Why can't you be more polite, and stop questioning our integrity and science?
Who can forget the classic confrontation between Humphrey Bogart and Alfonso Bedoya in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It's now being reprised in living color, featuring banditos from East Anglia, Penn State, Washington and the UN.
"We're Federales," they tell us. "You know, climate police. Evidence? We ain't got no evidence. We don't need no evidence. We don't have to show you any stinkin' evidence.
"Hold your tongue, hombre. We ain't trying to do you any harm. Why don't you try to be a little more polite? Why don't you just throw us a little more money, and stop questioning our integrity and science?"
The United States alone has spent over $30 billion on alarmist "climate science" over the past 20 years – plus another $35 billion on renewable energy – based on the banditos' tales of global warming catastrophe, if we don't slash fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions.
However, instead of solid, reproducible scientific evidence, the bandito scientists offered hypotheses, speculation, assumptions, assertions, "hockey stick" graphs, computer models and worst-case scenarios – purporting to demonstrate that CO2 causes planetary warming . . . and the warming will be cataclysmic.
Their reports were "peer-reviewed" by networks of fellow alarmists who tied every temperature, weather and wildlife anomaly to global warming and carbon dioxide. When challenged, they claimed the "science is settled" and stonewalled requests from experts who did not accept dire predictions of planetary mayhem – and wanted to examine the raw temperature data, computer codes and analyses.
Suddenly, however, the world got a glimpse into the mindset and machinations of these tax-funded catastrophists. Thousands of emails revealed systematic, concerted collusion to conceal and delete data, manipulate temperature trends that contradicted predictions of dangerous warming, stifle debate, and pressure scientific journals to publish only alarmist studies . . . and exclude dissenting analyses.
This fraudulent science is the basis for congressional cap-tax-and-trade legislation, EPA's pronouncement that CO2 "endangers" human health and welfare, and the new global governance treaty being debated in Copenhagen. The actions will result in huge taxes on energy use, reduced liberties and living standards, millions of lost jobs, and a massive transfer of wealth from energy-consuming families and businesses to governments and their allies.
The proposed Copenhagen treaty authorizes the "transfer of technical and financial resources" from developed countries to developing countries, to help them address climate change impacts allegedly caused by hydrocarbon use in industrialized nations. Free or low-cost technology transfers would include electrical generation and pollution control equipment and patents. "Financial resources" would tally $50-200 billion per year, most of it apparently from the United States.
The money would come from fines for noncompliance with CO2 emission rules, a global "carbon tax" on energy use, a new levy on air travel, and "mandatory contributions" as high as 1% of GDP, paid by (formerly) rich developed countries, as new foreign aid for corrupt officials in poor nations.
One would think such actions would be based on rock-solid science. One would be wrong. It's time to ask the critical question – which the White House, UN, EPA, "mainstream" media (especially the Associated Press, New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN) have refused to consider:
What evidence backs up the terrifying disaster claims, the calls for drastic "solutions" that won't work, to a crisis that extensive evidence strongly suggests is speculative or even illusory?
Reliable satellite temperature measurements span most of the planet. However, they only cover the last 30 years – and for the past 15 years show stable and then declining temperatures, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. So climate crisis scientists have focused their "research" on ground temperatures.
However, nearly half of the world's remaining ground-based gauges are in the United States, and cover just 1.8% of the Earth's surface. Moreover, as meteorologist Anthony Watts has demonstrated, many of those gauges are close to air conditioning exhausts, tarmac, blacktop and other urban heat sources. So they read high, and then are further "adjusted" upward, corrupting climate records, models and analyses.
Most of Siberia's stations were shut down years ago, leaving that vast frigid region devoid of reliable data, and further tilting average global temperatures upward. Britain's combined marine and land-based temperatures were "value-added" (aggregated, averaged and manipulated) by its East Anglia University Climate Research Unit (CRU) – which then tossed or lost all the original raw data, so no one could check its methodologies, honesty or accuracy. (Try that tactic with your friendly IRS.)
