Environmentalist Fraud, Caught on Tape!

Environmentalist Fraud, Caught on Tape!

Here we can see how environmentalists, advised by, and even driven by their attorney, plot to make up negative reports so they can get more funding. Amazingly, they even say this stuff while the camera is rolling. This is an outtake from a documentary. It now forms part of the evidence in a RICO case against them, filed by Chevron. Watch, and be entertained, or horrified, take your pick.



Wizbang has the entire story, and more video.

Legal RICO complaint from Chevron is here. They are charging under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The penalties afforded in a RICO case are huge, and criminal liability may attach.

A five minute video from Chevron explaining the case and the circumstances follows.

Scientific Heresy - Matt Ridley's Angus Millar lecture at the RSA

Scientific Heresy - Matt Ridley's Angus Millar lecture at the RSA

The great Matt Ridley has posted the text of his speech on scientific heresy at the Bishop Hill Blog. Great reading - a finely reasoned logical presentation. A little taste:

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

Read the whole thing. Even better, see the pdf with all the illustrations.

Cult of Global Warming Is Losing Influence

Cult of Global Warming Is Losing Influence

Michael Barone writes it so much better than I could-

Religious faith is a source of strength in many people’s lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous — or disastrous.

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered “the great disappointment” when it didn’t happen.

In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children’s Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn’t, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.

In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren’t, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.

A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists.

It goes on, and gets better. Read the whole thing.

The "Anti-Science" Trope

The "Anti-Science" Trope

Everywhere I go, I see that those who resist the global warming movement are always called "anti-science." I object to the sobriquet, a reversal of reality actually, of "anti-science." I was a physics major, and have followed climate and weather for fifty years. The science is in, and we have no idea what drives our climate, because there is no consensus among scientists.

There is a bunch of so-called "climate scientists" who make their living by ginning up hysteria, but in the real, peer-reviewed world of science, there is no agreement. The planet (the biosphere really) may or may not be warming, but it is historically colder than long term proxy studies suggest is normal for an interglacial period, and no warming has factually been seen for over a decade. We have much better ways to observe these things now, and the better we get at it, the less "warming" can be detected.

IF there is warming, and that's a big IF, there is no scientific consensus of what might be causing it.

If humans are causing it by carbon dioxide emissions, no possible way to reduce these emissions currently exists.

No matter which political stripe you come from, no matter how many times you scream "Bullshit!" (as Al Gore did last week) these are the scientific facts. Anyone who says differently is misinformed.

Now, that being said, there is some validity to adopting clean air and water policy. The hysterical claims of Gore et al make sensible environmental regulation almost impossible, as pols try to ride the hysteria to even bigger budgets and ever more power.

The "anti-science" group is the warming alarmists who claim that policy can alter weather and climate, and that is incontrovertible fact. The republicans like Rick Perry who see that there is no consensus, and no actual understanding of the drivers of climate changes, are the ones who follow the science where it has led us.

Science was better in the 60s

Science was better in the 60s

I was reading Luboš Motl's fine physics blog and came across this fine post about stratospheric aerosols. These substances have lately come into the news since they are the most recent excuse that warmists have come up with in their attempt to explain away the lack of warming the last decade and a half. First Luboš points out that the last actual science that addressed this phenomenon without the taint of warmism was done in 1965. Then Luboš makes some very strong points about where modern climate science has gone wrong, and, as he does, he goes on to prove it.

Some of the greatest commentary on the status of modern climate science is in this post. A little bit:

Their science resembles the science of the chieftain of a terrorist training camp. He believes in the Tooth Fairy and designs an amazing method to earn some money for his terrorist hobby. He punches away the teeth of all the mujahideens in his group, puts the teeth under the pillow, and expects that the Tooth Fairy will replace them by millions of dollars during the night, when he sleeps.

Instead, he still finds the teeth in the morning. So he is totally puzzled: what miraculous, unexpected, supernatural power could have prevented the Tooth Fairy from replacing the teeth by the money? Of course, he is as clever a chieftain as the IPCC scientists so he finds an explanation that satisfies him: the Tooth Fairy asked the Bone Fairy for a permission and didn't get it.

