Vin Suprynowicz

The little man behind the curtain ...

Only "two rogue scientists," as the oh-so-reassuring Climategate Deniers would have us believe? Walter Williams, esteemed economics professor at George Mason University, last week summarized Climategate, to date:

"New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies (and) engaged in scientific and academic fraud, but committed criminal acts as well. Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. CRU has the world's largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world ... its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 global warming report."

The Climategate e-mails show man-made global warming fraudsters "around the world" brazenly discussing "both the destruction and hiding of data that does not support their global-warming claims," Williams notes. "They discuss criminally deleting data rather than comply with Freedom of Information Act requests. There's also discussion of faking data for journals such as Nature, conspiring to keep opposing science out of peer-reviewed journals (of which they controlled the editorial boards), and using statistical 'tricks' to hide the cooling period of the last 10 years. ..."

But it fell to Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger to note, on Dec. 4 in a column headlined "Climategate: Science Is Dying," just how massive the aftershocks could be:

"I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them," Mr. Henninger wrote. "This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. ... The public was told repeatedly that something called 'the scientific community' had affirmed the science. ... Because 'science' said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. ...

"What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event," Henninger was one of the first to grasp. "This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. ...

"The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims -- plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish -- evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. ... Most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom."

Starting to get it? To land continued government grants, it was necessary to "develop" evidence that would "prove" the claim that man-made global warming will fry us all on a griddle unless we cede massive new power, massive wealth, our standard of living and our industrial dominance of the world to the "scientific" central state.

What those who dutifully excreted such steaming piles of crap have accomplished is to require that the world now presume, in self-defense, that any state-funded "science" is little more than government-funded propaganda to justify taxing us, regulating us and advancing national socialism under a new, green flag.

Mind you, it couldn't happen to a more deserving gang of grant-chasing welfare leeches.

It's not as though this is their first blatant fraud in the service of state repression. If secondhand smoke causes cancer, why is it when the first U.S. studies failed to turn up the sufficiently strong, 2-to-1 correlation between disease and cohabiting with a smoker, which had always been the required standard for showing medical causality, the parties simply reduced the amount of correlation required -- and subsequently ignored larger, international studies that show no provable harm from secondhand smoke, at all?

"The tobacco industry challenged the EPA in court," reports Steven Milloy, a biostatistician, lawyer and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of Junkscience.com. "A federal judge vacated the EPA's main conclusions, stating that 'EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information; ... deviated from its [standard procedures]; failed to disclose important findings and reasoning; and left significant questions without answers. EPA's conduct left substantial holes in the administrative records.' "

Yet children in the government youth propaganda camps are taught to this day that "Even secondhand smoke causes cancer; 'science' says it's so."

The pace of the world bailout from the "Let's cripple our economies to stop global warming" baloney is breathtaking. Two weeks ago, public outcry defeated "cap-and-trade" legislation -- which had been considered a done deal -- in Australia. After 14 members of his party leadership resigned in protest, conservative opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who had signed onto the scheme, was dumped, marking the first time since 1916 that a leader of a major Australian political party was deposed on grounds of a single policy decision.

Without conservative support, the legislation was promptly defeated in the Aussie senate.

"Cap-and-trade in Australia -- which just a week ago was declared a certainty -- is officially dead," reports blogger Tim Andrews. "Early last week ... Turnbull announced that he had reached agreement with the government to implement cap-and-trade, thus binding his party to support it in parliament en bloc. ... The days that followed were simply stunning. ... Political offices went into meltdown, unable to cope with the torrent of phone calls, faxes and e-mails opposing what was effectively a massive tax hike."

Dumped by his own party, Turnbull's "political career is over, his aspirations to become prime minister have come to naught," Mr. Andrews reports.

That noise you hear is the folding of tents in the night. It froze last night, in Las Vegas. Maybe they can try "the coming glacial winter," again.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of "Send in theWaco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/ and www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/.

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Comments

Note: Comments made by reporters and editors of the Las Vegas Review-Journal are presented with a yellow background.

1. MSchaffer Dec. 20, 2009 | 11:10 p.m. Report Abuse

   Paolo,
   Where the science is not settled is regarding the severity of the shifts in climate zones, droughts, and severe weather events so, to this extent, you are wrong in claiming that I or other reasonable people think the science is settled.
   It isn't the link to other websites that is the issue here but, rather, your inability, because of either ideological blindness or science illiteracy, in exhibiting good judgement. Proclaiming in all caps that you know that there are actual facts that disagree with the basic understanding of AGW or that assertions disagreeing with that understanding have not been answered ignores the research experts have done.
   Whether an appeal to authority is a fallacy depends on the expertise being appealed to. When you go to a specialist, according to your illogical argument, that is an appeal to authority fallacy. Instead, to complete the analogy to AGW, you want readers to believe sources with no credible authorship or written by people with no actual formal expertise or who have obviously been corrupted by producing results in accordance with pay from fossil fuel industries. Hopefully only fellow libertarians are naive enough to fall for such transparently ignorant materials.

