Be still my beating heart. There is hope for honest science, even in the gruesome Age of Algore. But only if we really grasp what’s happening with the Global Horror Picture Show these days. The biggest danger to good science is that rational skeptics will continue to be outgunned by the fear peddlers: A big lie can go around the world before the truth can get its boots on. The fear merchants just have to make up new scares faster than they can be knocked down, and honest scientists will always get there too late. Thoughtful skepticism takes thought. New alarmist scenarios can be made up by science fiction scribblers on an assembly line. It’s the Nazi panzers against the Polish cavalry. Sure it’s heroic, but it’s not really a contest.
So here’s the good news. The skeptics are winning against the global warming mythogogues. The polls show a drop in public faith in the global warming meme. Last week a stellar skeptics’ conference was held in New York City and the New York Times actually covered it — in its usual bitchy fashion, but they decided to cover it anyway. There are many excellent talks at this website, notably by Viscount Monckton, Margaret Thatcher’s former adviser, who provides a truly elegant and devastating deconstruction of the infamous IPCC “consensus statement” — done for the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, and of the bureaucrats. Any real scientific analysis and debate was left out of the IPCC statement, and Lord Monckton simply shoots it out of the water with a satisfying bang. Others like Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen were there as well, and you can listen to their presentations online. They are heroes.
But that’s not why I think the skeptics are winning. The rational skeptics are winning because the global warming crowd has simply dropped the two words “global warming” from its vocabulary. No more official global warming! This is like the old Soviet Communist Party. You have to analyze not just what’s said but what’s not said. You have to look to see who has been airbrushed out of the pictures of the Politburo waving on top of Lenin’s tomb watching the May Day parade. And “global warming” has disappeared from respectable scientific discourse. Only the elementary school teachers of the world will keep teaching about global warming, because their lesson plans are already written, and they’re a little slow on the uptake.
Somehow it’s all morphed into climate change.
What’s “climate change?”
It’s a scientific surrender by the Algore-James-Hansen Planetary Fear Brigade. No more global warming, folks. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
But it’s a silent surrender, so millions of readers of the New York Times will never notice a thing. Al Gore just has to drop one solitary slide from his infamous PowerPoint lecture. James Hansen just needs to pretend that all those horrific mistakes over at the NASA Climate Playstation Center were tiny computer glitches. Anybody can make an honest mistake, right? And they always fixed the published data after they were caught — I mean, after the errors were called to their attention. That’s what honest scientists do.
(Funny thing, though, how those glitches always favored the global warming faith?)
Still, real scientists have to use words with precision, and when all the big science journals change the words “global warming” to “climate change,” all at the same time, you know somethin’s up.
It is. The real scientists have simply, silently acknowledged that the skeptics were right all along, as a child of six might have figured out. And since everybody knows that “climate change” has been going on for a half billion years, it’s sure to keep happening. Now there’s a solid scientific prediction for you.
Nobody can object to “climate change.”
So nobody has to apologize to the skeptics. (Hint: If the New York Times deigns to cover skeptics who challenge their orthodoxy for the last decade or two, it’s because they are doing a quick CYA. They are not recanting. They are not doing the skeptics a favor. If you want a favor, go ask Tony over in Joisey.)
What really happened there, it seems, is that the science section of the NYT caught on, and hired a skeptic named John Tierney, who blew the cover off the scam. Check out the columns by Tierney, who sounds like an honest man in a impossible job. The science section people have to actually know something about science. They also have to stay respectable to real scientists, and they must have smelled the fraud for years and years. It didn’t take much. Even the Weather Channel caught on, for goodness’ sake!
What about those highly respectable scientists who were constantly giving scare headlines to their friends in the media? Well, they can pretend they were right all along, too. After all, they told us about climate change, didn’t they? And now everybody agrees that, yes, the climate is changing. Gotcha!
As for the media, they don’t care — most of their readers can’t remember yesterday’s stories anyway. With the 24/7 news cycle you can just swamp yesterday’s scare headline with bigger ones today. In fact, the imaginative scribblers of the media now have even more room to let their horror fantasies soar.
Which is exactly what’s happening. If you think global warming gave the media a lot of room for planetary fear stories, just wait till you see all the really catastrophic climate change stories to come.
Who needs warming?
How about … the oceans are turning acid and killing all the little carbonaceous critters? Yesterday, Nature magazine proclaimed that the oceans are turning acid and reducing the calcium in Pacific Ocean marine carbonate organisms. But skeptics will note that this study suffers from a huge sampling error. There is no way to cover an enormous ocean region with vast underwater mountain ranges and make generalizations about the acidity and the actual population of all carbonate organisms in that enormous volume of sea water. So it’s just another scare study that is grossly overgeneralized. Sounds like the good old “global warming,” right? But it did get published in the oldest and one of the most highly respected scientific journals in the world.
Or, how about “World leaders told to act on climate before it’s too late!!”? That’s one by the reliable eco-prop specialist Lewis Smith in the London Times. Mr. Smith is the environment reporter of the formerly respectable Times, and is a reliable bellwether to see which way the imaginary winds are blowing. His headline is illustrated by the infamous propaganda picture of a lonesome polar bear on its fast-disappearing little crag of ice in the vast Arctic Ocean. Now polar bears swim like sea lions for dozens of miles in search of prey. But this is the iconic “ET call home” image of the Arctic warming crowd. It’s a fraud, but they can’t let go of it.
Mr. Smith is a one-man shop for eco-horrors. Just within recent days he had “85% of Amazonian rainforests at risk!!!” Then there was “World heading for resources war!!” And “Hopes of climate change accord ‘are sinking.'”
Or how about this story? “Oil spill disaster on Australian beaches!” This is also from the Times, which is the new voice of the Euro socialist elite.
Well, as Bill Ayers told us ‘way back when, “you don’t need a Weatherman to see which way the winds are blowing.” That’s not metaphorical. Apparently they meant it literally, and now we don’t need any weatherfolk at all, because the winds are always blowing the same way. This is like those mythic battles between the gods and the demons, where both sides are always shape-changing. The eco-props have figured out they don’t really need global warming, but I don’t know whether the skeptics have figured out how to keep pace with the assembly line production of ever-new “scientific” scare stories. It’s a matter of supply and demand, and the fear industry is constantly cranking out new models to be greedily gobbled up by the scare-hungry masses. It’s a new genre of fiction parading as science, and until a whole new generation learns how to exercise rational skepticism, to laugh at the frauds on their own initiative, they are going to get suckered over and over again.
President Obama just sent $400 million to replenish the eco-scare industry. With that kind of money coming in on a regular basis, and the new “science czar” in the White House who is one of the true believers, the climate horror industry is not going to decline anytime soon. We may be losing our banks, the dollar may crash, and you’ve just lost half your savings, but here is a growth industry with fabulous prospects for the indefinite future.
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