So the chieftain breaks all the bones of his men and puts them under the pillow. It must be different this time, he is confident, and he is waiting for the Tooth Fairy to replace the teeth and bones by millions of dollars. His belief in these laws of physics remains perfect - well, up to the moment when this man is finally shot by a NATO soldier.

It's very similar with the global warming nuts. Instead of admitting that their could have made a wrong assumption, they always prefer to add dozens of other wrong assumptions.

Read the whole thing. It is refreshing to read a young physicist who is not concerned with the career consequences of telling it like it is. I am grateful that he finds the time to write about warmism, especially after a week in which so much other news came out in his field of physics.

Environmentalists are Cargo Cultists

Environmentalists are Cargo Cultists

Cargo Cults were belief systems developed by primitive tribes to make sense of parachute resupply pallets that missed their mark in World War 2. They found the bounty, had no easy explanation for how the goods arrived, and so designed a religion that ascribed these things to God. Environmentalists suffer from a similar misunderstanding about what they see in the world today. The actual explanation is easy to see, if we look at what is happening with open eyes.

The planet has changed, and it will continue to do so. Humanity has emerged as the apex predator in recent years, and we hope to remain at the top of the food chain for a long time to come. We humans need food and energy, and are fantastically gifted with the ability to provide it for ourselves. The Cargo Cultists and their ilk believe humanity to be vermin in a formerly "pristine" environment, who have ruined the optimum environment that existed before we ascended to primacy. There are too many of us, they believe, and we live too well, devouring too much food and energy for the planet's good, or something.

That is fatuous nonsense. We humans are here to stay, and our numbers are bound to increase. Pretending that yesterday's fish species or yesterday's climate is somehow "optimum" is merely a political talking point with no basis in fact or science. The political class wields these ideas to amass great power and wealth. I understand and respect where they are coming from. They know exactly what they are doing, and have no compunctions, or conscience, about it.

What I cannot respect is otherwise intelligent people buying in to these notions of peak oil, global warming, or endangered species. These changes are all natural, they have been happening for more than four billion years. There is no reason to believe that the earth will mot survive for billions years more as a fecund environment for whatever species have the hardiness and will to cling to life here.

Me? I'm betting on humanity. If the wild salmon can't make it in the real world, we will just have to find a better fish to eat. I see no danger in a warmer climate, even as I doubt that we shall see one. We are not that lucky - we may well have to deal with the cold. Air is cleaner every year, even as gas, oil, and coal are more abundant today than ever before. Victory will go to the bold, which pretty well describes humanity. Those who would cower in cold drafty caves instead of gleaming edifices because they fear the unknown can do it without me. Al Gore apparently agrees with me on that last point, for himself, at least.

Science, or "Science?"

Science, or "Science?"

Science has no place for consensus. "Science" does. In science, one puts forth a hypothesis and then experiments and observations are designed and collated to see if the result fits the predictions made in the hypothesis. In the case of climate science, the IPCC put forth a detailed vision of the future of earth's climate in 1990 and 1995. Those predictions failed. They changed the goalposts in 2001 and again in 2007, yet the conditions still will not conform to the new predictions.

The science that is settled is the physical behavior of CO2 in the laboratory. The "science" that says that we shall see this behavior in world climate is demonstrably false. We have lofted satellites and loosed buoys and balloons in order to get a finer understanding of climate, and the better observational tools have uncovered more failure of the theory. Oceans refuse to heat up, proof that global warming has not been happening for the last decade or so. Storms are way down, again not in compliance with prediction. Corals, sea level, none of these phenomena have acted in line with the predictions. That, in science, means that something is wrong with the hypothesis. It means we need more study.

