La Voz De La Revoluccion

With the Climategate scandal and the Econolypse, we now have two major issues in our society where hidden activities were revealed. In the case of the economy, the schemers in the financial industry were surprised when their "sure thing" collapsed, leaving an expensive mess for the rest of us to clean up. The administration (both President Bush's administration and President Obama's administration) acted to protect the banks and insurance companies, which (not coincidentally) helped them avoid the full brunt of the collapse they spawned.

Not that I am claiming administration misconduct. Not at all. The government has relied upon a fairly small and intimate group of financial leaders for much of its economic intelligence for some time. Because those leaders are known and trusted, their advice was solicited--and taken--even as outsiders shown the light on the flawed assumptions and the ethical lapses which may have contributed to the problem. The effect, however, is stil the same. Financial executives avoid prison, some of them even get to keep their bonuses, and you and I will spend the next thirty years paying off the loans (mostly from China) taken out to finance the bailouts.

In the case of the economy, those of us outside of the core financial group know that what those within the group say is unreliable and self-serving. That is, the advisors who are telling the government to prop up badly-managed commercial banks, investment banks, credit card banks, and insurers, happen to be mostly those who currently or recently ran those very companies, and whose actions contributed to the crisis. When everyone else in the country knows or should know that lenders were persuading borrowers to take on more debt than they could handle, the government still believes that the problem was caused by greedy and lazy borrowers!

Similarly, we are being asked to give up the energy use which has lifted us in one hundred and fifty years from dependence upon human and animal labor for almost all of our economic activitiesto much of the world becoming a push-button society. I press a key on the keyboard and a letter appears on the screen. After a few hundred or a few thousand such keypresses, I press another set of keys and the text is submitted to a server. You press a few keys and you can now read what I wrote.

The problem here is that Climategateisn't just some "hacker" breaking into a government site and posting a few e-mail messages. There are around 1,100 e-mails, plus thousands of documents, including computer program source code, apparently taken from some kind of internal investigation or storage. (FOI folder... Freedom Of Information? Maybe these were relevant to one or more FOI requests and were about to be deleted instead?)

Yes, once again, the administration is going to avoid acting on allegations of possible ethics lapses in the pursuit of a goal. This time, the goal is restrictive controls on energy use, particularly on energy uses which emit carbon dioxide, a gas which stimulates plant growth (and enables us to eat when photosynthesis changes CO₂ and H₂O into sugars). Now, of course, it isn't government wrongdoing so much as it is continuing to rely upon information sources that are and have been believed to be reliable. One of the arguments they use for relying upon the same advisors is published, "peer reviewed" studies, one of the areas that Climategate reveals that leading climate researchers used pressure to prevent publication and funding of contrary research.

Likewise, those who try and understand what CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) is about, who try and understand the science and the evidence behind it, soon start to wonder about the CA part. Yes, the globe is warming. I thank God for this, because I recall reading that the Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts were reduced to five grains of corn (maize) per person per day one Winter. Why? The cold Northeast Winter caused their imported Englishcrops to fail, and they hadn't yet fully converted over to domestic (cold-hardy) plants. The warming is not in dispute. What is in dispute is how much warming there is, how much of that warming is due to man's activities, and how much of that "anthropogenic" warming is actually due to carbon dioxide emissions, rather than land-use and other issues.

When people attempted over the past several years to obtain the data used to formulate the presentations of doom and gloom, the "climate science" establishment has dragged its feetand refused to produce it. When the data does finally come out, it very often isn't sufficient to support the pronouncements made from it. For example, one study used tree ring data to show the now-familiar hockey-stick shape. It turned out that there were twelve trees in one area of Siberia that were used in the blade of the stick, and much of the warming was from one tree out of twelve.

Despite questions about things such as whether a "global" temperature model should depend upon trees in every part of the world and whether the enhanced growth rings are truly proxies for temperature (versus, for example, available soil moisture or available sunlight), leading climate researchers built their speculations upon these tree ring studies, and then (according the e-mails in Climategate) altered the results of some studies to hide prior natural climate variations and the recent decoupling of tree ring growth from published measures of temperatures (a decline that had to be hidden, again according to the e-mails in Climategate).

In all these things, we see the government continuing to rely upon information sources now known to be unreliable. Is human activity causing potentially-catastrophic global temperature changes? Well, we do not know that for sure. What we do know is that ten or fifteen thousand years ago, the last ice age ended, and the temperature has been gradually increasing ever since. Not in a smooth line, however, but more of an undulating up-and-down motion, with warm periods tending to get warmer than prior warmer periods and cooler periods also tending to be warmer. We also know that there has been little or no measurable warming since the 2000-2002 period--not that such a short time period indicates the end of the warming--and that there are some troubling issues (nearly all of which bias measurements toward the warm side) with a large number of the measuring stations used in climate studies. (And, of course the unexplained "boost" that the computer programs add to recent temperature measurements and the corresponding "cut" that is applied to older measurements, which often adds up to just about the entire measured increase over the past fifty to one hundred years.)

We also know that there are Viking cemeteries on Greenland which were formerly within thriving farming communities.These are now permafrost areas. This indicates that the Medieval Warming Period (prior to the Little Ice Age) was warmer than today. This natural variation is one reason we should not lose our heads over "climate change". Just a few hundred years ago, it may have been warmer than now, and there is no way to pin that earlier warmth on human CO₂ emissions.

Now, the point I am making is not really about the climate, and it is not really about the economy. If you are a thinking person at all, you will soon realize that the global media are leading people around by rings in their noses, and that one should not be foolish enough to believe everything that the mainstream media (MSM) tells you. In other words, this is not news to thinkers.

My point is this: there are a lot of commonly-held beliefs out there, beliefs that are promoted by the media and which are organized by and benefit particular organizations. The truth will come out, and many of us will see the emperor's new clothes are imaginary. Whether that belief is that people only want to use Windows (or that Windows is more-familiar and easier to use than <pick-an-operating-system>) or that the solution to warmer climate is returning us to the age of animal labor (with the attendant starvation and freezing deaths of billions of people), many of us will eventually see through it. We may not be able to overcome the entrenched economic and political interests backing said beliefs, but we will know those beliefs to be false.