The incomplete, averaged and manipulated ground temperature data were then fed into computer models that reflect our still limited understanding of climate causes and dynamics, assume CO2 is the primary driver in climate change, and poorly analyze the vast, complex, chaotic planetary climate system. The models have never been able to forecast climate accurately, even one year in advance, much less 50 or 100. They can't reproduce prior years' climates. They failed to predict the stable and declining temperatures of the past 15 years.
But even that didn't conjure up the desired "man-made climate crisis." As a CRU programmer put it, the only way the models can produce "the proper result" is when programmers apply a "very artificial correction," use "low pass filtering at century and longer time scales," and "include a load of garbage."
Back in 1999, CRU director Phil Jones reported that he'd "just used [Penn State climatologist Michael Mann's] trick . . . to hide the decline" in average global temperatures. But in October 2009, US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth moaned that alarmists still "can't account for the lack of warming and it is a travesty that we can't."
Nevertheless, "peer reviewed" scientific journals somehow produce "consensus" among "mainstream" scientists, offer "unequivocal" evidence of disastrous manmade global warming – and give the IPCC, White House, EPA and Congress the "proof" they need to justify treaties, laws and regulations that will send energy costs skyrocketing. Compliant media outlets whitewash the email and science scandal, and trumpet the latest alarmist claims. And voila, like Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street, the predicted warming crisis is back, just in time for Copenhagen.
Evidence tampering like this would get legal cases thrown out of court – and land the manipulators in jail. To use it in advancing economy-wrecking energy policies is criminal.
Just one week ago, President Obama promised jobs summit attendees, "We will do everything we can to bring down the unemployment rate."
Within hours, he stepped up his arm-twisting for cap-tax-and-trade in the Senate, announced that he was going to Copenhagen to lobby for a new climate treaty, endorsed still more restrictions on producing America's vital, abundant hydrocarbon resources, and gave the EPA the go-ahead to blackmail Congress by decreeing that carbon dioxide "endangers" human health and welfare.
These decisions set the stage for job-killing government control of our energy, economy and lives. If they are implemented, millions of Americans will freeze jobless in the dark.
Applause for this essay, not because it’s different from all the other diatribes lambasting the Global Warming Hustle – it isn’t – but because it attempts in a weak way to show the relationship between money – especially free taxpayer money – and our century’s P. T. Barnum like scientific hustles. We can benefit from a closer look at the life cycle of one of these complex swindles, the relationship between science and public funding, the means used to secure funding, the many ways funds are disbursed –the underlying and no doubt fascinating financial mechanics of Big Science was a topic largely ignored in the past.
If you examine the infrastructure of “science” in America, it reveals what drives these clever schemes to hustle a gullible and trusting public. Besides educating many of the world’s scientists, who came to our colleges and then returned to their home countries, our world class universities produce, each and every year, many native scientists, lab and technical support personnel, computer programmers, etc. who want and need a job in “science”. Older American males remember the Vietnam era where keeping clear of the draft meant young men remained in college, desperately clinging to their student deferments while majoring in “cake” subjects like anthropology, sociology and political science – once the war wound down, these young men switched their majors to business or engineering or went on to earn a masters degrees in subjects which offered likely employment.
While anthropology, political science or sociology are useful subjects and have their place in society, the Vietnam era job market simply couldn’t absorb all the degree holders and reward them with well-paid jobs and long term career opportunities. But science is different, there is a mindset that says we should absorb these graduates, they possess valuable talents that must be nurtured and allowed to grow in their chosen field. A career in sales and marketing or within a trade like HVAC repair doesn’t appeal to someone who worked very hard to earn an advanced degree in molecular biology.
Consequently, periodicals like “Nature” or “Science”, as well those specialty journals in narrow scientific fields, devote much space to blatant editorials demanding more government funding, debating where funds are needed, who should benefit, the whole enchilada of scientific micro-economics. The life cycle starts with seed money, often government provided, that establishes the initial research. Once the basic research determines the vectors that further research should take, more grant applications are written, more funds provided and the snowball really starts to roll.
