Climategate may prevent a 47 trillion dollar misallocation of global resources

By Marcus Cake • December 24, 2009

I have previously discussed the opportunity to create a Web 3.0 Climate stability network. I also created a prototype. I could see how a Web 3.0 network could identify/confirm the problem, evaluate solutions and promote implementation with consensus, transparency and global community participation. Given the astronomical amounts to be invested (or sacrificed) to deal with climate concerns, the global community needed to determine the correct strategy and implement it fast. I thought a Web 3.0 strategy was the only means to ensure a process to deliver and implement solutions fast enough.

What is Climategate?
My interest in Climategate is seeing how a Web 1.0 opaque channel was compromised, rather than offering a specific opinion on the climate. The recent controversy nicknamed Climategate is a catalysing event on the critical path to Web 4.0. It highlights how a traditional scientific research channel to determine the “truth” was completely compromised and, literally, invented global warming. The world could spend US$45 trillion on global warming. The UK may spend 18 billions pounds per year for the next ten years. The result was (or is) a staggering misallocation of global resources to deal with a problem that may not exist.

Climatic research unit hacking incident (from Wikipedia)

Extract:

The Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, also known as “Climategate“,^[1] began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents made over the course of 13 years.^[2]
Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded^[6] to withhold scientific information,^[7] interfered with the peer-review process to prevent dissenting scientific papers from being published,^[8] deleted e-mails and raw data to prevent data being revealed under the Freedom of Information Act,^[9] and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.^[9]

I’ll only take a few paragraphs from Wikipedia on this issue. All the information on climate change at Wikipedia may have been compromised (see this article).

The key facts about Climategate were summarised in a paper titled Climategate: Cold facts about the hot topic of global temperature change after the climategate scandal, Lord Mockton, November 30, 2009. I have extracted some key paragraphs from this report below:

A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.
The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.
The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.
They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.
They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.
They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.
They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.
They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.
They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.
Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.