Global Warming Assumes Room Temperature (Mark Steyn)

National Review Online ^ | June 11, 2013 | Mark Steyn

[neverdem]

As readers may know, National Review and I have an impending court date in Washington with Dr Michael E Mann, creator of the global-warming “hockey stick” and self-proclaimed Nobel laureate, for the hitherto unknown crime of “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient“. (You can contribute to our legal defense fund here; also, the TV rights to my forthcoming white Bronco chase are still available – we’ll be using a hybrid, of course).

Forced by circumstance to take an interest in the latest developments on the climate-change “consensus”, I was interested to see this story, in which The New York Times belatedly acknowledges that for the last 15 years it’s been all quiet on the warming front:

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.

The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists.

You don’t say...

[neverdem]

Ping

[Izzy Dunne]

Must be quite “unsettling” for the scientists involved...

[Standing Wolf]

Must be quite “unsettling” for the scientists involved...

Nah. The intrusion of facts merely affords the vermin an opportunity to demand billions more in "free" feral government money for "research" to explain ways around the facts and concoct more pseudo-scientific lies. Governments the world over are the heaviest investors in the fakery of "anthropogenic global warming."

[relictele]

I call them consensusarians. A bit unwieldy but more descriptive.

[upchuck]

Nice posting job. Thanks.

Steyn is a treasure.

[publius911]

Must be quite “unsettling” for the scientists involved...

Get the popcorn!
Discovery will be a classic drama-comedy.
Looking at the bright side, that fruitcake James Hansen no longer gets a paycheck from the U.S. taxpayer, Ha ha ha ha.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Whether today’s cooling is a blip in the global warming trend of the Nineties, or the Nineties warming was a blip in the global cooling trend of the Fifties, I cannot say. But either way it doesn’t look like a hockey blade...the whole global warming farce is nothing more than a regression to the mean climate conditions which existed before the start of the "Little Ice Age" - a period of unusually cool temperatures lasting from about 1600 'til the mid 1800's - but since it's been shown that warmists know practically nothing about statistics, we won't expect they'll understand that.......

[Ditto]

I call them consensusarians.

That's good. Maybe Federal Grantarianins is more descriptive if even more unwieldy.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation January 17, 1961

[JLS]

Mark Steyn ping.

Freepmail me, if you want on or off the Mark Steyn ping list.

Thanks for the ping neverdem.

[Liberty Valance]

thanks for the ping

[Noob1999]

a Steyn bfl

[relictele]

If Galileo had observed the consensus we’d still have a geocentric model of the planets and sun and moon.

If doctors had observed the consensus of the 18th-19th century they wouldn’t bother washing their hands between patients.

[dead]

But either way it doesn’t look like a hockey blade.

It's a serrated hockey blade.

Introduced, no doubt, by the Philadelphia Flyers.