Providence intervenes to chastise climate-change fanatics and save the world
Anyone who doubts the operation of a beneficent Providence in human affairs ought to contemplate the exquisite timing of what has come to be called Climategate, i.e., the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (my emphasis):
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline“.
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
And so on for hundreds of pages. Curious readers at leisure might wish to peruse this searchable database of all the leaked emails: The Smoking Gun.
These emails were leaked on November 20. The Copenhagen climate change summit starts today, December 7, the day that now lives infamy for more reasons than one. First there was Pearl Harbor. Now there is orgy of bad faith that is Copenhagen. General Eisenhower, Admiral Nimitz, and their colleagues took care to redress the first outrage. It’s up to us — aided by that beneficent Providence I just mentioned — to redress the second.
Admire the timing: On the one hand, had the emails been leaked much earlier, the engines of obfuscation and exoneration might have had more of an opportunity to spin, twist, fold, spindle, and mutilate the story out of all recognition.
Maybe Barbara Boxer would have succeeded in her effort to prosecute those responsible for the leaks, thus transforming it from a story about the hijacking of science for political profit into a story about the machinations of the vast right-wing conspiracy to, to, to . . . well, she wouldnt have said to tell the truth, but you can see where her story is going. (Heres a question for call-me-Senator Boxer: why is Daniel Ellsberg a hero for leaking some top-secret Pentagon documents to The New York Times, thus compromising national security, while those who have just blown the whistle on what is perhaps the most egregious example of scientific fraud in our time are guilty of being traitors to the Progressive Cause?)
On the other hand, had the emails been leaked even a few days later, public outrage at the fraud might not have built to a sufficiently furious crescendo, which it certainly has done. Your proverbial man in the street has a lot of respect for scientists, i.e., those who pursue the truth about the natural world wherever it may lead. Part of the cost of that respect, however, is the fact that, once violated, it never recovers. The blow just delivered to the Climate Carbon Concession is devastating. The full extent of the damage has not yet been tabulated: indeed, it has not yet been fully experienced. The loss of credibility is spreading and accelerating. People are beginning to ask all sorts of embarrassing questions. Why, for example, should they give up incandescent light bulbs, which shed a pleasing light, for the Eastern European Cold War fluorescent bulbs that flicker for a few seconds after you flip the light switch and then yield a dim, scrofulous, sickly glow? It was supposed to be “for the environment.” But what if the environment doesnt give a damn. (Except, what about all that mercury in the fluorescent bulbs?)
When The New York Times first reported on this mares nest of scientific fraud, it strove to downplay its effect: “The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted,” said Andrew Revkin in our former paper of record, “that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.”
Wrong on both counts, Andy. The evidence is that human activity has at best a negligible effect on climate change. And as for global warming: where is it? (A headline as I write: Up to 4 inches of snow in the foothills coming, a light dusting in Sacramento.) As the climatologist Roy Spencer shows in his forthcoming book The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the Worlds Top Climate Scientists, “The public has been misled by politicians and the news media who have selectively filtered the science and economics related to climate change and energy use. We have even reached the bizarre point where carbon dioxide is now considered a pollutant, rather than a scarce nutrient which is necessary for life on Earth to survive.” Spencer presents incontrovertible evidence showing that 1) the climate system is much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than has been claimed and 2) the climate system itself, not SUV-driving energy hogs, are responsible for the ever-present variability in the climate. (Though speaking of energy hogs, how about the carbon footprint of the Copenhagen conference itself: 1200 limos, 400 private planes, untold caviar wedges: its almost as bad as Al Gore’s Tennessee homestead.) The bottom line is that change is what the earths climate does. The old New England quip that If you don’t like the weather, just wait, turns out to a home truth about the climate, not grounds for exploitable left-wing hysteria.
As I noted in this space in October, that hysteria has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. At bottom, I wrote, it is a “wealth transfer scheme in which rich countries send money to poor countries because they, the rich ones, have (so the story goes) done more to insult the environment.” The findings (i.e., the manufacturings) of institutions like the Climate Research Unit are merely the trumped up (i.e., mendacious) pretexts for embarking upon the most gargantuan left-wing internationalist initiative in history.
The real story about the activities of the developed world in the last century or so is that through a combination of technological prowess and humanitarian largess, Europe, Australia, and the United States have enriched the entire world beyond the dreams of Croesus.
But not, of course, beyond the dreams of your common or garden variety progressive, who is always willing to suborn truth in the interests of a given political program.
This weekend the NBC branch of the Obama administration, Nightly News, briefly “reported” this story. Here is the gist of what they (Lester Holtz was off for the night) had to say: NBC concluded that the “vast majority of scientists” still believe in global warming. A scientist from Princeton U implied that the e-mails should be ignored.
Maybe we should be thankful that the Earth actually started cooling 30 years ago. If that hadn’t have happened they wouldn’t have needed the coverup and might have got away with it.
Brilliant! One of the best comments I have read on the movement that is Climate Change (the religion formerly known as Global Warming).
