Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
The global-warming hoax on trial
Friday, June 11th, 2010
A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. [emphasis added]
Jason Johnston is Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law and Director, Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He holds JD and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan. From these and other facts, I conclude that (a) he is not a dummy, (b) he is trained in the examination and evaluation of both written testimony and physical evidence, and (c) he knows something about the relationship between the environment industry and the fields of law and economics (his PhD is in economics). He is the author of “Global Warming Advocacy Science: a Cross Examination” (which can be downloaded for free here).
The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.[emphasis added]
Consensus Science
At the heart of the hoax is the phony assertion that there is a “consensus” among scientists that anthropogenic global warming is an undeniable “fact”:
In recent Congressional hearings, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts stated that not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper contradicts the “consensus” view that increasing greenhouse gas emissions will lead to a “catastrophic” two degree Celsius increase in global mean temperatures. Senator Kerry is hardly alone in this belief. Virtually all environmental law scholars seem to believe that there is now a “scientific consensus” that anthropogenic greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions have caused late twentieth century global warming and that if dramatic steps are not immediately taken to reduce those emissions, then the warming trend will continue, with catastrophic consequences for the world. [emphasis added]
If ever there was ever a red flag in any discussion of science, the word consensus is it. The late author Michael Crichton warned of this sort of anti-science in a speech at Cal Tech in 2003.
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. [emphasis added] [The text of this speech seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the “official” Crichton site. I’m just sayin’.]
With politicians like Kerry, it’s hard to know if he is just ignorant or willfully lying in order to promote Obama’s Marxist agenda, but Johnston cites dozens of peer-reviewed papers in the course of his cross-examination of the hoaxers.
It is virtually impossible to find anywhere in the legal or the policy literature on global warming anything like a sustained discussion of the actual state of the scientific literature on ghg emissions and climate change. Instead, legal and policy scholars simply defer to a very general statement of the climate establishment’s opinion (except when it seems too conservative), generally failing even to mention work questioning the establishment climate story, unless to dismiss it with the ad hominem argument that such work is the product of untrustworthy, industry-funded “skeptics” and “deniers.”
The danger to America is that, since
the most significant ghg emission reduction policies are intended to completely alter the basic fuel sources upon which industrial economies and societies are based, with the costs uncertain but potentially in the many trillions of dollars, one would suppose that before such policies are undertaken, it would be worthwhile to verify that the climate establishment’s view really does reflect an unbiased and objective assessment of the current state of climate science.
But the leaders to which we have entrusted our economic and political future are not interested. Al Gore, Congress, White House advisors, and the UN’s fraudulent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are focused on destroying America’s free-market economy. Real science can only get in their way, so they evangelize us with their brand of true religion – unquestioning faith in “consensus science” and an inquisition for the “untrustworthy, industry-funded ‘skeptics’ and ‘deniers’”.
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"A blizzard of lies" from Al Gore
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Al Gore has a huge financial interest in the myth that human activity causes global warming. Perpetrating the fraud of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) has made him even wealthier than did his family’s tobacco business. And he’s prepared to defend this lie with the same zeal with which he and the tobacco companies defended the lie that cigarette-smoking was not a serious health hazard.
Gore has came out of hiding with an op-ed piece in the New York Times. If the spin makes you dizzy and the fantasy world he inhabits reminds you of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, you might regain your footing with a dose of reality from Investor’s Business Daily:
If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore’s op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”
Perhaps he’s trying to protect his investments as he knows them, for he is heavily involved in enterprises that deal with carbon offsets and green technology. If the case for climate change is shown to be demonstrably false, a lot of his green evaporates like moisture from the ocean.
Read the entire IBD piece here.
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Thank you, Massachusetts!
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Thank you for ending the Democrats’ stranglehold on the Senate. But you have to feel kind of sorry for the troika of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi. They thought they’d have two full years to turn the United States into the Soviet Socialist Republic of America. But they only had a year and they didn’t get it done. What a shame.
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Obamanation: Fun, shout-outs, and – oh, yeah – dead soldiers
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
Does anyone believe that Obama has respect for our military? If so, his shameful conduct following the shootings at Fort Hood should clarify things. He doesn’t. He cares about his political cronies, frauds like ACORN, his communist advisors, and terrorists like William Ayers, but American soldiers? Not so much.
