Scenes from the Climate Inquisition (The chilling effect of the global warming consensus)

the weekly standard ^ | 2 10 07 | Steven F. Hayward & Kenneth P. Green

[flixxx]

On February 2, an AEI research project on climate change policy that we have been organizing was the target of a journalistic hit piece in Britain's largest left-wing newspaper, the Guardian. The article's allegation--that we tried to bribe scientists to criticize the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--is easy to refute. More troubling is the growing worldwide effort to silence anyone with doubts about the catastrophic warming scenario that Al Gore and other climate extremists are putting forth.

"Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today," read the Guardian's lead. The byline was Ian Sample, the paper's science correspondent, and his story ran under the headline "Scientists Offered Cash to Dispute Climate Study."

[flixxx]

You will not hear this on CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, etc...

[SouthTexas]

You'd think eight feet of snow in parts of New York MIGHT have a chilling effect on global warming...

[Mongeaux]

The numbers are not working out the way the climate change touts had hoped. This is why they have worked so hard to smear skeptics and stifle the debate. They can't AFFORD debate because the facts are slipping away from them.

Consider this analysis by Christopher Moncton of the forthcoming IPCC scientific report:

Figures in the final draft of the UN’s fourth five-year report on climate change show that the previous report, in 2001, had overestimated the human influence on the climate since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third. Also, the UN, in its 2007 report, has more than halved its high-end best estimate of the rise in sea level by 2100 rom 3 feet to just 17 inches. It suggests that the rate of sea-level rise is up from 2mm/yr to 3mm/year – no more than one foot in a century. UN scientists faced several problems their computer models had not predicted. Globally, temperature is not rising at all, and sea level is not rising anything like as fast as had been forecast. Concentrations of methane in the air are actually falling.

Scientists are scaling back all their Climate Change claims while the Enviroes ratchet the emotion level UP. Wonder why?

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Discovery Channel and the Weather Channel have pulled out all the stops in "proving" to us that global warming is human-caused. This garbage science is the rule of the day and is the only thing that will receive funding (well, that and AIDS research).

[AmishDude]

What is funny about these accusations is that you can't get a dime of grant money if you criticize global warming and there is big grant money to be had if you try to buttress it.

[flixxx]

The best spin I've heard on that is something to the effect..."the global warming will cause extremes in temps.'
I guess I am skeptical about global warming (climate change) but even if it is happening, I certainly do not blame humans on all of it and certainly do not think that much of what we can do (even going back to the Bronze Age in technology)to 'stop' it...so maybe we need to start planning for climate change.

[Vision Thing]

Tim Robbins says "A Chill Wind Is Blowing. . ."

[xcamel]

FReepmail me to get on or off

Click graphic for full GW rundown

[sageb1]

Global tax warfare?

http://www.globalmarshallplan.org

[NutmegDevil]

Tim Robbins just wants you to pull his finger.

[Brad from Tennessee]

The site below summarizes a study that says sea level rise actually decreased over the last century:

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/02/09/shocking-facts-about-sea-level-rise/

[bubman]

I wish the weather channel would at least forecast what the weather would be like three days from now. 100 yrs from now? PUlease!!

[secretagent]

Former Vice President Al Gore has proposed that the media stop covering climate skeptics, and Britain's environment minister said that, just as the media should give no platform to terrorists, so they should exclude climate change skeptics from the airwaves and the news pages. Heidi Cullen, star of the Weather Channel, made headlines with a recent call for weather-broadcasters with impure climate opinions to be "decertified" by the American Meteorological Society. Just this week politicians in Oregon and Delaware stepped up calls for the dismissal of their state's official climatologists, George Taylor and David Legates, solely on the grounds of their public dissent from climate orthodoxy. And as we were completing this article, a letter arrived from senators Bernard Sanders, Pat Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry expressing "very serious concerns" about our alleged "attempt to undermine science." Show-trial hearing to follow? Stay tuned.

[kanawa]

Thou Shalt Not Disagree..

[Enchante]

Al Bore has become a mindless fanatic trying to bludgeon everyone into line.... now the onslaught against anyone who dares to raise critical questions is beyond obscene.

[D-Chivas]

Weather for International Falls, MN

Sat
Mostly Sunny
5° | -12°

Sun
Mostly Sunny
7° | -17°

Mon
Mostly Sunny
3° | -21°

Tue
Mostly Sunny
-1° | -21°

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

I'm taking a business trip to Dayton, OH on Monday. I'm fully expecting to freeze my butt off.

[Enchante]

Why would an ostensibly respectable scientific meeting even offer the podium to a ranting bozo like Al Bore? Surely they do not need a braying leftist politician to tell them what to think about scientific issues, or do they?

"Then in December, Kevin Vranes of the University of Colorado, by no means a climate skeptic, commented on a widely read science blog about the mood of the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where Al Gore had made his standard climate presentation. "To sum up the state of the [climate science] world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension," Vranes wrote. "What I am starting to hear is internal backlash. . . . None of this is to say that the risk of climate change is being questioned or downplayed by our community; it's not. It is to say that I think some people feel that we've created a monster by limiting the ability of people in our community to question results that say 'climate change is right here!'"

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Heidi Cullen, star of the Weather Channel, made headlines with a recent call for weather-broadcasters with impure climate opinions to be "decertified" by the American Meteorological Society.

I'd like to see what her qualifications are. I'll bet her figure in a tight pantsuit are more impressive than her education and I'd bet money that her liberal views have gotten her farther than her degree or her "research".

[Sherman Logan]

The funniest part of this whole story is that these are the exact same people who denounce GWB for "rushing to war" based on incomplete and possibly cherry-picked intelligence data.