Author Archives: Lila

Danish Climate-Gate

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From the Washington Examiner:

“Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.

“Denmark’s quota register, which the Energy Agency within the Climate and Energy Ministry administers, is the largest in the world in terms of personal quota registrations. It is much easier to register here than in other countries, where it can take up to three months to be approved.

“Ekstra Bladet reporters have found examples of people using false addresses and companies that are in liquidation, which haven’t been removed from the register.

“One of the cases, which stems from the Danish register, involves fraud of more than 8 billion kroner. This case, in which nine people have been arrested, is being investigated in England.

“The market for CO2 trade has exploded in recent years and is worth an estimated 675 billion kroner globally.”

Climate-Gate: Summary

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I found this excellent summary posted by a contributor to the New York Times blog of the evidence of manipulation of data in the outed emails:

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)

• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709).

Analysis of impact here. Wow!

• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news“.
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)

• Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series “…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)

• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)

• Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)

• Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)

• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)

• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)

• Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)

• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)

• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
• Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)

• Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)

• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)

• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)

• Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)

• Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)

• Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)

• Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)

• Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)

• Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)

• Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)

• Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)

Finished in next post …

November 21st, 2009
11:29 am
Continued from previous:

• Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460)
[Note to readers – Saiers was subsequently ousted]

• Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)

• Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)

• Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)

• Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)

• Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)

• Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)

• Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)

• Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)

• Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)

• Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)

• Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)

• Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
• Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)

• Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)

• Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)

• David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)

• Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)

• Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)

• Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306

Checking Back On Old Posts

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Delving into the archives is a lot of fun. It´s uncanny, how things turned out…

Check this post from October 9, 2008:

(Mind you, I hadn´t come across Deep Capture at that point. I started reading it in the spring of this year. I think I came across a link to it on Doug Boggs´blog – The Banterer)

October, 2009 2008

Do Statistics Back Claims of Complete Credit Freeze?

“Many commentators claim, however, that virtually no transactions are occurring in this market. These claims are completely false. For the week that ended October 1, which is the most recent week currently reported, total commercial paper outstanding amounted to $1,607 billion. Yes, this amount was down from the $1,702 billion reported for the previous week, but is a 5.6 percent drop a good reason to panic? If we go back to March 2008, when nobody was talking excitedly about the commercial market’s “freezing up,” we find that the total amount outstanding, on average, was $1,822 billion, or only 13 percent more than last week. In March, the market was working fine; now it’s “locked up.” This sort of hyperbole, with which we are being bombarded hourly around the clock, is totally without a basis in the facts…..”

Robert Higgs, suggesting that some people are fomenting panic. He asks why.

Comment:

The answer lies in asking yourself:

Who has benefited so far? How? What do they want to happen?

Paulson Plan Premeditated?

Here’s Bill Engdahl tying up the loose ends of my piece on Paulson on how Paulson’s plan benefits the three new super banks, Goldman, JPMorgan Chase, and Citi and how they would be used to dominate global, especially European, banking.

Interbank Wars – Latest

The latest in Citi’s fight with Wells Fargo is that Citi has terminated negotiations and is planning to pursue breach of contract against Wells, so Wells is going ahead with its deal. Citi has Goldman Sachs connections: Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and a former Goldman chief is a director.

Meanwhile, with regard to Bear’s demise, here is a piece arguing that JPMorgan was involved in gold price manipulation under cover of their bail out of Bear this spring. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon sits on the Board of the NY Federal Reserve and as such was privy to the NY Fed’s actions re Bear Stearns.

Media Trix

Bill O’Reilly, not usually my favorite person, has been pretty good on standing up to the bail-out. This evening, he had a clip from an NBC skit on the sale of subprime mortgages to Wachovia by a couple, the Sandlers. It mocks Barney Frank’s role in eliminating oversight of Fannie and Freddie. Apparently the video was edited to remove the reference to Frank. The Sandlers had a long list of progressive groups they donated to (including Move On.org).

