Orson Scott Card, who I believe to be both a brilliant writer and someone who gets his facts straight, has a very, very powerful column posted at the Ornery American that should be required reading. He presents the case that the "consensus" on Global warming is as much of a fraud as the entire body of "proof" that started the whole ball of hot air rolling in the first place. (Many thanks to Blackhawk for bringing this to my attention in the comments section of another post.)
Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have.
An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann."
The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to fight.
Well, that's not acceptable.
Cooking the Figures
He starts with his software. There are certain procedures that are normal and accepted in his line of work. But if he makes just one little mistake, his program does a weird little recursion and if there's any data at all that shows the pattern he wants it to show, it will be magnified 139 times, so it far overshadows all the other data.
He can run it on random numbers and it gives him the shape he wants. Unfortunately, the real-world numbers aren't random — they have a very different shape. All the numbers. Even his jimmied program won't give the results he wants.
All he needs is any data shaped the right way. And so he looks a little farther, and … here it is. It looks, on the surface, like all the other data that he's been working with. Other researchers working in his field, just glancing at it, will assume it is, too.
But it isn't. Because the source that gathered this batch of data had some other key information that takes it all away. The numbers don't mean what they normally mean. In fact, this number set is absolutely false.
If you use these numbers along with all the other data, however, the clever little program will pick them up, magnify them radically, and voilá! The final report shows exactly the shape he needs the numbers to have.
The trouble is, these numbers are supposed to be doublechecked. Anybody who looks closely at his numbers and at his program will see what he's done. It's not hard to find, if you have the original data sets and can examine the program. He will be exposed as a fraud. It will do his cause more harm than good, if it's made public.
But he's not afraid. He knows how this works.
He doesn't show the program or the lists of his data sources to anybody.
Read the whole thing. This actually gets right to the heart of the problem as I see it. If the entire foundation that all the other "proof" is built off is fraudulent, then the entire edifice is built on nothing. Seriously, this is an important column for people to read. If all the cited information is correct, there is a very, very good reason that the true believers are trying desperately to stifle anyone who disagrees with them.
Because they know the entire thing is a fraud.
McIntyre and McKitrik have
There might even be something more afoot. All of this has created a thing called the “Carbon Credit” these things are traded on world markets. There are also carbon credit futures. Now imagine if I am a climate researcher or a UN bureaucrat and I know that a certain paper is going to be released that might have impact on the market for carbon futures … up or down doesn’t matter as long as I know which direction the market is likely to move I can make a killing by buying the right futures contract and selling it after the market moves.
Futures allow someone to make money by betting that the market will either go up or go down. If you have access to information that might cause the market to move in a certain direction, you can make a killing by risking a relatively small amount of money up front.
Someone needs to look into carbon futures trading and see of any of the key players, their families, and their associates have been trading carbon credit futures. I believe in that direction will be found the real reason for all this global warming hype. Some people are making a killing on the market that it has created.