Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Meltdown of Climate Science


It has been a tough anniversary for climate alarmists.  5,000 emails circulated among the world's leading climate scientists were released on the second anniversary of the original leaks that derailed the UN redistribution train headed into 2009's Copenhagen summit.

Noman would be uncomfortable with the leaking were not the confederates of climate fraud so monopolistically entrenched in academe, popular media, business and government.  They don't fight fairly, so it's hardly upsetting when someone pounds them with brass knuckles.  Neither do they learn from experience.  The original revelations just stunned them; they didn't deter them.  They've stuck to the same story, and agenda, despite public exposure of fraud and intimidation.
Like the first "climategate" leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public. 
The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called "the gold standard" of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 
To Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) ... the leaker or leakers responsible are attempting to "sabotage the international climate talks" and should be identified and brought "to justice." 
One might sympathize with Mr. Markey's outrage if, say, the emails were maliciously rewritten or invented. But at least one scientist involved—Mr. Mann—has confirmed that the emails are genuine, as were the first batch released two years ago. So any malfeasance revealed therein ought to be blamed on the scientists who wrote them, rather than on the whistleblower who exposed them. 
This is the real significance of the climategate emails. They show that major scientists who inform the IPCC can't be trusted to stick to the science and avoid political activism. This, in turn, has very worrying implications for the major international policy decisions adopted on the basis of their research.
Bret Stephens chimes in, albeit with a secularist view of what he calls "climate religion," to pillory climate science as "another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen." (In the event that he wanted to, but couldn't, cite St. Paul correctly, the quote from Hebrews (1: 11) is: "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.")  
Stephens' issues with religion aside, he has a point about the fundamental pretentiousness, neigh silliness, of climate science.
This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.


Unfortunately for those on Chicken Little's bandwagon, the financial crisis intervened to require the aforementioned wealthy, but struggling, countries to address real, not imaginary and politically convenient, problems.

Stephens continues:
A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself. 
That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.
But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere. 
Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.
Stephens certainly doesn't know much about religion.  But, he can identify scientific charlatanism when he sees it.

Thank God for the FOIA leaker, who has flooded the scientific laboratory and public square with disinfecting light, transparency and full disclosure: truth's best defenses against private actors' grab for public money--obscene amounts of it--through the agency of government.

Noman's only question is why these politicized scientists are not out of their tenured jobs, perhaps even in jail for attempting to defraud the public.

Pray God that the climate hucksters are increasingly laughed out of the halls of political power by revelations of their shoddy research and shoddier politics.  Perhaps the end truly is near, though in ways scientists didn't intend while plotting to manipulate findings and silence opposition.


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