Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Economist’s Climate Alarmism

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Thoughts on their backing off:

…in January, they gave up on the global climate treaty approach, and are now acknowledging the many nuances inherent to climate modeling. This is a sign that the global intellectual and political establishment is gradually distancing itself from the climate radicals and taking a more thoughtful and balanced approach. We also hope it’s a sign that they’re beginning to realize a more fundamental truth about the politics of climate change: that green hysteria and doom-mongering are leading causes of climate skepticism.

I’ve always been appropriately skeptical about the modeling:

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.

I deny that skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is epistemologically equivalent to skepticism about evolution, and I resent the implications that if one is skeptical about the former, one must be similarly skeptical about the latter, and “anti-science.”

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.

The world seems to be catching up to me.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Low-Info Hipster Morons Who Voted For Obama

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…learn that elections have consequences:

That mean old company won’t throw extra cash at them so that they can live the New York City lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed! Dear Dudes: Companies are in business to stay in business and employ people. Obamacare regulations are making that increasingly more difficult; the costs are staggering and burdensome. That whole “you can keep your plan” deal? Obama lied.

And anyone with half a brain would have known that. But they’re products of the public educational system, and universities.

Business, Economics, Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Poor Poor Pitiful Mann

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The involuntary public figure. And Monckton is piling on:

I, too, can name-drop sanctimoniously, just like Michael E. Mann.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been subject to a constant onslaught of character attacks and smears on websites, in op-eds, by a politicized and now-discredited clerk in the House of Lords acting without the authority of the House, in Michael E. Mann’s Climategate emails, and on left-leaning news outlets, usually by front groups or individuals tied to global-warming profiteers of the traffic-light tendency (the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds): groups like Greenpeace, Deutsche Bank, the Environmental Defense Fund, Munich Re, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

As the website WattsUpWithThat has frequently pointed out, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the data that now comprehensively disprove the once-accepted scientific “evidence” simply because it is inconvenient for many who are profiting from attacking fossil fuel use.

Being the focus of such attacks has a lead lining: I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change. Reluctant at first, I remain reluctant embrace this role, but nevertheless I choose to use my position in the public eye to inform the discourse surrounding the issue of climate change.

Despite continued albeit diminishing skepticism in official quarters, in reality the evidence against dangerous human-caused climate change is now very strong. By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, helping to stave off the mass extinctions that would follow from the next – and long overdue – Ice Age. And storms like extra-tropical system Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the oft-precedented heat, drought, and wild-fires of last summer cannot in logic, reason, or science be attributed to “global warming” that has become conspicuous chiefly by its near-total absence over the past two decades and perhaps more. In a deterministic climate object operating on a rational world, that which has not happened cannot have caused that which has.

If we continue down this path of lavishly-funded nonsense, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet—one with more extreme Socialism, more pronounced and widespread scientific illiteracy, worse episodes of cant even than those of Michael E. Mann (if that were possible), and greater competition for diminishing taxpayer subsidies. It will be worse than we ever thought.

My emphasis. As a commenter at JunkScience noted, that’s bumper sticker material, there.