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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Why the major media con­tinue to go along with this stuff is a won­der to me. Doesn’t even one of them want to be a real jour­nal­ist again, if only just for a day?

Accord­ing to the edi­tor and one of the writ­ers for National Review Online, it is a the old misdirection-of-attention gag.  If the House passes the Sen­ate bill as is there will be no need for a con­fer­ence com­mit­tee, no need for a sec­ond round of affir­ma­tion in each house. That’s the ball game. The whole Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion brouhaha is a swin­dle.  If the swin­dle suc­ceeds, with peo­ple con­grat­u­lat­ing them­selves because it will never make the next hur­dle, when there won’t be one, it will be the crown­ing achieve­ment of the Democ­rats’ and the media strat­egy of the last 30 years: just lie.

Then we can all join hands and sing Baraaaack Obaaama, he is the pres­i­dent
Baraaaack Obaaama, he’s leader of this land as Barack Obama stands in the Rose Gar­den, smirk­ing that patented ‘ol cute-as-the-dickens Barack Obama Smirk, and announces, for one and all, to the 57 states and all the ships at sea:

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All this talk about The People’s Seat.  Pshaw!  At least if you’re a Demo­c­rat Massachussette.

“She’s kind of aloof,” the Demo­c­rat says. “There are peo­ple who will vote for her who don’t really have a sense that they like or trust her. The Kennedys aren’t really fond of her. She basi­cally announced her cam­paign the day Ted died, and didn’t give Vicki the oppor­tu­nity to think about [run­ning to replace her hus­band]. From the Kennedy side of the ledger, there’s no great love for Coak­ley. They look at her as kind of a preda­tory politician.”

Ah, Vicki Kennedy.  Vic­to­ria Reg­gie that was.  From Boston Crow­ley, Mass­a­chu­setts Louisiana, rice coun­try, a few miles west of Boston Com­mons Lafayette,  ground zero for the Boston Irish Cajun cul­ture who went to U Mass New­comb Col­lege at Tulane and then to Har­vard Law Tulane Law school where she learned all about the com­mon law civil code as they prac­tice it in Mass­a­chu­setts France and Louisiana before she gave up her career to go into rehab work full time and marry Ted Kennedy.

Good ol’ Mass­a­chu­setts girl.  But, then she DID marry a Kennedy.

First Car­o­line and now Vicki.

Will it NEVER END?

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Felling OK?  Com­fort­able?  Feel like a drink?  A Xanax?  Total Sen­sory Deprivation?

Because I have to tell you that the home stretch of the Health Care mon­ster is going to be like a blind­folded back­wards race on a merry-go-round.

Look­ing back­ward (apolo­gies to Edw. Bel­lamy — see?  The Nolan­im­rod can apol­o­gize with the best of ‘em) we can find a pre­view of what the Democ­rats are going to pull.

Remem­ber l’affaire Plame?  A spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor was appointed to see if any­one had vio­lated the laws against dis­clos­ing the iden­tity of active CIA field agents when he talked to Bob Novak and Judith Miller.

Fitzger­ald waded through Wash­ing­ton and George­town search­ing for the male­fac­tors who had dis­closed Plame’s iden­tity while Plame’s hus­band, a James Bond man­qué, talked non­sense to any reporter who would lis­ten (there were plenty) and started on a book and a lawsuit.

Mean­while the peo­ple who daily try to grind our minds into mush with their con­tin­u­ous assaults on logic and fact were howl­ing for the blood of Dick Cheney.  Said James Bond man­qué, Joe Wil­son, was mewl­ing to the press at every chance, even though it was start­ing to become clear that when he had taken a job for the admin­is­tra­tion and then come back and called his employer a bunch of naughty names he had divulged a bunch of top secret info.

No mat­ter.  They were out for Cheney and pos­si­bly Bush so they were tak­ing all the help they could get.

It didn’t mat­ter that the “expo­sure” of Judith Plame didn’t meet the require­ments of the act.  She wasn’t an agent.  She had a desk at Lan­g­ley and an ID with her pic­ture on it and if you wanted to find out if she were work­ing for the CIA all you had to do was call up and make an appointment.

It didn’t mat­ter that Richard Armitage, who was Colin Powell’s deputy, was the one who men­tioned Judith Plame. It didn’t mat­ter that Colin Pow­ell knew this.  It didn’t mat­ter that Patrick Fitzger­ald knew this. All that mat­tered was that Fitzger­ald spend a lot of time and mil­lions of dol­lars inves­ti­gat­ing a mat­ter that every­body in Wash­ing­ton knew the answers to.

And they con­victed Scooter Libby of a per­jury for lying about a crime that didn’t exist when the author­i­ties knew from before the inves­ti­ga­tions started who did it.

I cry no tears for Libby; he’s a polit­i­cal pro, he knows the score, and if he want to play in that arena he has to take his lumps.

But for six months or a year it was front page stuff and we were all sup­posed to care about it.

Well, push is com­ing to shove in the Health Care thing and we’re all going to feel efforts to enlist us on one side or another.

Remem­ber: the Plame thing was about a crime that didn’t hap­pen “com­mit­ted” by a per­son who was known even to the inves­ti­ga­tor before he began his inves­ti­ga­tion. But we still heard about it for half a year.

An avalanche of  … what did Howard Beal call it?

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