Weird that, according to the latest measurements using the best instruments, sea levels are not rising http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/spsl3.pdf , global temperatures have not risen for the last 10 years http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/12/november-2009-uah-global-temperature-update-0-50-deg-c/ and the latest NOAA report on National Climate has October as the 3rd coldest on record nationally http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=national&year=2009&month=10&submitted=Get+Report Yet none of this gets MSM coverage?
re: “Why, for example, should they give up incandescent light bulbs ….”
from this photographer’s point of view: from my cold dead hands.
The e-mails are an embarrassment but not proof of fraud. The computer programs, some of which have been examined by software engineers, are thermonuclear. I’ve done a little programming myself – about 45 years worth. The ones I’ve seen are of the nature: “You want a unicorn? What color?”.
Roger writes:
The blow just delivered to the Climate Carbon Concession is devastating. The full extent of the damage has not yet been tabulated: indeed, it has not yet been fully experienced.
You are right, Roger, it is Providence. Now pray hard all the time. You aint seen nothing yet.
What is sad is that the Democrat Party will go down with the Leftists that now own it. But such reckless and heedless governance cannot be forgotten, even after the individuals are forgiven.
You would not get away with falsely yelling Fire! in a crowded theater, but evidently you can get a lot of mileage (and even a Nobel prize) by staging hockey-stick-enhanced cinemascope-and-surround-sound planet fever alarm.
Are you old enough to remember the pre-post-Christian times, when humility was a virtue?
Providence is also where the blessings of carbon dioxide come from. No Carbon dioxide, no plant growth; No plant growth, no oxygen; No oxygen, no animal world, etc…; Carbon dioxide is not exclusively an artifact of civilization, its just as much the other way around.
roy lifquist writes:
“The e-mails are an embarrassment but not proof of fraud.”
From a technical,legal standpoint, you might be correct. With regard to Jones’ instructions to others to delete emails that were under FOI request, prosecutors will have to verify that the requests were in fact made, and so on. But that is ordinary work, they can do it. Enjoy your prison time, Phil.
Dear Theo,
I was not referring to legal proceedings but rather to the spin thread that this is just techno jargon – trick doesn’t really mean trick.
The code snippets I have seen are akin to an e-mail saying “delete my e-mail of 12/3/98, the one about modifying the raw data”.
Regards,
Roy
“As the climatologist Roy Spencer shows in his forthcoming book….”
Yet another of PJM’s unimpeachable scientific sources. This from Wikipedia:
“Spencer is a proponent of intelligent design, and rejects evolution as the mechanism for the origin of species.”
A perfect cause for PJM’s next crusade!
Roy writes:
“I was not referring to legal proceedings but rather to the spin thread that this is just techno jargon – trick doesn’t really mean trick.”
By now, we do not need to be concerned with the word “trick.” But when we look at what was being referred to, the patchwork supplementation of Mann’s stick with real temperatures to hide the decline in proxy measurements, we can be sure that, in plain and simple English, he was misleading people as to what the data showed. Pardon my French, but he had falsified the data.
Roger – The reason no one got exercised about Daniel Ellsworth’s leaking the Pentagon Papers can be summarized in a simple statement used by Jean Kirkpatrick in her speech at Ronald Reagan’s 1984 convention: Blame America first. The Climatologists have taken that to the next level: Blame Western Civilization first.
biblio44 @ #10: That is important information you have provided because it shows Roy Spencer is a thinking person. FYI, the Darwinian hypothesis is as fake as is global warming. Moreover, the Darwinists have been doing the same thing forever as the climatologists have been doing: they have squelched any scientific skepticism of their hypothesis. Hence, those disagreeing with them never get a chance to be “peer reviewed,” which today, as we know, can be one big joke. I might add, that the intelligent design hypothesis does not have to be accepted to be able to reject the Darwinian hypothesis. A rejection of the Darwinian hypothesis does not deny there is evolution. It only means that the Darwinian hypothesis is rejected because its explanation for macro-level evolution is implausible.
Considering PJM’s religion-tinged umbrella headline and lead –
The Warming Faithful Gather in Copenhagen
The UN Climate Change Conference has the unmistakable feel of a religious gathering –
I think Dr. Spencer’s support for intelligent design is particularly apropos to the discussion.
So Biblio’s unimpeachable scientific source is…Wikipedia! That’s how the global warming game works. Want to see the role Wikipedia and its global warming enforcer William Connelly play in manufacturing the warmist “consensus”? Check out this article from last year: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjU1ZDBhOGExOWRlNzc5ZDcwOTUxZWM3MWU2Mjc5MGE, which shows how Wikipedia agressively practices the kind of Stalinist “science” that warmists like Phil Jones and Michael Mann want to impose on the world: suppression of “inconvenient” evidence, Alinsky-style demonization and smears of respected scientists who disagree with the Lysenko-ist global warming “consensus,” etc., all in the service of the leftist political agenda. And “clever” types like Biblio are happy to take their marching orders, happy in their smug, self-satisfied, self-righteous ignorance. Biblio, you just proved Kimball’s point. QED. Thank you.
biblio44
If you have a problem with someone else’s opinion on a scientific topic, you need to rebut it scientifically. Since you have your own faith rather than science, however, you use the now widely understood tactics of fraud when attempting to portray someone else as less scientifically reasonable than you are. Your choice of rebuttal tactics, the tactics of choice for those who have been running the global warming scam, prove that you are not only lying but that you also know you’re lying.
