The Cause

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported that last October was the warmest in recorded history. Turns out this was not the case. Wrong wrong wrong. The conclusion went unquestioned, until it was questioned by some bloggers. Should the people whose job it is to notice such things have noticed a problem? Well, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports 63 local snowfall records, and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for that same October. You'd think this would raise some red flags, re it being the coldest ... or do I mean warmest? -- October for as long as there have been Octobers. How'd they get it so very wrong? A report "had a wrong month label attached." What, a report about the basement furnace? As for all that snow, a Goddard functionary dismissed it as cherry-picking: "Far more important are the long-term trends." His job, you see, is, apparently, to prove Global Warming.

Debra Saunders: "When science reporters write about, say, hormone therapy or drinking red wine, they report on studies that find that hormones or red wine can be good for you, as well as studies that suggest otherwise. Any science involving complex organisms is rarely black and white.

"When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the-sky-is-falling belief that global warming is human-caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news."

Weather, it seems, is black and white, and no fault in this to science reporters. It's the scientists themselves. "Scientists". A recent abstracts review of 928 global warming papers concludes that, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position." Perfect agreement. The debate is indeed over. There is debate over whether abortion ends human life, whether there is Evolution, whether there was a Holocaust -- but in the mainstream peer-reviewed journals, not one merest squeak against Global Warming.

We do know there is conflicting evidence. It does get promulgated. Just not in any journal of orthodoxy. From this what shall we conclude? A lack of courage? -- of honest? An abuse of power? -- of trust? A political agenda? A lunatic fringe unworthy of meaningful notice?

Here's what clues us into the nature of the phenomenal silence: there is no rebuttal of the other side, its arguments or its evidence. There is no survey of how they are wrong. GW, like EVLTN, is a fact, the way Obama is the Saviour is a fact. On fools, bigots and monsters can doubt it. And if we point out what we think of as evidence, the response, in the journals, in the MSM, is official silence and general scorn.

Botanist David Bellamy, produced an anti-GW documentary in Australia, and thereby ruined his career. He calls the current state of affairs "anti-science". He states that "in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased." Saunders tells us that Richard S. Lindzen, "MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, recently wrote, 'There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.'"

More than 31,000 scientists have signed the Global Warming Petition Project, which asserts that "no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." No work on this subject by any of these scientists will have been included in any scientific journal during the period of abstract review previously mentioned.

Remember the Goddard furnace gaff? Same sort of thing happened in 2007, when they had to change their tune: it wasn't 1998, but 1934 that was the hottest year in American history. Ah well. Such mistakes are understandable. Yep. Very understandable indeed, when we notice how the head of Goddard, James Hansen, gave evidence in a London criminal trial. He testified on behalf of six Greenpeace "eco-vandals" who attacked a coal-fueled power plant. The criminals were exonerated. They had a "lawful excuse" defense, based on Hansen's testimony. You see, without their actions, "400 species" could become extinct because of that particular power plant.

It's science, dude. What's a little proactive anarchy, a little religio-political dissimulation, when you're trying to save the Planet?


J