The murdered American soldiers at Fort Hood were just an afterthought to our “Commander-in-Chief”. See Robert George’s story or just go straight to the YouTube video of his casual afterthoughts about the tragedy. A truly stomach-turning performance by a dreadful President.
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Obamanation: Building on lies
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
Obama has told us we need a public health insurance option to “keep insurance companies honest.” An unlikely source – the AP – has taken a modest step toward keeping him (and serial liars Nancy Pelosi and moveon.org) a little more honest.
To quote the lead from this story:
What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They’re all more profitable than the health insurance industry.
It turns out the health insurance industry’s “obscene profits” (Pelosi) don’t actually exist. It seems the willingness of the health insurance industry to “let the bodies pile up as long as their profits are safe” is no match for the willingness of moveon.org to lie about it.
Pharmas and other health care providers did much better than the insurers. But a public option is not intended to “keep them honest”. Its intent is to drive them out of business altogether and make every American (except for Congress and privileged Government elites, of course) dependent on the government for health care. It’s the very foundation for establishing the nightmare of Obamanation.
Just a reminder – the source for this post is not Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or the Republican National Committee. It’s the left-leaning AP.
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Obamanation: The Nobel joke
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Ya gotta love those crazy Norwegians! An amateur statesman who has accomplished precisely nothing gets the Nobel Peace Prize. But before we start taking this silliness too seriously, let’s look at the real reasons. This won’t take long. The prize serves two obvious purposes, one backward-facing and one forward-facing:
Giving this prize to a ten-month U.S. President who has done nothing to earn it serves as a repudiation of his predecessor. There being no Nobel War Prize to give to Bush, they did the next best thing and gave the “Peace” prize to Obama.
Giving this prize to America’s first true socialist President serves as a repudiation of capitalism. If it weren’t for the first point, they may have given it to Propagandist Mikey Moore instead.
That’s it. The prize serves no other purpose. Well, no, it does serve an unintended purpose: It provides stark evidence of how politicized and corrupt the whole Nobel Prize industry has become. There were candidates who actually deserved to win the Prize and could have used the money to further real work, not just raw political ambition.
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Politics: Having your cake and eating it too
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
Disclaimer: I occasionally smoke a hand-made imported cigar. I quit cigarettes 27 years ago and have never chewed.
“Having your cake and eating too” could apply to much of what’s going on in Washington these days – Senator Chris Dodd handing his AIG buddies millions of dollars in bonuses then criticizing them for taking the money, Obama promising not to force the burden of our economic mistakes on future generations while creating the largest and fastest-growing deficits in the history of Earth, and so on.
But I’m particularly amused by the reasoning of those who raise taxes on tobacco. Inevitably, these geniuses manage to do something I cannot – believe that both A and not A are true at the same time. I suppose this irrational ability is a consequence of the post-modernist belief that truth is relative:
Rational Person: “Is truth absolute?”
Post-Modernist: “There are no absolute truths.”
R P: “Really? none?”
P-M: “True. Absolutely none.”
According to the story cited above, the reason for raising the federal tax on cigarettes from $.39 to $1.01 is “to finance a major expansion of health insurance for children”. Rooting for the increase is the president of the American Heart Association:
The tax increase “is a terrific public health move by the federal government,” he said. “Every time that the tax on tobacco goes up, the use of cigarettes goes down.”
Wow! 33 billion bucks to spend on children and improved health for smokers who are forced to quit or cut back! Who wouldn’t want that? But there’s a more realistic question – which one do you want? Someone needs to explain to liberals that they can have one or the other, but not both. Either smokers keep smoking and keep coughing up the taxes (so to speak) to pay for children’s health insurance, or they cut way back, get healthier, and leave no one to pay for the insurance.
But liberals, the poster children for irrational public policy, obviously believe that cigarette smokers will simultaneously pay and not pay the tax; they will both smoke and not smoke.
And, of course, there’s another hallmark of liberalism here, hypocrisy:
Some policy analysts have questioned the wisdom of boosting tobacco taxes to finance health care for children. They argue that the fate of such a broad program should not depend on revenues derived from a minority of the adult population, many of whom have low incomes and are hooked on a habit.
There you have it, pure post-modern liberalism at its best.
Posted in Culture, Politics | 2 Comments »