O’Reilly’s tack seems to be that the positions of those groups is undermined by the funding. That part is far-fetched, but it is time someone pointed out that not everyone affected by the decline in housing prices is an innocent. Many people made fortunes during the boom and are making more money from the bust.

Update – Market Moves Or CyberWars?

Another amazing day. I walked out of the house for 2 hours to buy a laptop for traveling, since my old one had mysteriously lost its internet connectivity. When I came back, the market was closing with a sell off, down 7% (679 points).

It began in the morning when
Paulson announced that insurance companies were in for trouble. That set off the selling in the bank and insurance stocks, including regional bank funds.

The whole thing was compounded by the fact that today was the day the ban on short-selling around 1000 financial and finance related stocks was lifted, so short-sellers were pouncing.

[Companies on the SEC’s list slid 18 percent on average during the ban, compared with 24 percent drop for all financial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index].

Then, General Motors had a bad day: Standard &Poor threatened to downgrade it (as well as Ford) to junk. GM shares got beaten down under $5; Ford was down over 20% too.

You had to wonder at the timing.

1) It’s the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, today. Recall that the selling began the evening of Rosh Hashanah. Remember that old saw – sell Rosh Hashanah, buy Yom Kippur? Markets are weaker at the time…

2) The declines came on the one-year anniversary of the closing highs of the Dow and the S&P. The Dow has lost 5,585 points, or 39.4 percent, since closing at 14,164.53 on Oct. 9, 2007. It’s the worst run for the Dow since the nearly two-year bear market that ended in December 1974 when the Dow lost 45 percent.

3) The decline is 7 years from 9/11

Anyway, when I got back the damage had been done.

[I ended up buying my computer at a shop that sold refurbished electronics in a rather shady side of town. A cop car was pulling away just as I walked in. But having just been a spectator to one of the biggest bank heists in history, I suddenly found the grungy looking characters hanging around rather harmless].

James Altucher, a trader, has this to say at The Street:

“The single biggest reason the stock market has fallen in the past five days is hedge fund liquidations. Of the top 20 hedge funds in the world, something like 18 are down 20% or more this year. They are getting redemptions, they are liquidating, they are selling stocks with reckless abandon to raise cash. Our job as good investors is to give them liquidity and take their bargain-basement merchandise off of their hands. Let’s get their selling over with so we can make money.”

Well, that’s evident. There was big selling, especially at the end, the kind from sell signals going off in program trading.

Morton Kondracke on FOX News in the evening was telling us sagely that it’s not a liquidity issue, it’s a confidence issue, and (get this) the answer is to create a global central bank. Right. The solution to a confidence problem is to give the markets to the confidence-men.

A note on cyberwarfare might be apposite hear [sic]. I dig it up from an old article I wrote that references Laurent Murawiec’s now notorious power-point presentation in 2002 advocating seizing Saudi oil fields. Murawiec is connected to Donald Rumsfeld’s Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) which makes InfoWars central to the battle ground.

“In all these cases, IW involves creating phantom cyber-images, which can include phantasms of nonexistent trains, airplanes, stock market orders, and bank transfers; false impressions of the enemy’s troop strength and one’s own, of supplies and movements, of fake attacks and all-too-real defenses; and phantom images of the enemy’s leaders doing evil things on screen because one has video-morphed images of them doing them so.

“Information warfare is not about machines or even electrons. It is about people’s minds, society’s functions, and armies’ strategies. Cyberspace endows us — and our enemies — with new and extraordinary means with which to achieve our respective aims. “We have only begun to cyber-fight….”

More at “Tom Tancredo Takes Out Mecca: The Cyber Wars Playing Near You” (Dissident Voice, August 8, 2007)

Muckety Maps Barrick Gold-AIG Link

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Marshall Cohen – current positions
Barrick Gold Corporation – director
Cassels Brock & Blackwell – counsel
Lafarge North America Inc. – director
Metaldyne Corporation – director
TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation – director
TriMas Corporation – director
Marshall Cohen – past positions
American International Group, Inc. – director
Collins & Aikman Corporation – director
Molson Companies Limited – president & CEO

Gold Sinks Further, Dollar Surges..

