Back in 2007 when I first started being a sceptic, almost every major institution and government, almost every media outlet, and most importantly almost everyone in every group that usually questioned government policy, were all lining up like a group of mindless zombies behind a policy that when I checked had almost no scientific credibility.
In truth, as few as half a dozen extremely politicised academics who had no compunction with lying to the public and whose academic ability didn’t include basic things like being able to use Excel, had gained control of the subject of climate and were leading the world trance-like toward economic oblivion using the lie of a CO2 catastrophe.
Whether intentional or just because they hated commerce & industry, their aim was clear: to destroy the oil based economies of the west. To destroy capitalism. To destroy the very economy that provided the wealth that employed them.
It is the closest the world ever came to self-inflicted suicide. Far worse than Nuclear war – because at least we knew that was bad when it was happening. The self-delusional process of lies being laid down over lies, data changing becoming ever more virulent meant we were on the verge of a big-brother world FAR WORSE than anything even the USSR could have done because there literally was almost no opposition.
We, few sceptics, stopped it just in time – any longer and we would have started to see the repression of free speech, concentration camps, etc. that were being openly talked about. And once such measures had been taken, there would have been no turning back the tide of repression. There would have been no chance for science based policy – because inconvenient science requiring credible impartial data and analysis simply could not be tolerated. It did not support the crazies who had gained control. Big brother was on the door, and almost EVERYONE was clambering over each other to ask him in.
I don’t think most people will ever realise how close we came to oblivion. After all most passengers on the Titanic had no clue how close they were to death until LONG AFTER they hit the ice-berg. And we sceptics were like cabin boys locked up from questioning the captain’s decision to go full speed into the dark. The cabin boy only gets remembered, if anyone who knows about them survives the incident and spills the beans (the cabin boy undoubtedly being locked up where they are first to drown). They don’t get remembered if the captain slows down.
And that is where we are at. The captain (nutter climate academics) are still running the ship, the cabin boys are still well and truly out of the picture, but the Titanic has slowed down and better still passengers are starting to question the captain’s zealous onward progress in the middle of a known ice field

But how did we get into this mess?

The main reason for this debacle stems with the incompetence of western academia. The issues are:

1. Western academia is one of the most overtly politicised groups rivalling trade unions for their shear political bias. This not only extends to a blatant left wing bias, but also means that in many policy areas there is a de facto one party state in academia that does not accept alternative views.
2. As a result Groupthink is rife. Anyone questioning the groupthink is sent to Coventry and the result has been the stagnation of many subjects from climate to archaeology.
3. Introversion and rejection of external views is also rife. Partly because academia is so politicised and doesn’t share the worldview of those outside, but largely because like any closed shop, it sees those outside who have views on academic subjects as “the enemy”.
4. Dishonesty & poor quality is rife in academia. The dishonesty stems from the lack of any adequate oversight and the huge incentives to make the data fit the theory. And quality is non-existent in many areas, because quality is driven by demanding customers and much of what academics work on has no customer at all.

To put it bluntly, in many respects academia has become a fifth column working against the rest of society, using government funding to create an alternative political power base, which is not subject to any oversight or control, and which has no compunction to create fake data and lies to push through its own policy agenda. And it works hand-in-glove with the similarly minded fake news media allowing the academia-MSM roadroller to push over and flatten the political wishes of the rest of society.
Thus, whilst the global warming Scam was the most serious immediate threat we have faced in recent history, it is but a symptom of a much greater illness: that academia has become a force for evil in society. We may have stopped the global warming scam from snowballing till those changing the data had so much power they could make it up with impunity and lock up critics so that there was no way for the people to regain control of their governments. But we have not clipped the wings of academia nor in any way stopped them from constructing a new scare. They are still able to make up fake social data to support their latest political fad whether it is anti-smacking, gender mutations or their general hatred of any social policy that is not on the extreme wacky left or supportive of commerce & capitalism.

What solution?

The problem is that the internet has immensely strengthened the power of academia to force its viewpoint on the rest of us. Through websites like Wikipedia, they create a fake view of “knowledge” that is highly politicised and extremely biased. By controlling the supposed sources of “authority” on knowledge: the academic journals, this extreme left-wing publicly funded political force can deny the truth simply by publishing papers that say black is white. You can’t fight academics on Wikipedia – they just publish another paper so they can write whatever they like
The only upside, I can see, is that the general public are not the gullible fools that academics take them to be. On global warming, despite the lies of academia on sites like Wikipedia, the public have generally seen through their lies. Indeed, even in academia, the nuttery of academics on Wikipedia is so well known that even many academics don’t like it.
I once heard it said, that the only closed shop Union that Margaret Thatcher didn’t dare take on was the doctors. It is true she didn’t take on the medics, but a  far more dangerous and powerful union she should have taken on is academia. Undoubtedly attempts were made to change academia by rewarding academics on the number of papers. But far from making them more subject to market forces, the result has been a decline in academic standards and general view in academia that the number of papers now matters far more than their quality or honesty.
Likewise, the internet should have been a force for good – allowing more scrutiny of academic work. But in contrast, what it did was to allow academics in the same subject to start working directly with each other so that each subject became a “gang” of people who then didn’t tolerate alternative views. The result has been a vast increase in groupthink and academics now view themselves as part of one global groupthink gang, rather than each being primarily a member of their own different University with an alliance primarily to their own colleagues in their own University.
So, in terms of solutions, I do not see many. Given that the current position means western academia is very much underperforming, one obvious “solution” is that the new academic powers of China, India, etc. having very different cultures, despite starting from a historically backward position, could easily outperform western academia with the inevitable consequence that their economies will dominate the future of our planet.
More palatable solutions (for us in the west) require some means to create oversight that is not massively left-wing politically biased. That cannot be done for free: the only obvious alternative source of knowledge competence comes from the private sector. Either those currently employed in the private sector – or those who have retired from the private sector.
I have already suggested a very modest proposal of Research University for the retired – focussing on those who have worked in the private sector. They will not have the public-sector bias of most academia and therefore will massively increase the amount of pro-private sector research. But that will in no way restore the balance.
Another option is to put such people in charge of the grant funding body. We simply replace every grant funding body with people who have retired from commerce. We don’t need to change their aims or terms of references, because the result will inevitably be to favour those who are more balanced in their political views.
Another possibility is to give money directly to the private sector to employ researchers, so that the private sector is in control of research. That has already been tried, but it clearly is not enough.
These are all pretty simple measures: but they will all be vigorously opposed by the highly politicised academia for obvious reasons. But that is not the problem. The problem is lack of political will, FROM THE RIGHT, to do anything about the extreme left wing prejudice of academia. A classic example is Trump’s failure even to do the most obvious thing and take on those faking the climate data. If he can’t do something that simple, there does not appear to be any realistic chance of the necessary reforms in the near future.
So realistically, it is almost inevitable that we are seeing the end of the dominance of western thought because I can see no realistic way to reform academia to make it capable of meeting future challenges. And that probably also means that our political systems will become a lot more like countries like China. And to end on an ironic thought … no doubt, those who will most strongly object in the centuries to come as we lose the freedoms we currently have and mimic other cultures, … is the extremists in academia whose predecessors caused the demise of western society.