Not for one moment does anyone think it is the role of a handwriting
expert to decide whether the accused is guilty. That is the job of the
judge and the jury—after listening to a variety of experts, some of
whom will no doubt contradict (and cast doubt on) each other’s opinions.
Although the pathologist who performed the autopsy may have private
views about an accused murderer’s guilt or innocence we all understand
that it would be inappropriate for that medical professional to voice
those views within the courtroom—and doubly inappropriate to do so
outside of it.
Yet when it comes to climate, everything gets turned on its head. People with a narrow specialty (in water resources, for example)
nevertheless regard themselves as full-fledged “climate experts.” Taking
on the role of judge and jury, they imagine that an understanding of
their small piece of the puzzle translates into firm knowledge of the
far more complicated big-picture. They proclaim that multiple lines of
evidence all point to the same conclusion—even though they themselves
don’t possess the expertise to evaluate the merits of these other lines
of evidence.
Fakegate shows us, with the precision of a scientific experiment,
several key truths about the global warming movement. It shows that most
warmists, both the scientists and the journalists, will embrace any
claim that seems to bolster their cause, without bothering to check the
facts or subject them to rigorous investigation. (Anthony Watts notes
how few journalists bothered to contact him before reporting the claims
about him that are made in the fake memo.) And it shows us that
warmists like Gleick have no compunction about falsifying information to
promote their agenda, and that many other warmists are willing to serve
as accomplices after the fact, excusing Gleick's fraud on the grounds
that he was acting in a “noble cause.” It shows us that “hide the
decline” dishonesty is a deeply ingrained part of the corporate culture
of the global warming movement.
Gleick wasn’t just an obscure, rogue operator in the climate debate. Before his exposure, his stock in trade was lecturing on “scientific
integrity,” and until a few days ago he was the chairman of the American
Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics. So this scandal
goes to the very top of the global warming establishment, and it compels
honest observers to ask: if the warmists were willing to deceive us on
this, what else have they been deceiving us about?
Between Climategate and Fakegate, the warmist establishment now has zero
credibility, and we must call all of their claims into question.
What concerns this sceptic when it comes to that kind of climate
alarmism and the bizarre politics it produces, is the possibility that
all too often stories precede science. There is a widespread idea that
there are actual and robust measurements of polar bear populations, the
extent of glaciers, the rate of sea-level rise, and the extent of polar
sea ice. But in each of these cases, closer examination of the available
evidence reveals the role of guesswork in the estimation of these
‘indicators’ of climate change and its effects. Worse still, perhaps, is
the possibility that these ‘indicators’ are presupposed to be in
decline for no other reason than the truism ‘climate change is
happening’.
Once you presuppose that climate change is happening, it doesn’t take
a leap of faith to incorporate the assumption into models to estimate
the health of polar bear populations, the progress of glaciers, and the
vulnerability of Arctic sea ice. There were no data showing polar bears
and Himalayan glaciers to be in terminal decline. Even measurements of
Arctic sea ice only extend back to 1979. And so knowledge which is
patchy, based on sparse data, estimates and guesswork is fitted into an
encompassing storyline of climate change. Really, they ought to remain
disconnected stories, at least until more robust studies can show
otherwise.
The most extreme conditions on the planet are naturally the least
accessible and therefore the least understood. Such regions aren’t
simply distant; our primary access to them is through the imagination. It is no coincidence, then, that stories about climate change seem to be
located at the hottest, highest, deepest and coldest parts of the
world. The most alarming stories about climate change rest where there
is the least data. Like explorers in search of Yeti, climate researchers
hunt frozen landscapes hoping to make the myth a reality.
The Gleick episode exposes again a
movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization
over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush
its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate
change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath.
Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the
serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David
doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty
club and only hits himself square in the forehead.
