Let’s ignore McKibben’s barmy notion that man has it in his power to control global climate by tinkering with CO2 output, and concentrate on that part of his tearful outburst that does make sense. Copenhagen never really had anything to do with “Climate Change”. Rather it was a trough-fest at which all the world’s greediest pigs gathered to gobble up as much of your money and my money as they possibly could, under the righteous-sounding pretence that they were saving the planet.
This nauseating piggery took two forms. First were the Third World kleptocracies – led by the likes of Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe – using “Global Warming” as an excuse to extort guilt-money from the Western nations.
Second, and much more dangerous, were the First World Corporatists who stand to make trillions of dollars using the Enron economics of carbon trading. Never mind all the talk of President Obama’s trifling $100 billion pledge. This is very small beer compared with the truly eye-watering sums that will be ransacked from our economies and our wallets over the next decades in the name of “carbon emissions reduction.”
Richard North has spotted this, even if virtually nobody else has. The key point, he notes, is the Copenhagen negotiators’ little-publicised decision to save the Kyoto Protocol. This matters because it was at Kyoto that the mechanisms for establishing a global carbon market were established. Carbon trading could not possibly exist without some form of agreement between all the world’s governments on emissions: the market would simply collapse. By keeping Kyoto alive, the sinister troughers of global corporatism have also kept their cash cow alive.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a group of thousands of scientists in 194 countries around the world, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — has issued several comprehensive reports in which they indicate that they have become convinced that “global warming” is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it, and that Man is the chief cause of it. They say that there is a consensus of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but a growing number of prominent scientists disagree. Meanwhile, some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous.
Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature. It’s often been said that once a conclusion is reached, proper scientists set about trying to prove themselves wrong. Failing in that, they arrive at a statement that appears — based on all available data — to describe a limited aspect about how the world appears to work. And not all scientists are willing to follow this path. My most excellent friend Martin Gardner once asked a parapsychologist just what sort of evidence would convince him he had erred in coming to a certain conclusion. The parascientist replied that he could not imagine any such situation, thus — in my opinion — removing him from the ranks of the scientific discipline rather decidedly.
History supplies us with many examples where scientists were just plain wrong about certain matters, but ultimately discovered the truth through continued research. Science recovers from such situations quite well, though sometimes with minor wounds.
I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid.
Emphasis mine. I think that claiming that there is a “consensus” and that “the science is settled” are semantically equivalent to “I can’t imagine any such situation.” Such people are many things, but they are not people who truly respect, or even understand, science. They are politicians, encouraging political acts.
[Update a while later]
I’ve deleted my reference to Little Green Footballs, pending the outcome of an ongoing civil email conversation with Charles.
Government ministers can’t agree on the best way to take money from their own citizens, give it to an opaque, above-the-law organization, and yet still control it; because, of course, with all that money comes power. Negotiators are skittish about how they can ensure that the money pledged will actually be paid into the pot, and if it does, who gets to dole out the funds. Everybody wants a piece of it, but nobody trusts anybody.
Well, they shouldn’t.
Unfortunately, as he notes, this is only a temporary setback. The leftists will regroup, and make other attempts in the future.
We now have substantial evidence, from several independent sources, that the data used as the basis for the IPCC report has been adjusted in undocumented ways, and those adjustments account for nearly all the warming we are told has been caused by humans.
The manufactured consensus continues to fall apart.
Given all this manipulation and cherry-picking, you should ignore the press releases that will undoubtedly be coming from NOAA (when they return from snowy, cold Copenhagen), NASA, and Hadley about how this has been among the warmest years, and how the last decade was the warmest on record.
I guess that Heidi Cullen will be calling for the former head of meteorology of her employer to be “decertified.”
A couple hundred thousand years ago, the planet became a much colder and drier place. In Africa, deserts expanded, species were wiped out and the human race was in deep trouble.
Climate change! But it wasn’t warming. And it wasn’t caused by humanity. Or at least, there’s no case made that it was. I continue to think that a cooling planet is much more to be feared than a warming one, and I’m thinking more and more that it’s not necessarily unlikely.