The fact that you and others in your camp don’t even realize that you are now all branded as gullible liars for supporting the unsupportable proves the liberal BS about their being more intellectually inclined or capable than conservatives is the same thing, a fraudlent attempt to gain power when you know your own ideas are worthless. In fact, climategate proves that the left is simply another pagan religion looking for some higher meaning it can use to establish itself as a new priesthood. Unfortunately for you folks, you’re going to have a very tough time slaughtering people atop the pyramid of global warming now that it obviously a well concerted fraud. You’ll have to try some other scam that will get the majority to allow you to rip their hearts out as a sacrifice to your fictitious gods.
have a nice day
Einstein said, “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one’. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” And Einstein was wrong. When it comes to quantum mechanics, God most certainly *does* play dice with the universe.
But, biblio, does the fact that Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics mean that Einstein’s phenomenal insight into relativity was worthless?
On a less exalted plane (as Roy Spencer is probably no Einstein — almost none of us are given Einstein’s gifts), I’ve met several biochemistry and microbiology researchers who are creationists. I cannot at all understand their point of view, since to me any biology without evolution is incomprehensible (and I’m a Christian), but this doesn’t change the fact that they’re competent biologists producing useful research in their fields. More to the point, I know that they’re far more competent at what they do than I’ll ever be.
Did you know that Newton, for all his physics and calculus, believed himself to be an alchemist and also somewhat of a prophet? It sounds loony today, but does that mean Newton was an incompetent?
Kepler fantasized about hearing “the music of the spheres” and is said to have written musical compositions for each celestial body. Does that make Kepler’s laws any less good for astronomy?
Linus Pauling is another example of a scientist who held “wacky ideas” according to public opinion, but who nonetheless did more for physical chemistry than most scientists can ever hope to accomplish. Do we throw his prolific discoveries away just because a lot of people also found him a little “wacky”?
That a scientist holds a “wacky idea” of some sort, as you say Roy Spencer does about intelligent design (and I don’t like intelligent design, either), doesn’t disqualify him from producing good science, as long as he sticks to the scientific method and has the brains to produce some good insights.
Dishonesty, on the other hand, may well disqualify someone from producing good science. I have no idea whether Roy Spencer is a good scientist or not right now (I’d have to read his work), but his belief in intelligent design doesn’t ring as many scientific alarm bells for me as evidence which suggests that certain *other* scientists have hidden some of their data, or contemplated re-defining what peer-reviewed literature is, rings.
Human beings are forever tempted to “wacky ideas” and also forever tempted to dishonesty. Of those two temptations, dishonesty is the one more damaging to science.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus is a principle that applies to *deliberate falsification*, not mistaken ideas. If all scientists who held honestly mistaken or peculiar ideas about one thing were thereby discredited as scientists in all other matters, there wouldn’t be much science left!
Not so fast Rog, the EPA will, despite the evident facts, plunge us into a depression inducing regime of governmental control through unfettered regulation. Will the Congress have the cojones to stop them?
Whatever Dr. Spencer’s views are on evolution etc, Anjika has it right. Thoroughly.
Case in point: unlike that of the CRU cabal, Dr. Spencer’s satellite-derived database on global temperatures is open and available for anyone to inspect at any time. Now who is the scientist?
Roger: “The real story about the activities of the developed world in the last century or so is that through a combination of technological prowess and humanitarian largess, Europe, Australia, and the United States have enriched the entire world beyond the dreams of Croesus.”
With all due respect, Roger, if youre including Australia in “the developed world”, I think Canada deserves a nod too.
I’m absolutely pro-American. However, I’m irked by how often Canada is simply overlooked in the American media, including conservative blogs. E.g., In Afghanistan, Canada is punching way above its weight in the most dangerous part—and has been for eight years. We export a very significant amount of our natural gas and oil to the USA, which is our major trading partner: Canada’s a part of the team. It would be nice to be acknowledged as such once in a while.
P.S. Our fine Conservative Party Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, reviled by the MSM and lefties, is a far cry from Obama. Thank God! Harper is an economist and a smart, low key, effective leader, who doesn’t waste time and energy—and Canadians’ patience (unless one’s a socialist, as are our other political parties and MSM)—grandstanding and blowing hot air. In over three years, I can only recall one talk by the PM on national TV. Our economy is in reasonably good shape and Harper’s able to speak prime ministerially, without a teleprompter! (When Obama insulted Canada by spending part of an afternoon in Ottawa last February, Harper’s gravitas made Obama—who started by saying he was happy to be in “Iow . . .Ottawa”!—look like a complete amateur. I don’t think Obama will want to be on a podium with Harper again any time soon!
Yes, Canada’s a very European-like polity, but Harper isn’t a cheerleader for this kind of governance. If his party ever gets a majority, I think—I hope!—we’ll see some real changes in the lefty, big government, corrupt juggernaut that our Democrats—the Liberal Party of Canada—took decades to build.
God bless America! (And Canada!)