Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 02/10/2010 10:32:13 AM PST by neverdem
Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960s. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the “limits to growth” fad of the 1970s to acid rain to ozone depletion, always with an overlay of moral condemnation of anyone who dissented from environmental correctness. With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot — a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be falsified and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level. Former Colorado senator Tim Wirth was unusually candid when he remarked in the early days of the climate campaign that “we’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration he ended up at the United Nations.)
The global-warming thrill ride looks to be coming to an end, undone by the same politically motivated serial exaggeration and moral preening that discredited previous apocalypses. On the heels of the East Anglia University “Climategate” scandal have come a series of embarrassing retractions from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding some of the most loudly trumpeted signs and wonders of global warming, such as the ludicrous claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear within 30 years, that nearly half of the Amazon jungle was at imminent risk of destruction from a warming planet, and that there was a clear linkage between climate change and weather-related economic losses. The sources for these claims turned out to be environmental advocacy groups — not rigorous, peer-reviewed science.
To be sure, these revelations do not in and of themselves mean that the idea of anthropogenic global warming is false. But this is probably the beginning of a wholesale revision of the conventional wisdom on climate change. One of the central issues of Climategate — the veracity and integrity of the surface-temperature records used for our estimates of warming over the last few decades — is far from resolved. The next frontier is likely to be a fresh debate about basic climate sensitivity itself. There have been several recent peer-reviewed papers suggesting much lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than the IPCC “consensus” computer models predict. And alternative explanations for observed climate change in the Arctic and elsewhere, such as shifts in ocean currents and wind patterns, should receive a second look.
Dissenters who pointed out these and other flaws in the IPCC consensus were demonized as deniers and ignored by the media, but they are now vindicated. (The American media are still averting their gaze, though the British press — even the left-wing Guardian and the Independent — is turning on the climate campaigners with deserved vengeance.) The IPCC is mumbling about non-specific reforms and changes in the process shaping its next massive climate report, due out in three or four years. The IPCC should emulate a typical feature of American government commissions and include a minority report from dissenters or scientists with a different emphasis. But the next IPCC report may not matter much: With the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process and the likely rejection of cap-and-trade in Congress, climate mania may have run its course.
Excellent!
Someone should tell this to John F’in Kerry
“Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960s.”
Exaggeration, alarmism and communism. The author left that one out.
The real giveaway that the warmistas are dealing in agitprop rather than science is that none of their data ever comes with an error bar. That's not science; there's no such thing as a measuring instrument with absolute accuracy and precision. Certainly there's no thermometer of which that could be said.
All the same, don't expect them to give up easily. There's a lot of money involved, and the prospect of more power than all the emperors in history put together have possessed. When your raison d'etre is controlling other people's lives, you either win or you die. Like the religious warrior, for you there are no other wars.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Eternity Road
Leave him alone. He was severely wounded in a vicious firefight (among many hundreds he led and fought in), highly decorated, some kinda special forces k-bar in his teeth while hip shootin' a coupla M-16s Viet Nam veteran, and don't you forget it.
Attacking John F'n Kerry like you just did, using tactics reminscent of Jenjis Khan, is not fair. Lindsey Graham will tell you the same thing.
I sure hope so!
And, in the process, defund the lying bastards, too!
” But the next IPCC report may not matter much: With the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process and the likely rejection of cap-and-trade in Congress, climate mania may have run its course.”
A year ago that would have sounded like a pipe dream. Boy, whoever was behind climatgate should have gotten the Nobel, been knighted and given every other prize, honor, title we can think of.
Once we defund them, we investigate “what they knew and when they knew it” and put some of them in prison.
Don’t think for a minute the AGW scam artists have quit yet.
Billings, Montana is sitting in between eight and fifteen inches of snow cover, nobody in town has seen their lawn for snow since late November and the city has run through their budget for the year and completely given up plowing anything but major arterials.
So this morning, a front page story appears in the Billings newspaper about this wandering AlGore acolyte with a sad tale about the Arctic ice all melting away right in front of his little bitty eyes.
....didn’t think they’d go completely to printing comic books quite this soon, but guess I was wrong.
I remember that one of the other leaflets being fluttered about, featured the statement that ecology was the "best" of all movements, because in the name of ecology you could push for the control of virtually every human activity.
At the time, I was just 18 and pretty far to the left. But even I, a young hippie leftaroo, thought, "Huh? Are we supposed to be the Power Freaks? Are we supposed to want to control 'virtually every human activity'?" It was unsettling. It stuck in my brain like a splinter.
And now, 40 years later, we see how the most aggressive branch of the Ecology Borg almost succeeded. It almost delivered us all into the hands of a totalitatian world state.
We've got the IPCC Global Carbon Control people stumbling backwards now. For the time being. But they're still active on 1,000 fronts, and they still want to control 'virtually every human activity'.
I guess we'll be fighting the Power Freaks for the rest of our lives.
And the larger problem is the unstated fact that anything such groups say, about anything, is and always has been and always will be, a transparent lie.
While written in a relieved tone, “it’s about time we slowed down,” the essential problem is that the policies desired by the authors of the IPCC have mostly been accomplished — just not implemented.
Even NR recognizes that the onus still seems to be on those who simply want proof that all this is so.
How can the skeptics possibly prove those who say the crisis is real are wrong?
As long as the funding lasts the AGW advocates are going to go forward with even greater claims that doom is but a burnt lump of coal away.
Nature hasn't been cooperating with the AGW hypothesis for at least a decade.
As long as the funding lasts the AGW advocates are going to go forward with even greater claims that doom is but a burnt lump of coal away.
IMHO, they'll get funding for one more fiscal year, but none after Nov 2010.
It wasn't you that received the soon-to-be President's order on your secret decoder ring that dark and stormy Christmas Eve when Lt. JF Kerry led us up into Cambodia, swimming the treacherous Mekong on our hunt for NAZI spies and environmental polluters.
The Mekong was much higher that night due to Global Warming, but that did not deter my CO, Lt. JF Kerry, who was in VietNam with us and who shares the same initials as that other outstanding Irishman from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, JFK, Ted's brother.
It was Lt. Kerry, displaying manly modesty, who wrote the After-Action Report, He was auto-awarded the Croix de Guerre avec Palme, The Congressional Medal of Honor, the Pour le Merité, the coveted Red Cross Life Saving Badge, and three of the 15 Purple Hearts he holds. He was generous to us, too. I, who single-handedly captured 314 violators of the Cambodian Plastics Recycling Code, was awarded an autographed photo of Lt. Kerry windsurfing off Chatham, MA, which I treasure to this day.
America needs heroes, Bob.
Good post(s); thread. Thanks to all posters/linkers/researchers/educators. BTTT!
(It’s good to see you fporretto. I haven’t seen you in a while, although I see your great commentary on other forums from time to time.)
You, my friend, are singlehandedly responsible for making my frikkin’ day. The retelling of that fateful night was absolutely rivetting.
You should forward this missive to Tay-Ray-Zuh, so she can frame it and place it, deservedly, alongside J F’n K’s many accolades.
And still no one seems ready or able to build a good working guillotine, to deal finally with the purveyors of global governance through selling anthropogenic global warming.
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