Some thoughts about the “moderate” Jon Huntsman:

Nearly everything “liberal” about Huntsman is symbolic. His campaign’s iconic moment was an unprovoked Twitter comment in which he wrote: “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

While politically loaded, this statement is nearly substanceless. A president’s “Belie[f] in evolution” has not had any bearing on public policy in a good while. And scientifically, the statement doesn’t mean much — “believing in” something is more the business of faith than science.

And “trust[ing] scientists on global warming,” taken literally isn’t actually agreement with Al Gore’s fevered warnings of 20-foot sea-level rises or endorsement of Democrats’ big-government energy proposals.

Science involves detail, nuance, and acknowledgment of uncertainty. Bluster about “believing in science” is just a self-congratulatory liberal trope meant to denigrate conservative rubes from the red states clinging bitterly to their guns and religion.

It’s identity politics, and Huntsman is identifying as a liberal or a moderate. That MSNBC hosts and liberal writers fall for this trick is telling, but just as telling is how much conservatives also buy into it.

It comes back to the mistaken concept of many that “science” is knowledge, rather than a process by which we achieve it. It is my own belief in science that creates my skepticism about AGW, because the process is intrinsically flawed, and the leading practitioners of “climate science” have betrayed it.

[Update a few minutes later]

I often joke about firing up the SUVs to stave off the next glacial advance, but now there’s a paper that says greenhouse gases will do exactly that. Of course, they still think that global warming is worse than a mile-thick sheet of ice. Have to stick with the narrative.

…from Climaquiddick. It’s hard to read these and still believe that “the science is settled.”

Exposed.

I’ve always had high cholesterol (around 240 total), but I’ve never bought into the statin thing. And over the past year, since I went mostly paleo in my diet, I’ve gotten it down to 207 (as of October), with HDL of eighty and triglycerides below fifty, so for me at least, diet makes a big difference (not by cutting out cholesterol, but by cutting out the wrong carbs). I’ve also lost almost twenty pounds, though that wans’t a goal (and I gained seven or eight pounds over the holidays, what with the mashed potatoes and bread with holiday meals). The notion that “you are what you eat” and that fat makes you fat and cholesterol gives you high cholesterol is primitive thinking, and yet it remains the medical mainstream view. And while it’s been good for the drug companies, I think that it’s killed millions over the decades, including my father.