Writes Jay Roberts:
8:42 am on December 8, 2009“The Left Fell into the Climate Morass” is the most complete and economical damnation of the whole global warming farce I have ever read. Like a sniper rapidly shooting a string of deadly bulls-eyes, its few short paragraphs accurately demonstrate the systemic failures of science, media, and political institutions. Nothing included is extraneous and nothing relevant is left out.
This should be required reading for everyone regardless of where they may be on this issue. Obviously, adherents should be held to provable refutations of your points and dismissed if they cannot do so. But more importantly, skeptics can benefit from the frame you construct. In the typical skeptic view, “bad science” is the driver of climate change evil—so simply de-legitimizing the science will defuse the whole issue.
But bad science abounds in many fields and is normally rapidly debunked or ignored—it certainly never leads to a mandate for global deconstruction of civilization. Your piece demonstrates that the root evil here is simply statism and its media handmaidens using a convenient pretext to advance their eternal goals of command and control. In this case it just happened to some low rent spreadsheet jockeys posing as scientists (Who ever heard of the University of East Anglia?), but just as easily has been the children, drugs, poverty, coastal erosion, seatbelts, tooth decay, swine flu, etc. It is important to understand, as you make clear, the pathetic climate “scientists” are just convenient pawns in this whole mess.
Your exposition of this issue reminds me of the clarity Ron Paul brings to an understanding of the welfare/warfare state. That is, left wing social programs are simply the flip side of right wing wars & security apparatus, both being expressions of an unconstrained monolithic state funded by soft money. Now you demonstrate that another reason to oppose statism is that it leads to global institutions powerful enough to destroy industrialized civilization with no more justification than the flimsiest of highly disputed “science” generated by obscure hacks in obscure institutions.
Anyone with half a brain and training in a real science, e.g, physics or chemistry (ones that, unlike climate science, don’t need “science” or “ology” postfixes to convince people that they really are a science), understands AGW to be utterly preposterous. It is devoid of the basics scientific rigor—developing a theory based on empirical evidence, then using that theory to predict results of future observations/experiments. Rather, at heart it is simply attempting to do linear correlations between two conditions, temperature and CO2 concentrations, deeming one of the conditions (CO2) causative, and then extending the trend line. There is no physical theory, beyond some non-normative hand-waving discussion of the thermal properties of CO2 in this “model.” Even done earnestly without a fudging data to fit an agenda, this is just cargo cult superstition that in a free marketplace of scientific ideas would be ridiculed even at the level of an undergraduate thesis.
But it wasn’t and you show that the real danger, once again, is the concentration of power that can attack the fundamentals of civilization based upon a fairy tale rather than fairy tale itself. I do hope this article is widely read. Just like Ron Paul’s discussions of the welfare/warfare state have brought many of those whose ostensible concern was preemptive war, security state, social programs, etc, into opposing the Fed, perhaps this piece will similarly help bring many climate change skeptics into the liberty movement.
