The slick trick behind global frauding

American Thinker ^ | April 09, 2008 | James Lewis

[neverdem]

In Stalin's Russia any dissenter from the Party Line was guilty. Innocence had to be proved. It's a standard tyrant's trick. During the reign of Oliver Cromwell in England, witchhunters did not have to prove that their victims were guilty. The accused witches had to prove their innocence.

That's what Al Gore has done to science: He and his friends have flipped innocence and guilt from normal science to Stalinist science.

In Al Gore's America, any "global warming denier" is guilty until proven innocent. He or she must have been bought off by Big Oil.   Skeptics, no matter how well-qualified, must prove the negative about really silly alarmist hogwash. And whenever some prediction is falsified, the warm mongers have an explanation: it's just a temporary glitch in the data. Oh, yes, we were wrong about 1998, but just wait till 2050! The excuses are endless.

Stalin twisted scientific biology over four decades in the Soviet Union. His favorite fake-scientist, Trofim Lysenko, used all the powers of the police state to enforce his batty belief that the bleeding disaster of Soviet agriculture could be fixed just by making plants grow bigger. It's the old idea that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors stretched their necks out more and more, to nibble at higher leaves on the trees. It's nonsense, as horse breeders have known for ages. You can't make a great race horse just by making their ancestors run fast. You have to do selective breeding.

But breeding takes time, and Stalin was in a hurry. So he fell for the Lysenko fraud, and flipped the burden of proof: Any Soviet biologist who disagreed with Lysenko was shot. This went on for forty years, and caused endless suffering as one harvest after the next crashed. People died by the millions, in part because biological science was fundamentally corrupted.

Putting the burden of proof on the doubters is a perversion of normal, healthy science. It's as if Jeremiah Wright demanded that all white folks must prove to him that they're not blue-eyed devils.  If politically correct ideas are true by default, the Al Gores can prove anything.

In normal science the burden of proof is on the proposer. Albert Einstein had to prove in his historic 1905 paper that there was a fundamental flaw in classical physics.  The distinctive predictions of Relativity Theory had to be verified for decades afterwards. Some are still being tested today.  His predecessor Max Planck remarked that he encountered so much skepticism that he had to wait for the older generation of physicists to die off before his work was accepted. Darwin said the same thing.

A healthy scientific community is extremely skeptical. It needs to see more and more evidence, over and over and over again, before it adopts some wild-eyed new idea. It takes all the time it needs; good science is very patient. Einstein himself was a complete skeptic about quantum mechanics, and never accepted it over the last forty years of his life. He had a perfect right to question it, as long as he had rational arguments, and he did. (He was wrong on QM, but he was right on Relativity.)

"Catastrophic global warming," caused by human beings, is a really wild-eyed idea, given the fact that animals have survived on earth for half a billion years, with thousands of massive volcanic explosions, giant meteors hitting the earth, drifting continents, and great biomass changes that would have perturbed the climate, if the hypothesis were true. Just imagine the amount of C0² that must have been released with the Cambrian explosion of animal life. If the earth really saw superfast global ups and downs in temperature, no animals could have survived those 500 million years. The Ice Ages drove animals and people south, but they were not superfast, global events, or you and I would not be here today. Animals and plants are able adapt to temperature changes. Polar bears grow layers of fat and long, dense fur. Camels can stay cool in the desert.

In biology, "catastrophism" has been treated with intense skepticism since Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century. Except today, when biological catastrophism is the in thing. Why would that be, do you suppose? 

How have Al Gore and the fraudsters pulled it off? It's really simple. They just flipped the burden of proof and put it on the "deniers" --- the skeptics, who don't believe the computer models. With the Left in control of the media, you can do it.

So now it's prove to me you're not a witch! Because there is no decisive evidence. There are 21 computer models that "prove" global warming over the next century. By the time 2050 rolls around, most of the modelers will be dead.

To answer the biggest con trick in the history of science, you just have to address a single question to True Believers:  What's your evidence for this barmy idea? (Not: Here's my evidence against it. That's not how it works).

And the answer is: There are no facts robust enough, consistent enough, and verified enough to support the mass  hysteria. The climate system is hypercomplex, nonlinear and poorly understood. The media spinners are immensely ignorant about real science, and just care about the next scare headline. There's a lot of wild speculation and a mob of self-serving politicians, bureaucrats and media types who stand to gain a ton of power and money by suckering millions of taxpayers. Al Gore just started a 300 million dollar PR campaign to convince everybody.  When was the last time you saw 300 million bucks being spent to promote a scientific hypothesis that was already proven? We're not spending millions to prove the existence of gravity. The uproar and money involved in this fraud is in direct proportion to the lack of solid facts.

The last ten years have seen global cooling, not warming.  

Temperatures over the last hundred years look like the stock market: ups and downs, a very slow rise of a fraction of a degree until the late 1990s, then a drop for the last ten years, with so much cooling in the last year as to cancel out a century of warming. Why? Nobody really knows, but Mr. Sun is the logical suspect.

Look it up. But don't get caught in the trap of proving the negative. In normal, healthy science, the skeptics ask questions. It is the proponents who carry the burden of proof. 

Now can we talk about 9/11? That's a fact. But Al Gore doesn't think it's a big deal, compared to his favorite science fiction story. Al Gore just wants power, fame, money, and the US Presidency. Well, three out of four ain't bad.

Oliver Cromwell and his witchhunters would have understood  perfectly.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com

[cogitator]

Especially now that we just might be getting the evidence we need to prove that Global warming is not accelerating.

Thanks. I am going to be really curious to see what happens as the La Nina effect diminishes (both to the temperatures and to the skeptical perspective on the temperatures).

What will be even more interesting will be what happens the next year that we have a decent-sized El Nino. Because I'm starting to think that warming is a quasi-step function related to El Nino events, that year and subsequent years will be really interesting to watch.

[Lazamataz]

Mellow a little why don’t you.

Ok.

[SunkenCiv]

...this reminds me... from my very own lips...

Thanks neverdem.

[LeGrande]

What will be even more interesting will be what happens the next year that we have a decent-sized El Nino. Because I'm starting to think that warming is a quasi-step function related to El Nino events, that year and subsequent years will be really interesting to watch.

I think you are right that the next El Nino year is going to pump the air temps right up there again (at the expense of cooling the ocean).

I think what we are missing is the 'cooling' forcing. When I go soaring I look for warm spots to provide lift. As the day heats up lift improves dramatically. Thunderstorms are a dramatic example of this heat pump effect.

Yesterday I rode a wave up to +30,000' and out of curiosity I would jump in and out of the wave noting the temps and tried to predict how high the wave would take me based on the temperature differential. It isn't as easy as it sounds because the air temp outside of the wave is falling with increasing altitude too. The lapse is about 2 degrees centigrade per thousand feet, but weather systems always override that rule. My ride ended when the outside temps dramatically increased and I entered some kind of shear with dramatically warmer temps.

My theory is that wind, thermals and clouds are nothing more than heat pumps. The extra warming induced by CO2 is offset by longer periods of thermals that take the heat up high to get radiated away.