Scientists have learned that certain areas of science are very attractive to politicians and, once the political dynamics are learned, politicians can be successfully approached for funding on a massive scale. Viewed from the political side, there are many claimants to taxpayer money, so a decision within a legislative session to invest $10 billion of public funds into either entomological research or into cleaning-up and rebuilding Detroit Michigan is complex and requires consideration of cultural factors beyond a “clear need for further research”. Obviously, scientific research must have an emotional “hook” on taxpayers to command large scale government funding – scientists understand and accept this relationship – although it doesn’t mean they have to like it.
Looking at the other end of the current Big Hustle, there are ramifications of government funding that need to be explored. What is the ratio of public to private funding – if it’s close to 100% public funds, we should be looking for a skunk in the woodpile. How are the patents from publicly funded research controlled? And who makes those decisions – a panel of scientists and politicians deciding whose name goes on the patent is bad news for the public trust but often good news for individual scientists and politicians.
Is the stated goal of the research really the goal? In California, embryonic stem cell research was sold as research leading to an Alzheimer’s cure (remember Nancy Reagan) – that was the initial carrot which secured state supplied funding. But now, science admits that embryonic stem cells will likely have no practical application within this area and as a therapeutic cure. If goals are re-defined once the funding is obtained, is the public fully informed, is the funding reduced accordingly, is there a hidden agenda that had nothing to do with the stated original goal and where is that agenda going?
Journalists are attracted to ideological and emotional issues involving morality, integrity, politics, what have you – but exploring the “money” culture of modern science in detail and with hard questions being asked would go much farther toward educating the public about where their science dollars should and should not be invested. Journalists should study Big Science’s economic infrastructure and produce probing essays and factual exposes that address more than just emotional “hot buttons”.
Kudos. A very good concise statement of affairs.
Some things I am pondering:
1. If you are in a gang, who are your peers? Should we trust them? Dr Wegman essentially proved this in 2006.
2. Do the sharks that stand to profit when the money mandated in Copenhagen flows into corrupt governments and non-productive sinkholes care about evidence? How cynical are they?
3. If, as may be likely, we are on our way to a peak similar to the MWP (with or without a CO2 boost), will the temperature climb doom us to this lunatic and futile exercise? Or can the climate science improve enough to put CO2 in proper perspective and quell the hysteria has been ginned up?
4. Even though the current course seems crazy, might we get to better energy sources as a result?
After commenting on Phil J’s recent essay, I saw yours.
Another good essay. Let me repeat my latest comment on Phil Jackson’s essay here.
(It repeats your cliché about “stinkin”. ☺ BTW, with all due respect, in view of the caliber of readers & commenters here, I don’t think you needed to explain the reference.)
Inwood
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Seems to me, a non-scientist but not a scientific illiterate, that the current Copenhagen Conference is easy to understand, both for intelligent non-scientists as well as for not-really-interested dummkopfs: it’s all governance, all the time. It don’t need no stinkin’ scientists. And the scientists who are there just need to know how to shut off mikes & call the gendarmes when inconvenient truths are brought up by skeptics who must be personally destroyed in the harshest terms possible.
It’s the politics, stupid, the economic politics, that is, which is being urged by economic illiterates who call their critics scientific illiterates: government control, confiscatory taxes, punishing regs, & government redistribution of the “ill-begotten wealth of the Western World” (a) to the rest of the world who are poor because we are rich & (b) to Western World charlatans for their allegedly green businesses.
Newsflash to scientists & those of a scientific bent: politics & critical thinking about science are not always reconcilable.
Newsflash to economically-illiterate scientists: Google “cost-benefit analysis”.
BTW, a rather fair & balanced (to coin a phrase) analysis in the NYT Opinionator Blog, yes the NYT:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/global-warmings-cold-shoulder/