetail together quite nicely. Further, the emails make clear that this problem is worldwide, not limited to the Hadley/CRU. Indeed, it goes right up to the UN and its hopes of becoming the government of the world.

Time to face facts, my Friend! Your appeals to authority are nothing short of totalitarian.

Copyright December 2nd, 2009