Christopher Monckton excoriates the Stern Report and the "science" behind the global warming policy pushes:

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

And Chris Mooney thinks that there's a Republican war on science?

Rand

Good post.

There is absolutely zero probability that the CO2 rise preceeded the temperature rise. If this were true, then a mechanism for this rise would have to be postulated. The only possible one is massive methane release that is later oxidized. There is NO increase in methane in the records of the magnitude needed to produce the rise in CO2. For those who do not know, the post ice age rise in CO2, over less than 1000 years, is as much as our entire increase based upon the Mauna Loa data from burning fossil fuels.

Dennis

The medieval warming period is and should be increased in modern articles... The recent temperature rise is still high and steep if you take the hump into account.

Dennis,

There is absolutely zero probability that the CO2 rise preceeded the temperature rise.

I wouldn't say never. One mechanism is that CO2 consumption by vegation might slow down below that of CO2 production by animal life, decay, and volcanic activity. Still that explanation is no good when the CO2 increase follows rather than precedes the end of the ice age.

I don't think that Republican War on Science can be denied any more than Holocaust can. Just ask yourself, what was the only bill that Bush vetoed? Call it "Bush's War on Science" if you want, the result is the same.

Democrat's War on Science is just as vicious, and may be progressing even better, because they control universities. But it tells us very little about the other one.

Mayeb we should get government the hell out of science.

(A goal with which Bush's veto is consistent...)

Nice Idea, meet Real World.

Two words: Manhattan Project.

To very loosely paraphrase Niven & Pournelle: forswearing federal involvement in biotech may not turn out to be an optimum solution.

I don't like it either. But I like having Western Civilization around.

Pete Zaitcev - Since you were the first to bring in the Holocaust, I'll continue in a like vein. Was it a war on science to boycott Mengele and the rest of the nazi concentration camp human experimentation data? Were the experiments themselves, science? The poster child for using the data was the hypothermia experiments and eventually it was that very useful data set that broke the embargo back in the 90s.

Were we all engaging in a war on science for decades by maintaining that boycott? If that's the case then there's no point in having ethics committees vetting experiments. They deny permission to do certain experiments because they are unethical *exactly as Bush did* with his stem cell restriction rules for federal government funding.

The legislature, the executive, the political class reserves for itself the right to say XYZ may be scientific but you can't do it anyway. This is not a war on science. It is the mark of a sane society where human beings are ends and not means.