2. Paul W Dec. 20, 2009 | 7:37 a.m. Report Abuse

   The approach of the GWC (Global Warming Cult) in this thread appears to be two-fold.
   
   One, "The science is settled. Anyone who disagrees is a fool."
   
   Two, "The GWC is correct, because we can link to other websites that agree with us. This proves that we are geniuses."
   
   Gosh, I'm so impressed. I could link to hundreds of websites with plenty of solid scientific evidence that disputes man-caused global warming. So what?
   
   Interesting that the ACTUAL FACTS cited that challenge the GWC do not get answered, except with the old tired refrains of "the science is settled," (a parrot could squawk that line), and "here are websites that support what I say."
   
   Both these "arguments" are simply variations on the "appealing to authority" fallacy.

3. MSchaffer Dec. 17, 2009 | 11:02 p.m. Report Abuse

   Paolo,
   At this point I am more interested in how it is you so consistently exhibit poor judgement in source selection. I have referred to well known and respected sites written by and for scientists while in return you suggest a site with no reliable attribution and obviously false information. The claim on this site for a prediction of global cooling in the 1970's has been shown to be not true for the science literature but a claim, since retracted by Newsweek, which is not a science publication. For more on why your source fails the reliability standard see here:
   http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/

4. Paul W Dec. 17, 2009 | 6:02 p.m. Report Abuse

   A point that is ignored by the GWC (Global Warming Cult) is the sheer complexity of global climate, which makes it difficult to predict trends for the next week, year, or decade with much accuracy. Thousands of factors--not all of them known--undoubtedly play a role.
   
   For example, the GWC claims as ABSOLUTE FACT that the pitiful amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by homo Sapiens will, beyond a doubt, raise the global temperature. CO2, as the United Nations recently told us, is an environmental toxin.
   
   But CO2 is absolutely essential to life on earth.
   
   Why? Because CO2 can also be called "plant food."
   
   When more CO2 is put into the atmosphere, plants tend to thrive. When they thrive, they of course absorb more and more of that CO2. When they process it, they convert it into O2 (breathable oxygen).
   
   In other words, there is a feedback loop. More CO2 means more plants, which automatically absorb and therefore reduce the amount of CO2.
   
   Plant and animal life are dependent on one another, because of this CO2-to-O2 cycle.
   
   Another example is cloud reflectivity. If water vapor (by far the most important greenhouse gas--waaaay more important than CO2) increases in the atmosphere, you tend to get more clouds, which reflect sunlight. Therefore, the effect is self-mitigating. Again, a feedback loop.
   
   There are many, many more of these natural systems that tend to mitigate the effect of global climate change.
   
   But of course, I must be wrong, because the anointed ones, the GWC, have said I am wrong. Oh, the shame!

5. Paul W Dec. 17, 2009 | 5:51 p.m. Report Abuse

   Here's a good overview of climate history:
   
   http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
   
   This site (any many others, for those who say "the science is settled" on this matter, too) says the current interglacial period has lasted about 18,000 years. Other sources I have seen say fifteen to twenty thousand years.
   
   Guess what? The science is hardly exact on these claims. Maybe the current warm period has been only 12 thousand years. Maybe it's been 20.
   
   Here, we have a quibbling attempt to counteract my arguments by citing minutiae, rather than the real crux of the argument, which is unanswerable.
   
   Ice Ages, to say it again, are much more to be feared than warm periods. During such times, arable land will shrink to a fraction of what it is today. If, on the other hand, the global temperature goes up an average 1 or 2 degrees C, we might very well have arable land in mid-northern Canada, and in southern Siberia.
   
   Others have said, in this discussion, that they, the anointed ones, have actually taken courses in paleo-geology. Well gosh, I'm just so impressed. This puts them, evidently, above the fray; they need not deign to discuss matters with us poor, ignorant serfs.
   
   And serfs they want to make us.

6. MSchaffer Dec. 17, 2009 | 3:42 p.m. Report Abuse

   Given the nature of the threat to all of us, my concern has never revolved around me and it is odd that you would think this. This is not about my beliefs but about evidence. You have presented none that is reliable so why should anyone put any credence in what you write?

7. MSchaffer Dec. 17, 2009 | 10:52 a.m. Report Abuse

   My opinion is based on the evidence, which is overwhelming, and unless you present valid credible evidence otherwise, which you have not done, will not change. What do you believe and why?

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