…science has more epistemic depth than most of us can cope with. That water quenches thirst and puts out fires, I can confirm by experience. That it is composed of hydrogen molecules bonded to oxygen molecules by electromagnetic forces, I take on trust. “What the deuce is it to me?” I take it on trust because water’s real useful (see above). I’d likely be skeptical about the hydrogen/oxygen business if it were detached from the thirst-quenching and fire-extinguishing. It sounds improbable on the face of it, and one can easily think up folkish objections, of the kind that creationists make against evolution. (Hydrogen’s highly flammable. If there’s hydrogen in water, why isn’t water flammable? Etc., etc.)
When unmoored from utility, abstract ideas have to appeal to the human mind on their merits; and the human mind is so structured that the only abstract ideas it regards as having merit are those that concord with the “naïve duality” that is our default metaphysic — “medium-sized dry goods” being acted on by human wills, or by invisible spirits possessed of human-like wills. That’s as much epistemic depth as most of us can handle. Abstract ideas at odds with that schema just irritate us. And of course, an abstract idea widely held among people we dislike for personal, social, or tribal reasons, is doubly unappealing.
When the science has as powerful real-world implications as climate “science” (sorry, it’s hard to say it without scare quotes at this point) does, it must be trusted much more than it currently deserves to be, based on the behavior of its ostensible practioners.
Here’s my question for those who insist that the current warming trend is a result of the Industrial Revolution: if so, then what is your explanation for all of the previous temperature spikes? Why should we assume that this one, and this one only, is a result of CO2 build up, and not simply part of the natural cycle (which is what it appears to be in the longer view) and a coincidence?
…soon after my request was fired off, I was informed by NCAR’s counsel that the organization is, in fact, not a federal agency—because its budget is laundered through the National Science Foundation—and thus is under no obligation to provide information to the public.
“Why don’t you put all your e-mails online for everyone to see?” Trenberth helpfully suggested to me. “My e-mail is none of your business.”
Now, generally, I would agree. It’s every American citizen’s hallowed duty to mind his or her own freaking business—except in those rare instances when one of those citizens happens to be a taxpayer-funded eco-crusader utilizing his appointed station in life to promote policy that sticks its nose into the lives of every American.
I’m afraid snarky columnizing, on the other hand, is not federally funded—at least not yet.
In fact, Trenberth’s work is one reason the nation is moving toward rationed energy use via cap-and-trade legislation. His work is one reason the Environmental Protection Agency, through its endangerment findings on carbon emissions, can regulate industry by decree. It is Trenberth’s government-financed science that drives public policy across this country. Yet Trenberth has less accountability to the public than the local parks department.
He is not alone. The Competitive Enterprise Institute—one of those troglodyte-funded, big-screen-television-loving outfits—was forced to file three notices of intent to file suit against NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, demanding the organization provide documents and raw data that were requested under the Freedom of Information Act three years ago.
Chris Horner, an attorney and senior fellow at CEI working on the NASA case, says of NCAR: “Without government, these jobs would not exist; that is a reasonable threshold test to determine whether documents should be available to the taxpayer.”
But if they release it to us, we might know just how extensive the fraud is.
Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.
Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
Gee, whyever would they do that?
It would certainly explain the “warming” in Siberia. More Mann-caused phenomena.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Wait a minute. I just reread that. It wasn’t the CRU — it was the Hadley Centre. So, is this collusion, confirmation bias, what?
Continent after continent, researchers are seeing no warming in the unprocessed data (see one thorough analysis here).
For years, I have been a true skeptic on the subject. That is, I wasn’t convinced that the planet was warming, but I was willing to concede the possibility, even probability, and be convinced, though I never thought that it justified the costly and draconian, even totalitarian measures being proposed to deal with it.
I’ve reached a tipping point. Now consider me a “denier.” The burden of proof has shifted, completely. The climate scientific community has clearly been engaged in a toxic combination of groupthink, overadoration of their theories and confirmation bias, and outright fraud, not to mention hiding a lot more than the decline. Whoever finally blew the whistle on them last month is, in my opinion, an unknown hero to humanity.
I’ll have more thoughts on this, and the implications for national and global policies, at PJM in the morning.