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We will need to see a few more days of supporting action, but as of now, it looks like gold might be beginning the long-awaited correction.

How deep that will go is anyone´s guess, though the recent central bank buying is supposed to lay a floor for it above $1000. Now, normally I wouldn´t bet the house on that, but I´ve come to see that pronouncements from insider analysts (at GS) are no longer just market analysis to be weighed. They are announcements about the course of action the banking cartel is going to be supporting.

The trigger for this? I think it´s that upbeat jobs number, which is probably taking some speculative money out of gold …especially as gold is technically very overbought and institutional buyers want to lock in profits before the year end.

Dubai is more important than most commentators think, even Marc Faber. They say the numbers involved are  too small.

But, as I blogged earlier, they´re  not seeing the contagion possible.

Here´s what they´re discounting:

1 We don´t know what the numbers from Dubai really are.  We can´t be absolutely sure. They keep changing them.  $125 billion (the highest figure I´v heard) may not be enormous in a global context, but we don´t know how its tied up with investments and where. A firesale of Dubai Worlds real estate could have unsettling effects all over the world.

2. Dubai has an impact on the property market, not just in Dubai, but in London and New York where Dubai Worlds has holdings, and also in India, where real estate and employment could take a hit.

3. Banks have leveraged exposure through derivatives, beyond what they are admitting in public.

4. These are banks that are already broke, for all purposes.

5. When the banks involved are not themselves broke, they are backed by governments that are broke, or near-broke.

6. The government with likely the most exposure is Britain. Britain is on the verge of sovereign default.

7. This happens just as the second down-leg in real estate is unfolding, and along with it the just-as- leveraged commercial real estate market (see the recent zero hedge post on an ongoing  CRE failure in Chicago), where there´s little pressure for the Feds to step in.

8. This happens after a 10-month run up in the stock market in what is essentially a bear rally, according to many experts.

9. This happens when the government has escalated an unpopular war in Afghanistan, calling for more troop commitments and more money

10. This happens after massive further government commitments in health care and other social spending.

Would the dollar move up just on the back of an employment number that was widely acknowledged to be misleading? I don´t know.

Do I know if gold will sink below $1000? No.

But CB (central banks of India etc.) buying is said to have set the floor. Me, I  think that was a bit of help given by the RBI (CB of India, Sri Lanka, etc.) to the IMF, seat of power of the globalists. Even the IMF admitted it got lucky.

Will that bit of market manipulation to the upside be enough to stave off the deflationary effect of develeraging asset derivatives?

I don´t know, but I suspect it won´t.

I’m anticipating  a rush into the dollar like we had in 2008…maybe not as strongly…
maybe gold will sop up some of the rush this time. I think that´s what the CB´s are hoping will happen.

But again, one can´t be sure, for the simple reason no one knows how much more bad debt there is and where it is.

Libertarian Living: Expat Belonging

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My first year as an expat. Come New Year and I will have done the necessary time outside the country.

I must say it´s a relief. At the best of times I never quite fit into America, although I think I fit in better there than I would ever have fit into India…but I´ll never know, since I left India as a student.

Honestly, I think I wouldn´t really fit into any country, except as an observer of sorts. A kind of partial citizen. That´s me. I spend a lot of my time alone, because people tire me out. Yet I like them around me anonymously…. preferably talking a language I don´t understand.

Loren Eisely, the anthropologist, once wrote somewhere in some essay of his that he liked spending time by himself in dark theaters (or was it bars?). I´m like that.

I like a seat in the corner of a crowded restaurant or lobby where I can watch people. The current of voices, as long as it doesn´t impinge too much on my thoughts, soothes me. A  dark hum of water whirring around me. A kind of return to the womb.