Since 1988 the global warming movement, in the UN, through the IPCC, and some governments, have been demanding a policy prescription that is nothing short of reducing the expansion of industrial development worldwide. CO2 is a proxy for energy and manufacturing. It is unclear if it would be possible to reduce the amount of this trace gas in any significant way, since this has not been determined. Enforcing CO2 emission reductions will not only require the first world to reduce its standard of living, but, if it were to be effective, it would damn people in the third world to poverty, heating their food with animal dung and wood. For such a draconian regime to be put in place, the science better be right - we had better be confident. We are not confident, in fact we have become less so with better science.

My background in science makes me agnostic about what is happening. I am willing to believe that human activities are having an effect, but there is no way to know today, with the best science we can do, whether humanity is making it warmer or cooler. It has been much colder and hotter on earth in the past - on that there is no debate. Whether or not the climate of the 20th or the 19th century is an optimum that we must strive, at any expense, to maintain, is also something I do not believe that we know.

By all means keep funding research. We need to understand our world better if at all possible. And, once we know what is happening, then we should decide what to do. The true believers in the "science" are practicing a religion, where belief can not be questioned. That is not science.

The Climate Conundrum

The Climate Conundrum

All the solar energy (insolation) that hits the planet is known, about 1366 watts per square meter. That sounds like a lot, but it is all used or otherwise accounted for in natural processes. It makes the rain fall, the wind blow, and the plants grow. It makes the planetary surface warmer than the deep cold of outer space. We can play with it, and so long as we do not extract a very large amount of power from it, we will be fine. But if we would actually attempt to extract enough solar power to make a real difference, there would be consequences in weather and climate that we do not know much about, since we have such a paltry understanding of the dynamics of climate.

I am always amused when I read one of these climate studies - not the executive summaries that science journalists read, but the studies themselves - there is so much that they admit that they do not understand. It does not stop them from reaching sweeping conclusions though, ofter covered with weasel words like "we believe" or "likely" with no backup or calculation. Climate science is unique that way - no calculation is needed, just a well written exec summary to fool the rubes.

Early indications are that wind farms on land tend to create a warmer microclimate nearby and offshore wind farms cause onshore cooling. The reasons are unclear, but the folly of extensive deployment of wind extracting mechanisms will definitely have unintended, and largely unknown, consequences. Large solar electric or heat extraction similarly prevents the sunlight from reaching the ground, thus upsetting the ecosystem in ways both known and unknown. Hydro - well, nobody is gonna let us build any more hydro plants, so that does not matter. The little fishies would protest.

The real conundrum is that we use an enormous amount of power in the first world, and the third world wishes to join us in this endeavor. There is no known way to produce this power without upsetting a preexisting balance of ecology. It may well be that petroleum is the cleanest and safest, but that depends on the yet unknown danger of CO2, the last emittant, the one that we can not remove the way we removed the actual pollutants. But all these alternatives also change the ecology in ways both known and unknown.

That is why the green movement is against every single one of them. They have sued to stop photovoltaic and wind projects, and they are just getting started. Their answer they seek (just ask them, or read their blogs) is a Malthusian die-off of about half the world human population. The global warming scare is just a single manifestation of their desire to achieve this Brave New World of theirs, where humanity lives in harmony with the little piggies and fishies, and everyone is happy. They have banded together with the end of the worlders, and combined with careerists in academia and industry to formulate their scare. They probably believe their own bullshit. The fact is that earthly climate history is a story of ice ages interspersed with interglacial periods. We are currently deep into an interglacial. The sentient people in the physics community believe that, to the extent that something humanity is doing is extending the interglacial, that is a Good Thing, since humanity cannot survive another ice age.

