STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Climategate – Worst Scientific Scandal Ever?
By admin - November 30, 2009

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed. The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: What a surprise!

Free-Market Analysis: Like any other ambitious (though modest) publication, the Daily Bell is engaged in a struggle for "share of mind." While the Bell is doing very well in its quest, we believe that scandals such as Climategate prove the ultimate veracity of the Bell's model. We have long held that the world is not divided into a "right" and a "left" or that the endlessly observable drift toward authoritarianism worldwide is simply serendipity. No, the Bell's argument, and we have long argued this elsewhere as well, is that a power elite, a handful of enormously wealth families and individuals, knowingly promote a variety of dominant social themes that are designed to help them consolidate wealth and power (often at the expense of the rest of us).

We would modestly offer this paradigm (a generational one) as an explanation for what is occurring today around the world and why we (and many Daily Bell readers no doubt) were not at all surprised by Climategate. Detecting the whiff of a promotion in "global warming," the Daily Bell has always looked at such claims with skepticism. We have long noted that no matter how many people reasonably disagreed with the data, the promotion of "climate change" continued to roll forward. This is usually a signifier of a promotion – a power elite promotion especially — that data does not sway it, facts do not sway it and reason has little to do with the results.

Our certainty about the promotion that is "climate change" allowed us to predict this past week what the official response might be. This is what we wrote then:

We have pointed out, one of the signifiers of an elite dominant social theme is its imperviousness to reality. Climategate – the falsification of data over numerous years to "prove" global warming – has definitively arrived and the damage to the global warming meme is immense. But don't expect the banking and political class to acknowledge that. It is not that there is just too much money at stake. Or that those involved are committed leftists. These are convenient reasons tossed up to justify the continuation of the promotion that is climate change. But the reality – as the Bell attempts to show regularly – is that climate change is one of a number of memes sponsored by the monetary elite and these are notoriously difficult to dislodge. There is so much money poured into them – and so many people are enlisted to help with them – that it becomes very difficult to fully remove them.

To read the full article as originally posted at the Daily Bell, click here now.

Sure enough, the official reaction to the Climategate scandal has intensified in exactly the way we might have anticipated. Faced with a foundering promotion, British Commonwealth leaders met to proclaim their fealty to the concept. According to Google stats, there were twice as many stories (in English anyway) about the Commonwealth's endorsement of the global warming meme (1,000) as there were about Climategate (500). This too is predictable. As were a veritable blizzard of stories over the weekend about China's determination to see to it that America came up with a firm pledge to cut significant carbon production.

The Daily Bell proposes that the world works (currently) in a certain way. A handful of wealthy families and individuals promote certain dominant social themes through a massive construct of national and international public and private institutions and pliable politicians and governments. These promotions, relayed through the mainstream media, almost always involve scarcity or disaster of some sort and the solutions inevitably involve massive authoritarian action by the same institutions (often controlled by the elite) that are proposing the problems. The result: increased wealth and control.

After Thoughts

There is no right or left in the paradigm presented above, only a certain degree of ruthlessness inherent in the actions of a small group of global insiders. If one understands and accepts this paradigm (and imbibes a certain amount of free-market literacy as well), we would suggest that the world will immediately become a bit more comprehensible. One will begin to understand better what is occurring on both a macro and even micro level. It might even help with saving and investing.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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