Interior of Unibomber's shack whose manifesto was virtually indistinguishable from Al Gore's "Earth for the Unbalanced"
Posted on 05/15/2014 4:14:37 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
On Monday, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson took a tilt at climate skeptics. “The assumption that the vast majority in a scientific field is engaged in fraud or corruption is frankly conspiratorial,” Gerson wrote. As a non-scientist, he decided that the answer to the question of whether humans had warmed the planet was to trust scientists.
The article’s timing was unfortunate. Three weeks ago, Lennart Bengtsson, a leading Swedish meteorologist approaching his 80s, announced that he was joining the avowedly skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank. In an interview with Speigel Online, Bengtsson spoke of the need for climate-model predictions to be validated against observations. “Since the end of the 20th century, the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show,” he said.
Hadn’t the IPCC covered this in its recent report? “Yes,” Bengtsson replied,
the scientific report does this but, at least in my view, not critically enough. It does not bring up the large difference between observational results and model simulations. I have full respect for the scientific work behind the IPCC reports but I do not appreciate the need for consensus. It is important, and I will say essential, that society and the political community is also made aware of areas where consensus does not exist.
One of the most telling features of climate science is just how few climate scientists changed their minds as the evidence changed. The pause in global temperature in the last 15 years or so has been unexpected. Now we know why: Yesterday, Bengtsson dropped a bombshell. He was resigning from the think tank. In his resignation letter, Bengtsson wrote:
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. . . . Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy.
Especially significant was a tweet from Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute, who for many years worked alongside James Hansen. “Groups perceived to be acting in bad faith should not be surprised that they are toxic within the science community,” Schmidt tweeted. “Changing that requires that they not act in bad faith and not be seen to be acting in bad faith.”
Evidently the right to practice and discuss climate science should be subject to a faith test. It is an extraordinarily revealing development. Fears about unbelievers’ polluting the discourse, as some academics put it, illustrate the weakness of climate science: The evidence for harmful anthropogenic global warming is not strong enough to stand up for itself.
Inadvertently Schmidt’s tweet demonstrates how far climate science has crossed the boundary deep into pseudo-science. Karl Popper observed of the trio of pseudo-sciences prevalent in 1920s Vienna that their followers could explain why non-believers rejected their manifest truths. For Marxists, it was because of their class interests. For subscribers to Freudian psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler’s psychology, non-belief was evidence of unanalyzed repressions crying out for treatment. So it is with climate science. Only the pure of heart should be allowed an opinion on it.
Science regresses if it becomes intolerant of criticism. At the beginning of her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England spoke words of tolerance in an age of religious strife, declaring that she had no intention of making windows into men’s souls. Unlike religion, science is not a matter of the heart or of belief. It exists only in what can be demonstrated. In their persecution of an aged colleague who stepped out of line and their call for scientists to be subject to a faith test, 21st-century climate scientists have shown less tolerance than a 16th-century monarch.
There is something rotten in the state of climate science.
This came to mind after reading the National Review article:
A Sudanese court gave a 27-year-old woman who is eight-months pregnant with her second child, until Thursday to abandon her newly adopted Christian faith and return to Islam or face a death sentence.
The AGW priests are truly desperate. The world is giving every indication of ignoring them. Desperate fanatics do desperate things.
Their polices are set up for population control in Africa because India and China are never going to change the polices on setting up a Coal fired power plant every week.
You have bought the drivel.
You speak of carbon.
There is no evidence that carbon has anything to do with changes in climate.
The main reason for the decline in the US is the switch from coal to gas?
Science unfortunately has always been adversely influenced by people with a political agenda. Soviet natural sciences never recovered from Stalin’s fascination and support of Lysenko. Lysenko had the politically correct opinion that learned traits could be inherited. Nice for communist theory but utter quackery. Opposing views and scientists were quashed.
You are correct. Carbon is objectively and scientifically meaningless. But since it is going to be an economic fact of life (taxes) for the foreseeable future, it is worth talking about in some sense.
If Al Gore was a scientist he would be our Lysenko.
The subject must be redirected. Climate change is predicted based on computer models that are man made.
It is computer modelers rather than coal burners that are the cause.
While the sky is said to be falling, there is no piece of sky one can find on the ground and hold in his hand.
FTA: “The assumption that the vast majority in a scientific field is engaged in fraud or corruption is frankly conspiratorial,”
Hey, Mikey! You might want to take a look at the emails and source code (oops, the latter is WAYyyyy over your head) released by the Univ. of East Anglia whistle-blower.
It *is* “conspiratorial” loser.
*spit*
too bad this NR columnist, Rupert Darwall, had to denigrate Tail Gunner Joe to make his point.
I only wish we had more Senators like Joe McCarthy today.
Forced consensus is anti science. If your model doesn’t work, you go back and look at your basic assumptions. You don’t threaten critics that point out flaws in your model. In short, you’ve missed something that is your responsibility not the critic’s.
Some climate scientists are so concerned by their predictions that they are demanding immediate action. Others are cynically using problematic models for political, economic and cultural advantage.
Reminded of McCarthyism? So the global warming climate change climate disruption "pure of heart" are admitting that they are wrong and "McCarthy" is right -- again?
MCCARTHYISM, RED SCARE, AND DOMESTIC SUBVERSION
"“McCarthyism” has morphed from a term that once described a specific pathology, into a verbal club that is used to invoke cloture on politically correct subjects. "
"Although newly released archival materials such as the Venona intercepts show the extent of Communist subversion in pre- and post-war America, contemporary leftwing historians like Ellen Schrecker . . . continue to use critiques of McCarthyism as a way of exonerating American communists . . . Writers like Nicholas von Hoffman have recently challenged the prevailing orthodoxy in provocative articles with titles such as “McCarthy was Right.” But the left will not relinquish the notion of an American Dark Age when communists were innocent victims. This is part of its foundation myth and it is spread not only in the university, but by Hollywood as well, where films about the malicious excesses of anti-Communism have become a familiar sub-genre."
....If your model doesn’t work, you go back and look at your basic assumptions. You don’t threaten critics that point out flaws in your model......
Yes. They're slaves to their modeling. Scientific observation of physical facts have been tossed out the window.
If Al Gore believed his own hype, he would be living a simple life off the grid. So would the “scientists” and other believers.
I might start to believe these people when I see them practice what they preach.
“I might start to believe these people when I see them practice what they preach.”
Not I. Muslims practice what they preach, and I’m not going there either.
I know it’s a rhetorical statement, but even if they all did the Ed Bagley Jr. thing, the observed temps don’t support the models, and AGW is not so.
Interior of Unibomber's shack whose manifesto was virtually indistinguishable from Al Gore's "Earth for the Unbalanced"
Top story this morning in the Houston Chronicle:
“The melting of the Antarctic is now unstoppable, according to NASA scientists, which means rising sea levels and the loss of coastal communities is inevitable.
The report, by researchers from NASA and the University of California, looked at ice sheets in one part of the frigid continent and brought into sharp focus the coming situation facing cities like Galveston.
“The collapse of this sector of west Antarctica appears to be unstoppable,” said lead author Eric Rignot, of UC-Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
All that melting ice has nowhere to go except into our oceans.
See the above photos for what we would miss if Galveston disappeared..........”
Not only do you and I know that, the gaia worshippers do too.
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