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Update - In response to a question, I will add this bit:
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Hydro power is solar power in that the sun evaporates the water that falls as rain in the reservoir that spins the turbines. Wind power is solar power in that it is the heat of the sun that provides the convection that results in wind blowing. There is a finite amount of insolation delivered at the planet's surface, and it all does SOMETHING. We can capture it on a limited basis, but do you really think the greens will let us cover a desert area the size of Arizona plus New Mexico? The little salamanders will stop that one every time, so there is never gonna be enough power from solar to replace more than a fraction of the energy we use currently, and the third world wants to use energy like we do. The "Greens" want us to use energy like the third world does. All known practical energy sources must be exploited, and all leads pursued, but I fear that the profoundly unserious way humanity appears to be dealing with this impending problem will continue to take us in exactly the wrong direction. We need energy in increasing amounts. A sizable proportion of powerful humans (the greens) want us to use less energy, but they know we will never agree, so they put up spurious limits on energy generation expansion, backed up by religious dogma, which they label "science." Science is a process, while Warmist greens claim that "The science is settled," which is a profoundly unscientific statement. Science marches on, but inconvenient findings are scorned and ignored by the academic and media Warmist community. Meanwhile more and more scientists who formerly believed the orthodox position are changing their views. There are powerful career and social consequences for a scientist deviating from academic orthodoxy - just ask any physicist who questions string theory how his career fared after submitting that contrarian paper. But. Over time, the data and the reality will become clear - whatever it is.

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Update #2 Better insolation numbers
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Above I posted that total energy from the sun was 1366 watts per square meter. That number applies to a total of solar energy, much of which energy never reaches the ground. Clouds soak it up, "greenhouse" gases soak it up (yes Virginia, actual CO2 absorbs energy from both directions, which is why global warming can not be caused by CO2) and a large amount is reflected back into space (albedo). The maximum solar energy that does reach the ground is 746 watts per square meter in optimum conditions, which is, in the U.S.A. limited to relatively small area in the south west between about 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM for about 300 days a year. all other places in the United States see less than that. Then the efficiency of collection must be considered. Right now we are doing well at 10%, but even assuming huge strides in this area you must factor in that this is only possible during times when most people are not home. Storage of electricity is also woefully inefficient, so add it all up and you can easily see that covering every roof with photo-voltaic cells and filling every basement with next generation electric storage batteries will still not keep any modern home off the grid for more than a few hours at a time.

Greens are running out of solutions

Greens are running out of solutions

The religion of Thomas Malthus is running out of steam. A few of the adherents to this incoherent religion are beginning to scramble for ways to salvage their movement, and make it compatible with rational thought. The true believers have hijacked science and have called us, all of us, self destructive idiots, and thus lost most of the popular support they once had.

Walter Russel Meade has a nice essay on this, borrowing liberally from a recent piece on the dead end their movement has run into by George Monbiot in The Guardian. Money quote:

All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.

But Mead goes much further than Monbiot. He deconstructs the failures of the movement and gets to their causes.

Malthusianism is a religious conviction that desperately needs to think of itself as a science. From Thomas Malthus and his mathematical certainties to Paul Ehrlich with his famine timetables and the Club of Rome with its ‘scientific’ predictions of resource exhaustion, Malthusians have made confident predictions about the future and claimed scientific authority for statements that turned out to be contemptibly silly. That is the brutal fate that often awaits people who can’t keep the boundaries between science and religion straight.

We can only hope that a soft landing awaits the movement, if only because humanity has actual challenges to meet, and having a fringe religion that claims to own the issue places itself in opposition to all the rest of us. This is entirely counterproductive, as we face a burgeoning population, all of whom require food, fuel, and housing, and few of whom will embrace a Malthusian solution that requires most of them to die.

Thoughts on climate alarmism

Thoughts on climate alarmism

The movement called AGW, or Anthropogenic Global Warming, is basically an anti-modern or Malthusian belief in the finite availability of resources and a religion that believes that humans have soiled the planet due to our hubris and unquenchable greed. Believers in this religion can be called Warmists. Their redemption or solution to this "problem" is to back off of modernity by decreasing living standards and consumption to assuage the anger of the God Gaia. But they have their facts wrong. Since they base their religion on their claim that their religion is based on science and their belief in certain scientific "facts," the truth of those facts are a central to the understanding of that movement, and their view of where humanity stands here at the beginning of the 21st century. Those facts are not nearly on their side.

