Posts Tagged climate

If any­body wants some­thing to point to when argu­ing that the Great Global Warm­ing Debate has mutated into an ide­o­log­i­cal boon­dog­gle one need look no far­ther than this head­line in the March 5^th issue of the San Fran­cisco Chronicle.

Gov­ern­ment should defend cli­mate science

Tim­o­thy E. Wirth
Fri­day, March 5, 2010

That should make the point right there.  If you thought the PC Police were bad, wait’ll you meet up with the Global Warm­ing Gestapo!  But, hey! What fun is shoot­ing fish in a bar­rel? Every­body knows there are always tastier tid­bits lurk­ing fur­ther beneath the sur­face. Meme-fish. Trope-fish. Fixation-fish.

Mr. Wirth opens his arti­cle about cli­mate sci­ence thusly and also proves him­self not loaded-adjective-averse (empha­sis mine — ed):

The sta­tus quo has many guardians, but the future is an orphan. From our out-of-control health care sys­tem to lax bank­ing reg­u­la­tion, vested finan­cial inter­ests are hav­ing a field day dis­tort­ing the facts in ser­vice of another year’s or decade’s profits.

Out-of-control. Lax (not the air­port). Vested.  All in the ser­vice of prof­its (shriek!!), which, from the con­text, one would judge that Mr. Wirth con­sid­ers very naughty things indeed.

Then even shy, nor­mally retir­ing mod­i­fiers become loaded under Mr. Wirth’s tutelage.

…and a few mis­takes in a 3,000-page, 130-country sci­en­tific col­lab­o­ra­tion are blown grossly out of pro­por­tion to dis­credit the enter­prise — indeed, the entire sci­en­tific process. [NOTE: OK, I’ll grant you that the entire sci­en­tific process is not a mod­i­fier; the tech­ni­cal term is … the-drama-queen-said.]

Where to start? How about with the entire sci­en­tific process? I don’t think any­body was dis­cred­it­ing the entire sci­en­tific process other than the peo­ple who were push­ing an agenda and per­vert­ing the entire sci­en­tific process to do it. That’s Item One.

Item Two is that, if you have an hypoth­e­sis and any­body can break it in any way the hypoth­e­sis is invalid. That’s Sci­en­tific Method 101. You don’t need a few mis­takes.

Item Three: how do you blow a mis­take out of pro­por­tion? What is the proper pro­por­tion for putting false­hoods in a sci­en­tific paper?

The British sci­en­tist in the mid­dle of November’s Cli­mate­Gate scan­dal says that con­trary to what Al Gore and many in the media claim, the debate con­cern­ing man­made global warm­ing is not over.

“There is still much that needs to be under­taken to reduce uncer­tain­ties, not just for the future, but for the instru­men­tal (and espe­cially the palaeo­cli­matic) past as well,” Phil Jones, the for­mer head of Britain’s Cli­matic Research Unit told the BBC.

Then, in what some might call just pure showing-off, Mr. Wirth proves that up to now he was just teas­ing us, and demon­strates that when he really gets going he can be truly hilarious.

The IPCC has been one of the most impor­tant and far-reaching sci­en­tific under­tak­ings in his­tory, involv­ing thou­sands of the world’s top sci­en­tists — who are not paid for this work.

Not paid.  Thou­sands.  And all avoid­ing any hint of a taint by those lurk­ing sirens: PROFITS!

Of course, the Hin­dus­tan Times might take issue with that.

The Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change (IPCC)’s faulty claim that most of the Himalayan glac­i­ers would melt by 2035 had helped Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Insti­tute (TERI) win grants worth sev­eral mil­lion pounds, a news report in London-based Sun­day Times said.

R.K. Pachauri heads both —IPCC and TERI.

We now return con­trol of real­ity to you as we leave what­ever planet we have vis­ited in order to inspect the bona fides of a Global Walarmist cri de coeur.

Oh. I for­got to men­tion Mr. Wirth’s cre­den­tials. You remem­ber him. The guy who wants gov­ern­ment to MAKE us all believe in Global Warm­ing? What, for the record, does he do?

Tim­o­thy E. Wirth is pres­i­dent of the United Nations Foundation.

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Unless, of course, Murkowski was always plan­ning to do this and this is just a coincidence.

I think a lot of them were still feel­ing shocky from ’06, ’08, and the inces­sant with­er­ing media fire and it took some­body to retrieve the fallen stan­dard and say, Let’s go!

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Lucy would have a hard time splainin this one to Ethel Mertz, much less Ricky Ricardo:

Last week the IPCC refused to com­ment so it has yet to explain how some­one who admits to lit­tle exper­tise on glac­i­ers was over­see­ing such a report.

I’m get­ting a clearer pic­ture of how it hap­pened that the UN pub­lished its report’s Sum­mary of Con­clu­sions before the study was over.

I would gen­er­ally would pre­fer that peo­ple who have a lot of say in how the world works, and and can at least tan­gen­tially influ­ence my life, have at least mod­er­ate lev­els of exper­tise and judg­ment and be right most of the time.  But I must admit to a wee bit of schaden­freude as these aggres­sively pro­moted houses of cards seem to be tum­bling down as one per­son after another feels it safe to tip­toe out of the waters of Global Warm­ing ortho­doxy with­out get­ting gunned down.

This report from the Times of Lon­don makes one scary aspect of the UN IPCC Report, the con­tention that the Himalayan glac­i­ers will be gone in 25 years, seem anal­o­gous to the Whis­per­ing Game.  It also bears a strong resem­blance to Chicken Lit­tle, only in this ver­sion Foxey Loxey, instead of get­ting a tasty poul­try ragout, ends up with a Nobel Prize, an Oscar, and a for­tune.

There is fur­ther dis­cus­sion which men­tions the strate­gic impli­ca­tions in The Amer­i­can Inter­est.

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When asked why he robbed banks Willie Sut­ton replied That’s where the money is.

But bank-robbing can be a messy busi­ness and there is always the chance that some­one is going to get mad at you and do some­thing dis­tinctly unfriendly like try to shoot you dead or put you in a steel box for a very long time.  And the money really ain’t that great.  If you started in Los Ange­les, drove to New York City, and robbed every bank you passed along the way you wouldn’t get a bil­lion dollars.

Kofi, Kojo, & Co., the Annan Gang, prob­a­bly got more than that for allow­ing the UN Oil for Food pro­gram to turn into some­thing a swindler like Bernie Mad­off could only dream about.  Plus, Bernie went to the pokey.  The Annan mob just drifted off to where ever peo­ple, who have become rich beyond the dreams of avarice, go when they want to keep a low profile.

Accord­ing to our friends at the increas­ingly ironically-titled Hot Air there is a new mob on the scene and their take looks to make the Oil for Food scam look like a school-yard bully steal­ing lunch money.  The ulti­mate con:  An invest­ment scam where the investors don’t EXPECT any return, because what they’re doing is buy­ing grace from the high priests of the new religion.

And they ask a very good question:

Why did the UN pick a for­mer rail­way engi­neer with no back­ground in cli­mate sci­ence to lead its effort on AGW?  Clearly, Pachauri was selected for his influ­ence rather than his sci­en­tific expertise.

Clearly, if you wanted to study some­thing which required astro-physics, mete­o­rol­ogy, arche­ol­ogy, and geol­ogy you’d pick an econ­o­mist.  Just like you’d pick a coal miner if you wanted a new head for the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Commission.

Kinda makes you long for the old ver­sion of The Bad Guy.  At least when the jig was up they shot it out.  Sad­dam Hus­sein cow­ered in a hole.  Marc Rich bought a par­don from Bill Clinton.

HERE’s the story.

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