Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Economist’s Climate Alarmism

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.

The Hypocrisy Of The Left

Yeah, I know,that’s an evergreen post title. This time it applies to their strange silence about Mike Bloomberg spending millions to deprive us of our civil rights:

Apparently the New York Times‘ editorial board’s description of politically-active billionaires as “the perfect illustration of the squalid state of political money” only applies to those of the conservative variety. And how about President Obama, who just months ago was slamming the activities of conservative billionaires on the campaign trail and proposing a Constitutional Amendment to muzzle them? According to his former campaign manager Jim Messina, who appeared Sunday on ABC’s This Week, not only does he fully support the mayor’s activities, but they are leaving the door open to using their new Super PAC, Organizing for Action, to run their own ads complementing the mayor’s campaign.

For the record, I fully support Nurse Bloomberg’s First Amendment right to waste his money on the odious cause of taking away my Second Amendment rights.