Life expectancy and health are on the increase world wide, as are personal income and living standards. Air and water pollution is similarly getting better every year. We have more resources of every type, as can be easily seen by commodity prices, whether steel or lumber, copper or wheat, or the availability of potable water to the poor. How can one reconcile Warmist beliefs in the face of these incontrovertible and easily proven facts? The only major threat our environment may be about to have to deal with is either global war or the appearance of the next ice age or a meteor strike, none of which is central to Warmist theology. Everything else they believe is faltering keeps getting better. We are so wealthy as a species, and getting more wealthy every day, that we can have this debate even as we make good money and live at a standard that our parents could not even dream of.

Our "addiction" is not to oil and coal, it is to wealth and modernity, and that requires immense amounts of energy. The discovery of hydrocarbon energy was the thing that brought us out of the middle ages, into the industrial age, and will bear us into the future. Until and unless we discover and build out a reliable source of energy to replace it, we will be "addicted" to oil and coal for decades. Windmills and sunshine ain't gonna cut it, because the wind and sunshine are not reliable energy sources. Malthusian fears of an impending die-off are no reason to impoverish our wealthiest societies or end our energy intensive ways unless or until the worst fears of the warmists become clearly true. Right now they are at the end of at least two years of being wrong about just about everything.

The planet continues to cool, as seen in measurements of heat in the oceans and weather on the ground. Even sea level has begun a small decline. The "Ozone Hole" has been shown to be a natural phenomenon, and banning chloro-fluorocarbons has had no effect on it. In any event the lack of ozone has initiated no increase skin cancers in affected areas, a central tenet of "Ozone Holism." In the face of unprecedented expansions of windmills and solar electric generation, no way to slow the growth of the thermal generation of electricity has proven effective, as these "green" technologies have no effect on the need for base load capacity. The same Warmists who decry carbon dioxide generation from hydrocarbon stand against expansion of nuclear electric generation capacity. Computer models that have been predicting melting ice caps and hotter climate have been universally unable to predict these non-events.

There is nothing new about religions that predict the end of the world. The difference here is that this religion is based on observable conditions. Their predictions have not been observed. That is how we know that this is a religion. No fact can withstand that portion of the human brain that insists on blind belief in a supernatural prediction. In this case the Jedi mind trick is correct. There is really nothing to see here, and we should really move along.

Has the green movement been a miserable flop?

Has the green movement been a miserable flop?

That's not my question, it is the headline of an article in The New Republic. No global warming skeptic in sight there. They wonder why their demand for the hobbling of capitalism and individual freedom has failed, and, as usual, they blame all the wrong things. Being statists, they are mired in process, since using the tools of government to change human behavior is the highest calling of a statist. They never ask if their message is wrong down to its fundament. They never question why, if "the science is settled" we are living in undeniably colder world every year for the last five. They never blame the fact that none of the models they made public have correctly predicted, well, anything, correctly. Especially the last two years of record cold in both Northern and Southern hemispheres of the planet. No, they decry the way some people argue against their received truths.

No matter what drivers humanity may have introduced into the environment, the real questions (that are never asked) are, 1) What would be the effect on climate if we followed all the greenie prescriptions? The simple answer to that one is at best a 10% increase in the rate of increase of CO2, with unknown effect on climate or temperature, because of 2) Why is the "scientific method" not applied to the climate policy debate? Since there is NO theory of global warming, and no theory of "greenhouse" effect on an open system, there is no way to quantify what is happening. There is only a feeling that we have soiled our nest, so we must suffer for it. But, like happens with flaggelist movements everywhere, recruitment numbers are down.

But what they never seem to notice is that their singular concentration on massive changes in the way humans interact puts people off to their message. Their prescription is all pain, no gain. Not gonna happen as long as humans have a say in what their government does, which is why statists are against democratic institutions in general, and the U.S. constitution in particular. And then we get to see just what they are about, like this bit on the electric vehicle front, and you have perfect conditions for the gestation of AGW skeptics, and even republicans.

