In a startling new book, Christopher Booker reveals how a handful of scientists, who have pushed flawed theories on global warming for decades, now threaten to take us back to the Dark Ages … Next Thursday marks the first anniversary of one of the most remarkable events ever to take place in the House of Commons. For six hours MPs debated what was far and away the most expensive piece of legislation ever put before Parliament. The Climate Change Bill laid down that, by 2050, the British people must cut their emissions of carbon dioxide by well over 80 per cent. Short of some unimaginable technological revolution, such a target could not possibly be achieved without shutting down almost the whole of our industrialized economy, changing our way of life out of recognition. Even the Government had to concede that the expense of doing this – which it now admits will cost us £18 billion a year for the next 40 years – would be twice the value of its supposed benefits. Yet, astonishingly, although dozens of MPs queued up to speak in favour of the Bill, only two dared to question the need for it. It passed by 463 votes to just three. One who voted against it was Peter Lilley who, just before the vote was taken, drew the Speaker's attention to the fact that, outside the Palace of Westminster, snow was falling, the first October snow recorded in London for 74 years. As I observed at the time: "Who says that God hasn't got a sense of humour?" – Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: Global warming under attack?

Free-Market Analysis: Global warming – now climate change – is as good an example of a dominant social theme as we have got. It does seem, in writing about dominant social themes, that one is postulating a kind of conspiracy of the elite. But how else does one account for the kind of evidence that Booker presents (evident even in this article of his) except through a kind of conscious dislocation of facts – a manipulation not to put too fine a point on it.

Global warming has monetary elite fingerprints all over it. The signs are always the same: a few "prestigious" players at "prestigious" institutes discover something, or say something. The mainstream media trumpets the findings and then the political establishment takes action amidst cries for speed and haste. A "crisis" has been discovered, discussed and finally dealt with. The only trouble with such dominant social themes is that when they are built on real or manufactured evidence, and when they linger without being enshrined by legislation, they are subject to revision.

And that is just what is happening to global warming – in large part thanks to the Internet. On the ‘Net the real evidence of global warming has been exposed for what it is: elite propaganda manufactured and purveyed by a handful of scientists that one can presume are more than innocent bystanders in this production. The initial evidence was evidently manufactured or at least misinterpreted; the massive number of scientists on board with the manufactured evidence appears to be something of a charade; and finally and most inconveniently temperatures have been going DOWN for the past 10 years.

Here's some more from the article:

I have been regularly reporting on the issue in my column in The Sunday Telegraph, and this week I publish a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific delusion in history?

It is a story that has unfolded in three stages. The first began back in the Seventies when a number of scientists noticed that the world's temperatures had been falling for 30 years, leading them to warn that we might be heading for a new ice age. Then, in the mid-Seventies, temperatures started to rise again, and by the mid-Eighties, a still fairly small number of scientists – including some of those who had been predicting a new ice age – began to warn that we were now facing the opposite problem: a world dangerously heating up, thanks to our pumping out COâ‚‚ and all those greenhouse gases inseparable from modern civilization.

In 1988, a handful of the scientists who passionately believed in this theory won authorization from the UN to set up the body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was the year when the scare over global warming really exploded into the headlines, thanks above all to the carefully staged testimony given to a US Senate Committee by Dr James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), also already an advocate for the theory that COâ‚‚ was causing potentially catastrophic warming.

The disaster-movie scenario that rising levels of COâ‚‚ could lead to droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and, above all, that melting of the polar ice caps, which would flood half the world's major cities, struck a rich chord. The media loved it. The environmentalists loved it. More and more politicians, led by Al Gore in the United States, jumped on the bandwagon. But easily their most influential allies were the scientists running the new IPCC, led by a Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin and Dr. John Houghton, head of the UK Met Office.

The IPCC, through its series of weighty reports, was now to become the central player in the whole story. But rarely has the true nature of any international body been more widely misrepresented. It is commonly believed that the IPCC consists of "1,500 of the world's top climate scientists", charged with weighing all the scientific evidence for and against "human-induced climate change" in order to arrive at a "consensus".

In fact, the IPCC was never intended to be anything of the kind. The vast majority of its contributors have never been climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all. And from the start, the purpose of the IPCC was not to test the theory, but to provide the most plausible case for promoting it. This was why the computer models it relied on as its chief source of evidence were all programmed to show that, as COâ‚‚ levels continued to rise, so temperatures must inevitably follow.

One of the more startling features of the IPCC is just how few scientists have been centrally involved in guiding its findings. They have mainly been British and American, led for a long time by Dr. Houghton (knighted in 1991) as chairman of its scientific working group, who in 1990 founded the Met Office's Hadley Centre for research into climate change. The centre has continued to play a central role in selecting the IPCC's contributors to this day, and along with the Climate Research Unit run by Professor Philip Jones at the University of East Anglia, controls HadCrut, one of the four official sources of global temperature data (another of the four, GIStemp, is run by the equally committed Dr. Hansen and his British-born right-hand man, Dr. Gavin Schmidt).

With remarkable speed, from the time of its first report in 1990, the IPCC and its computer models won over many of the world's politicians, led by those of the European Union. In 1992, the UN staged its extraordinary Earth Summit in Rio, attended by 108 prime ministers and heads of state, which agreed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; and this led in 1997 to the famous Kyoto Protocol, committing the world's governments to specific targets for reducing COâ‚‚.

There is something deeply and profoundly wrong with the current course of the West, and much of the problems lead to the promotions of the monetary elite. It is extremely profitable to manufacture problems – of any sort – and then to provide solutions. Demographic problems, addiction problems, declining resource problems, food problems, water problems – any problem inevitably demands an equally manufactured solution. The one thing that ordinary people are never supposed to find out is that most of the problems are phony, or at least exaggerated, and then the market itself would take care of them in due course without government action.

The biggest meme of all, in our opinion, is central banking, the idea that a handful of men exercising the levers of high finance are necessary to the smooth functioning of Western democracies. This is entirely untrue. Market based money – gold and silver – are adequate for the task, just as private enterprise is adequate when it comes to most functions currently embraced by government.