My hope is that global warming has died. I mean died dead – really really dead. And the ‘scientists’ seem to have done it to themselves. How brilliant and how appropriate. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed seeing anything like I’ve enjoyed watching this whole debacle unfold. I guess partly it’s because we came so close to disaster, that I’ve been giddy over this.
Entertaining column:
From the Las Vegas Review-Journal
Only “two rogue scientists,” as the oh-so-reassuring Climategate Deniers would have us believe? Walter Williams, esteemed economics professor at George Mason University, last week summarized Climategate, to date:
“New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies (and) engaged in scientific and academic fraud, but committed criminal acts as well. Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. CRU has the world’s largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world … its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 global warming report.”
The Climategate e-mails show man-made global warming fraudsters “around the world” brazenly discussing “both the destruction and hiding of data that does not support their global-warming claims,” Williams notes. “They discuss criminally deleting data rather than comply with Freedom of Information Act requests. There’s also discussion of faking data for journals such as Nature, conspiring to keep opposing science out of peer-reviewed journals (of which they controlled the editorial boards), and using statistical ‘tricks’ to hide the cooling period of the last 10 years. …”
But it fell to Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger to note, on Dec. 4 in a column headlined “Climategate: Science Is Dying,” just how massive the aftershocks could be:
“I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,” Mr. Henninger wrote. “This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. … The public was told repeatedly that something called ‘the scientific community’ had affirmed the science. … Because ‘science’ said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. …
“What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event,” Henninger was one of the first to grasp. “This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. …
“The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims — plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish — evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. … Most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom.”
Starting to get it? To land continued government grants, it was necessary to “develop” evidence that would “prove” the claim that man-made global warming will fry us all on a griddle unless we cede massive new power, massive wealth, our standard of living and our industrial dominance of the world to the “scientific” central state.
What those who dutifully excreted such steaming piles of crap have accomplished is to require that the world now presume, in self-defense, that any state-funded “science” is little more than government-funded propaganda to justify taxing us, regulating us and advancing national socialism under a new, green flag.
Mind you, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving gang of grant-chasing welfare leeches.
It’s not as though this is their first blatant fraud in the service of state repression. If secondhand smoke causes cancer, why is it when the first U.S. studies failed to turn up the sufficiently strong, 2-to-1 correlation between disease and cohabiting with a smoker, which had always been the required standard for showing medical causality, the parties simply reduced the amount of correlation required — and subsequently ignored larger, international studies that show no provable harm from secondhand smoke, at all?
“The tobacco industry challenged the EPA in court,” reports Steven Milloy, a biostatistician, lawyer and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of Junkscience.com. “A federal judge vacated the EPA’s main conclusions, stating that ‘EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information; … deviated from its [standard procedures]; failed to disclose important findings and reasoning; and left significant questions without answers. EPA’s conduct left substantial holes in the administrative records.’ ”
Yet children in the government youth propaganda camps are taught to this day that “Even secondhand smoke causes cancer; ‘science’ says it’s so.”
The pace of the world bailout from the “Let’s cripple our economies to stop global warming” baloney is breathtaking. Two weeks ago, public outcry defeated “cap-and-trade” legislation — which had been considered a done deal — in Australia. After 14 members of his party leadership resigned in protest, conservative opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who had signed onto the scheme, was dumped, marking the first time since 1916 that a leader of a major Australian political party was deposed on grounds of a single policy decision.
Without conservative support, the legislation was promptly defeated in the Aussie senate.
“Cap-and-trade in Australia — which just a week ago was declared a certainty — is officially dead,” reports blogger Tim Andrews. “Early last week … Turnbull announced that he had reached agreement with the government to implement cap-and-trade, thus binding his party to support it in parliament en bloc. … The days that followed were simply stunning. … Political offices went into meltdown, unable to cope with the torrent of phone calls, faxes and e-mails opposing what was effectively a massive tax hike.”
Dumped by his own party, Turnbull’s “political career is over, his aspirations to become prime minister have come to naught,” Mr. Andrews reports.
That noise you hear is the folding of tents in the night. It froze last night, in Las Vegas. Maybe they can try “the coming glacial winter,” again.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of “Send in theWaco Killers” and the novel “The Black Arrow.”
Diary of a Mad Conservative 