Alexander Cockburn makes quite a bit of sense

Alexander Cockburn makes quite a bit of sense

Cockburn may be a dedicated socialist and a bit phobic about the hazards of nuclear power, but he sure sees through the hypocrisy of establishment Warmist academics and the massive fraud promulgated to scare people into a disastrous transfer of power from We the People to nameless faceless bureaucrats.



HT: John Ray at Greenie Watch

Global warming zealots are self-destructive to their claimed goals

Global warming zealots are self-destructive to their claimed goals

We live in a dangerous world. There are threats and toxic substances everywhere. We need to steer a course forward, making choices as we go. Taking natural gas out of the mix would be a disaster. Luddites who are against all hydrocarbon energy sources will either come up with usable, realistic, alternatives, or they will be sidelined from the debate. We see that today, as any hope of major CO2 reduction has been destroyed by zealots whose policy prescriptions amount to, frankly, a demand a descent into poverty. That is a step too far to ask a free people to undertake.

Understanding Science

Understanding Science

Physical laws are described by mathematical relationships. Newton's laws of orbital mechanics apply well to objects at planetary distances, even galactic distances, but now that we can resolve intergalactic distances, the math no longer works. Physics has responded by pretending that there is a force, they call it "dark matter" that adds the necessary gravitational force needed to make their equations work. Then they noticed, as their power to resolve details became better, that their math was out of whack again, so they invented "dark energy," which is a magic force that acts opposite to gravity.

Now that the physics establishment has made it look like they know what is happening, they are acting exactly the same way the climate group acts. The establishment has their orthodoxy, and grad students and academic staff either parrots the party line or they starve. Just try to get a position or a grant if you have ever written a paper that says that string theory is unsupported by experiment or observation and that thought, even though it is entirely true, will garner a failing grade.

Science is entirely political, with the older established deans and heads of labs sticking to party lines. The students in the field that are gathering the data know that they had better find data that supports their professor's well established viewpoint. That's the way it has always been, that's the way it is, and so it goes.

Climate science is only the most visible of the sciences where interest groups have tried to leverage their position of authority into massive political power. Here are the facts - temperatures are well within normal range, CO2 is higher today that the last few centuries, but low by long term standards - it has been many times higher than it is now, and the flora and fauna flourished. We can detect more global weather now, and as we can see finer detail we enter a situation where we have no historical comparison. The question is no longer about warming, since that stopped in 1998, it is about increased weather variability. There is a debate about that, with one side saying "Yes, now give us more money and power" and the other side saying "well now, we can resolve these things on a finer scale that ever before, so we do not know if the weather is getting more erratic, so let us pursue further research before we continue to pretend that we know these answers."

Evolution

Evolution

There are a plethora of tribal arguments making the rounds these days, among them Global Warming and Darwin's theory. There are plenty more, but these two seem to be particularly susceptible to a logical attack. (Who knows - maybe Bush really DID make a deal with bin Laden) Both sides to these arguments need to ignore the other side's facts to continue in their blissful certainty. These are complicated natural systems, and neither side wants to concede that the truth is NOT available to either side.

One thing I have learned in decades of readings in science during a period of immense progress in the state of understanding is this: The more we know, the less certain we seem to be. Greater knowledge give us the power to formulate better questions. The facts we learn refuse to support either of the polarized sides. We just do not know enough. This has reached the point of parody in the global warming debate, since one side was so sure that their truth was the objective truth that they falsified so much of the data that there has really been no advance of knowledge. None of that is true in the evolution debate, where both sides act from the same set of data.

Evolution is not a sound bite. It is a complex scientific theory that has many elements. Some parts of the theory are provably true, parts are provably false. Anyone who takes a definitive position on either side of the God vs. Nature debate is practicing a religion. Anyone who claims that Darwin or his successors can use their theory to explain or describe how a living cell emerged from a puddle of slime is as committed to his Darwin religion as any holy-roller. There is no way to use that body of work to describe how a fish became a lizard which became a bird or a mouse, let alone how that mouse became Einstein. Not a clue to how that was done. Personally I do not believe a deity was involved, but religion describes the phenomenon better than any scientist can - yet.