Airport lounges…small coffee shops, one-star hotels with wooden cupboards that tilt precariously when you open them late at night…unfamiliar streets that open up suddenly as you turn a corner ..a grey sea… I feel at home around  them.  Anonymity seems to make my own self clearer to me. In a group of friends, on the other hand, I lose a sense of who I am.

People yearn to belong somewhere. I spend my time elaborating ways of not belonging. And when I begin to feel at home, it´s always a warning sign that soon, very soon, I will want to leave.

Brown Calls Climate-Skeptics Flat-Earthers; IPCC Calls Hackers Sophisticated

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Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:

“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”

—  Telegraph, December 6

Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.

No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.

The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.

“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”

In short, act first, think later.

Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..

At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.

Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me —  whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12,  were sent on October 12  to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then,  realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted  via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.

“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”

The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.

But frankly, so what if the hackers were Russian? Climate science is international and cap and trade is international. If there were repeated freedom of information requests that the researchers  blocked, then it´s vital for the data to be in the public domain.

So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.

The hackers have the last word on this:

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.

Climate-Gate: Media Ignored Scientific Back-Trackers

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This story back in September ought to have made a lot of headlines, but didn´t. Perhaps it will now:

“When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it’s usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN’s World Climate Conference — an annual gathering of the so-called “scientific consensus” on man-made climate change — Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.”

The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.

But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.”

My Comment

Now why would Latif come out with this suddenly? Maybe he had a peek at some of that data the CRU scientists were trying to hide and decided to dissociate himself in advance from a scandal threatening to blow up…

Climate Chief Jones Steps Down

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The Winnipeg Free Press notes that chief climate book-cooker Phil Jones has announced he´s stepping down. It then comes out swinging in defense of the true scientific spirit, let the carbon footprints fall where they may:

“Many skeptics have had their doubts about the climate data championed by the IPCC and the CRU, but one of them, Steve McIntyre, a retired mathematician and policy analyst, decided to do something about it. McIntyre has been indefatigable in his efforts to get the raw data and computer codes from the climate science community so he could check whether or not their work was straight.

But the climate scientists at CRU and elsewhere have denied McIntyre’s information requests for years. Phil Jones, the head of the climate-change body at CRU, even emailed he’d destroy the data rather than let McIntyre have it. Jones has announced he is stepping down from his post….

… a tribe of incestuous climate scientists may have actively conspired to undermine the peer-review process.

The climate-change industry, along with people like Al Gore, has slammed skeptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. What the Climategate documents reveal is that this small group of scientists, who often peer-review each other’s work as well as skeptical articles, have discussed ways of keeping findings they don’t like out of the peer-reviewed literature as well as the IPCC reports, even if it required trying to oust editors, boycott certain journals, or to reclassifying a prestigious journal that publishes skeptical articles as a fringe journal unworthy of consideration. They also discuss their specific intention to exclude contrary findings from the IPCC reports, even if they have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!

Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open, transparent and must adhere to the scientific method. The institution of science has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists or holocaust deniers. Let the Climategate hearings begin.”

My Comment:

I hope this will make the lay public much more skeptical of the much touted academic process called “peer review.” Peer review, in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous “scientists,” turns out to be nothing much more than a PR gimmick to enhance the authority of certain points of view.

Of course, anyone who´s spent any time at all in academia already knows this.  Graduate students quickly find out that dissertations are written not because of any intrinsic scholarly merit in the project, but because professor x can get grant y, which will let student z graduate and perhaps get a foot into the tenure system at university abc, where professor x´s old buddy j needs someone else to support his agenda. And so on. The process, because it involves grubbing for money more than following the inherent worthiness of a project, naturally promotes the most political and street-smart operatives rather than the most scientifically gifted or creative researchers.

When academic work is driven by government funding, the end product is not science but propaganda for government programs. What a shock.