Canada’s National Post published this footnote to the Climategate story. It should come as no surprise to frequent users of Wikipedia, where it is wise to remain skeptical when reading about anything remotely political.
The highly variable record of global temperatures prior to the industrial revolution has always been a thorn in the side of the alarmists, who have tried to present a clear narrative: the earth was in perfect balance before humans started burning so much fossil fuel, but since the late 1800s carbon dioxide has been driving temperatures to new heights, where there be dragons.
Said Briffa, one of their chief practitioners: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
In the end, Briffa and other members of the band overcame their doubts and settled on their dogma. With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.
But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.
But then came Wikipedia, the one-stop-shop for official versions:
All told, (William Michael) Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.
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Yes, this is a financial blog, but this is a financial issue. The global warming crowd would burden society’s producers and feed the parasite class with heavy new taxes and regulations. Goldman Sachs has a 10% equity stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange (Al Gore and Hank Paulson’s Generation Investment Management owns another 10%) and hopes to capture transaction fees from what its chairman Richard Sandor claims could be a 20 trillion dollar market.
This is coming from a dyed-in-the-wool conservationist. I spent three years among the greenies getting an advanced degree in environmental science, so I saw their group-think up close. I can say that almost to a person, they are socialists and True Believers in government. I’d trust an oil man over a climate professor any day. The CO2 issue is politicized science at its worst, and distracts from real problems such as toxic pollution (including the depleted uranium, lead, and high explosive residue that the US military spreads with liberty), topsoil erosion, overbuilding and overfishing.