Once we get past the child's play of the actual origin of species, we can undertake to explain the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe.

Catastrophic Global Warming

Catastrophic Global Warming

This current interglacial period is coming to an end. True to form, the warming trend ended with a spurt of heat. Now we are hanging around the peak, maybe about to go into a global temperature decline. Ocean heat has not risen since 2004. Minimum arctic ice extent hit its minimum in 2007. The southern hemisphere is at record cold this winter. The only thing in scientific dispute is whether we are about to begin a cooling towards an ice age, or will the natural warming continue. Staying the same is the least likely outcome. It is not any exaggeration to say that we can take a 2 degree warming WAY better than we could a 2 degree cooling. 5 degree cooling and civilization is dust. Small, ambitious people are riding the wave of public cash and power on this AGW fraud. They are dining out and seizing power and tax money worldwide on this situation. Just remember one thing that is absolutely true - when the warming stops, the ice age begins. And all signs are that the warming has stopped. If that trend is not reversed, pray.

Quote of the Day - H.L. Mencken

Quote of the Day - H.L.Mencken

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it"

H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Quote of the Day - Marcus Aurelius

Quote of the Day - Marcus Aurelius

"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180)

Andy McCarthy on Global Warming

Andy McCarthy on Global Warming

"From the premise that AGW is undeniable, the alarmist side leaps to the extravagant conclusion that we are therefore capable of, and obliged to, do something meaningful about it. On the other hand, the skeptics (I am one) too often deny the premise — not because it's false but because it may be frivolous. That is, relatively speaking, it may be nothing more than a drop in the ocean. I suppose it is undeniable, in absolute terms, that the drop increases the ocean's volume. The increase, though, appears so de minimis that denying it makes sense in the greater scheme of things. Yet, the alarmists deride the skeptics over their denial as if they were denying something as basic and incontestable as that two plus two equals four. For their part, the skeptics continue denying — even if they are wrong in absolute terms — because they fear alarmists have set the table in such a way that to concede the premise is to concede the draconian remedies alarmists have in mind. The debate gets nowhere."

"You say: "Put yourself in the position of a senior government leader tasked with making real decisions that affect the lives of millions. What would you do if faced with a matter of technical disagreement on such a quantitative-prediction question among experts?" I'll tell you what I would do. I would say that, given our finite capabilities and the shortness of life, AGW may not be a problem at all, and, if it is a problem, it is not urgent enough to obsess over. Not if I am a senior government leader of a country trillions of dollars in debt who is also tasked with making real decisions about unsustainable entitlement programs, the high likelihood that states will soon default, 10 percent unemployment, crippling new taxes and inflation on the horizon, a global war against jihadists whose mass-murder attacks — and their catastrophic costs — are impossible to predict, the imminence of game-changing nuclear capability in a revolutionary jihadist state that has threatened to wipe Israel off the map and whose motto is "Death to America," aggression from other hostile nations, a judiciary that is steadily eroding popular self-government, and a host of other actually pressing problems."

"That is, I would say it's not the government's job to gather together "the leading subject matter experts to produce a review of the known science" and then have their product "reviewed by a standing body of leading scientists ..." If the issue is truly important enough, the experts will sort that out themselves. Meanwhile, I’d conclude, get back to me when you have more certainty about the nature and extent of the problem, plus a compelling case that it's worthy of being on my plate given all these other first-order challenges. And when you come back, make sure that you have a proposal that makes economic sense in light of the straits we're in, and that you are ready to explain why I should not discount the problem based on (a) the rampant fraud that has been perpetrated to make the problem seem dire, and (b) the financial interests of the alarmist community in the existence of the problem."

From Andy's reply to the Jim Manzi piece, at The Corner on NRO.

Quote for Today

Quote for Today

"Claims that the [AGW] science is settled border on criminal and certainly illustrate complete lack of understanding of climate science or deliberate ignorance for political ends or both."

Dr. Tim Ball writing in Canada Free Press.