For the record, I greatly resent being called a “denier,” with its clear — and fully intended, as the LA Times analogy
reveals — connotation to Nazis. I am a skeptic. I don’t “deny” AGW,
because I don’t have sufficient knowledge of how climate works, or its
history, to confidently have a strong opinion about it. What I do deny
is that the proponents of the theory do have such knowledge or
competence, and my doubts were buttressed by the release not just of the
emails that revealed their duplicitous and unscientific behavior, but
of the shoddy and unreplicable climate data sets and models themselves.
So, yes, I guess I am a denier. Here’s what I deny.
I deny that science is a compendium of knowledge to be
ladled out to school children like government-approved pablum (and
particularly malnutritious pablum), rather than a systematic method of attaining such knowledge.
As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself,
I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the
atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them
with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable
and unscientific to think that those who believe they do have such
understanding suffer from hubris. To paraphrase Carl Sagan,
extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.
There’s a story out of Canada
about a guy who was arrested and told by officers that he was being
charged with possession of a firearm. Normally, you would expect this to
happen after they found someone in possession of a firearm.
He was given an attorney who was informed of the charges and even had
a date set with a judge for a bail hearing for this charge. At no point
did he ever possess a firearm, but they kept him locked up and moved
forward with the charges.
With his wife hauled down to the station and his children taken in
for questioning by the relevant agency for possible endangerment issues,
he signed a document that allowed police to search his home. They did
and there was still no firearm found in his possession. Finally, they
let him go free.
The evidence seems to come from a he said/she said scenario because
his 4-year-old daughter drew a picture of a firearm and said the guy
holding it was her daddy who would fight off bad guys and monsters. Yes,
a child who thinks monsters are real was used as evidence for the
arrest instead of, you know, actual possession of a firearm.
On Thursday, February 23, President Barack Obama was on the UM campus to
tell the biggest bunch of lies about energy in America I have heard
compressed into a single speech.
This President has already set records wasting taxpayer’s money on a
range of so-called clean energy and renewable energy “investments”. Solyndra, the solar panel company that went bust and stuck taxpayers
with a half-billion in loan guarantees is just one of those
“investments” and I keep waiting for someone to ask why public funds are
being flushed down the toilet when, if the companies involved were
viable, they could not raise private venture capital? [...]
All politicians put the best face on their pet projects, but to flat-out
lie about one of the most idiotic ideas to replace oil when this nation
has enough oil, domestically and offshore, known and estimated to
exist, defies the imagination. It is an insult to every one of us. And
Obama wants to pump $14 million into algae, otherwise known as pond
scum. [...]
Barack Obama has been lying about so many things for so long I doubt he
even knows when he is lying or even cares. It’s not enough to dismiss
this saying that all politicians lie because many do not. Some in
Congress right now are desperately trying to get the public in general
and voters in particular to understand that America has more debt per
capita than Greece. We are on the precipice of financial collapse and
Barack Obama just wants to spend more and more and more; some of it on
pond scum. [...]
This is the same President who stopped the building of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada that would provide more oil for our refineries and
not cost the American taxpayer one penny to build. This is the same President who imposed a moratorium on oil from the Gulf of Mexico even after the courts told him to remove it. It caused the loss of an estimated 12,000 jobs while rigs departed for Cuba, Brazil and Mexico.
Between now and November, the President will be out campaigning and telling the same lies. The rise in the cost of oil isn’t just a seasonal thing though prices have usually gone up in the summertime when people
travel more for vacations. It’s up because the Iranians are closing in
on making their own nuclear weapons and their own missiles to hit, not
just Israel, but the U.S. It’s up because it is essential to ensure that
the tankers oil-producing nations around the Persian Gulf can enter and
exist it via the Strait of Harmuz.
The world isn’t running out of oil and is not about to run out. The
Earth floats on an ocean of oil despite the rising demand from Asia and
other developing nations. To replace foreign oil with algae-based fuel
would require a chemically-controlled tank the size of the State of
Colorado, about 69.3 million acres.
An Ohio woman who compared animal-welfare work to the liberation of
World War II concentration camps has been charged with soliciting a hit
man to fatally shoot or slit the throat of a random fur-wearer, federal
authorities said.
