CLIMATEGATE: The market is the best peer reviewer

Recently activist P. Sainath ran an expose on three local dailies in Maharashtra showing that they had simultaneously run the same story on Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan, just prior to the elections. Today, 56 newspapers across the globe ran an identical editorial, that included The Hindu from India. This editorial claims exactly what the entire left-liberal world has been claiming for the last couple of decades, that if unprecedented regulatory powers are not vested upon the UN and a select coterie of global "intellectuals", humanity will be faced with catastrophic consequences of Anthropogenic Global Warming. As we all know, there is no limit, no outer bound for the bad things that can happen to us - children will die by the millions, oceans will rise and flood many countries, tsunamis and hurricanes will increase, there will be wide spread disease and epidemics, low rainfall, low crop yield, many species will go extinct, your penis will shrink - ok, made that one up.

These newspapers are pretending that climategate never happened. Well, climategate already gets more google hits than Global Warming.

As it stands now, the global warming story stands thoroughly debunked. Up until now, most people accepted the general idea of global warming, although few believed in the doomsday scenarios and even fewer accepted the so called solutions.

Climategate shows the whole thing was a scam on a scale beyond our wildest imagination. It corrupted institutions, sacred principles of science and above all, it pushed a set of people generally considered above suspicion on the brink of and possibly well into criminal behavior. Perhaps the latter is the most tragic chapter in the book of climategate.

Consider the following:

- the scandal involves the very core of the global warming industry, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK. The entire edifice of global warming and the IPCC reports are based on this organization's data and research.

- over the last two decades, the research grants for CRU and other pro scientists have increased dramatically, to the tune of many tens of millions, if not hundreds.

- the global warming scientists have always claimed a massive scientific consensus. It turns out there was no such consensus. The 2,500 scientists named in the IPCC report? Well, perhaps a few of them are actually scientists, the rest are bureaucrats. Rajedra Pachauri, IPCC head honcho, is a former railway engineer.

- the scientists vigorously denied any grain of truth in the so called "skeptics" claim, yet they actually entertained Stephen McIntyre's rebuttal and corrected the part involving Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

- the scientists persistently refused to share data with the "skeptics". If they at all released data, it was the heavily massaged and processed data.

- CRU now claims that the raw data was deleted for "space reasons".

- The Chief of CRU has stepped down following an externally constituted investigation.

- The famous hockey stick graph was found to have been based on a single tree! This tree was actually a huge outlier.

- NASA is yet to share raw data

- New Zealand NIWA produced a graph showing global warming that can not rationally be reproduced from the underlying data

The list goes on and go on. If what they are willing to admit and what their massaged data and research reveals is shocking enough, what they did to achieve the so called consensus is absolutely repulsive. They ganged up on anyone in the academia who challenged their thesis, they influenced journals to pull out contrarian articles and universities to drop competing research. Some of the emails exposed in the scandal indicate they might have completely compromised the scientific peer review process. They took care of the academia while their overground supporters - politicians, governments and government agencies made sure that if you did not support global warming, your funds ran dry.

In due course, everyone wised up and played ball. To understand the implication of this, consider this: reliable temperature records exist only for a century or so. In order to get a handle on temperature variability, one needs data for at least a couple of thousands of years. This is achieved in a rather esoteric field of paleoclimatology. This science produces what is known as proxy data - for instance, by studying width of tree rings of ancient trees, one can get a handle of temperatures far into the past. In this manner the "global warming" science touches upon a very broad range of sciences.

It is entirely possible that in order to keep contradictory evidence out of sunlight, many of these science areas have been either been heavily compromised or parched in terms of funding.

As is very evident, the entire process of Government funding research creates such sinister scenarios of moral hazard. Economics as we all know is a heavily compromised area, with the climategate expose, it appears that any political meddling in supposedly cut and dry areas of sciences can get corrupted in no time.

The only way to restore sanity is to let the market work its magic on the scientific process. Once the dignity of the science is restored, there is little by way of climatic danger that humanity can't handle.