Bush’s legacy

If the same thing happened for 13 straight years, would you call it a trend? An emerging consensus? How about an incredibly inconvenient truth?

The data shows that not only is Global Warming not happening, but we are well into a cooling period that could last for quite some time. It is clear why the fanatics have re-branded Global Warming as Climate Change.

When the Warmest in History Isn’t
by Debra J. Saunders

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…

…Richard S. Lindzen, the MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, recently wrote, “There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.”

Al Gore and Barack Obama and other fanatics use this so-called “scientific consensus” as a hammer to silence critics and skeptics. John Kay of the Financial Times explains the problem with the “scientific consensus”,

Consensus is a political concept, not a scientific one.

Consensus finds a way through conflicting opinions and interests. Consensus is achieved when the outcome of discussion leaves everyone feeling they have been given enough of what they want. The processes of proper science could hardly be more different. The accomplished politician is a negotiator, a conciliator, finding agreement where none seemed to exist. The accomplished scientist is an original, an extremist, disrupting established patterns of thought. Good science involves perpetual, open debate, in which every objection is aired and dissents are sharpened and clarified, not smoothed over.

The “scientific consensus” demands immediate action! We cannot afford to wait, we are a “tipping point”!

Meteorologists…are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

Too bad for the fanatics that this quote comes from Newsweek Magazine’s April 28, 1975 cover story, “The Cooling World“

Here’s Professor Lindzen explaining how this consensus is reached today, and why it is so flawed,

Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored

Lindzen, probably the most qualified prominent global-warming sceptic, suggested that a number of changes in the way science is conducted have contributed to the rise of climate alarmism among American scientists.

Central to this is the importance of government funding to science. Much of that funding since World War II has occurred because scientists build up public fears (examples include fear of the USSR’s superiority in weapons or space travel, of health problems, of environmental degradation) and offer themselves as the solution to those fears. The administrators who work with the scientists join in with enthusiasm: much of their own funding is attached to the scientific grants. Lindzen says this state of affairs favours science involving fear, and also science that involves expensive activities such as computer modelling. He notes we have seen “the de-emphasis of theory because of its difficulty and small scale, the encouragement of simulation instead (with its call for large capital investment in computation), and the encouragement of large programs unconstrained by specific goals.

“In brief, we have the new paradigm where simulation and [computer] programs have replaced theory and observation, where government largely determines the nature of scientific activity, and where the primary role of professional societies is the lobbying of the government for special advantage.”

Lindzen believes another problem with climate science is that in America and Europe it is heavily colonised by environmental activists.

Here are just two examples that indicate the scale of the problem: the spokesman for the American Meteorological Society is a former staffer for Al Gore, and realclimate.org, probably the world’s most authoritative alarmist web site, was started by a public relations firm serving environmental causes.

If you think the economy is bad now, wait until the President elect gets his hands on it and starts regulating in the name of the almighty, cannot be questioned “scientific consensus”.