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Earth's next last chanceGEORGE F. WILLT X- TASHINGTON\\ ~ With \ \ 20,000 del-T ▼ egates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth’s last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate change meeting. Its organizers had hoped it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone’s choices.China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate change theater, promises only to reduce its “carbon intensity” — carbon emissions per unit of production. So China’s emissions willrise.Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit in Britain — a collaborator with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — reveals some scientists’ willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer “consensus” and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propa -gandistic lockstep about any subject.The Washington Post learns an odd lesson from the CRU materials: “Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them.” These scientists overstated and censored because they were “goaded” by skepticism?Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, andTHE OTHER DAY UPON THE STAIR I MET A tyAN np WHO Vimi THERE HE WASNTTHERE SMN TODAY, x WISH,X WISH HED 00 AWAYwere they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be “goaded” into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word “deniers” to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic manmade warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100 percent certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists’ models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.The Financial Times’ peculiar response to the CRU materials is: The scientific case for alarm about global warming “is growing more rather than less compelling.” If so, then could anything make the case less compelling? A CRU e-mail says: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment” — this “moment” is in its second decade — “and it is a travesty that we can’t.”The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars — and substantially diminished freedom.Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. Theyseem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet’s fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments’ attempts to manipulate Earth’s temperature now comprise one of the world’s largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. Political, commercial academic and journalistic prestige and advancement can be contingent on not disrupting the (postulated) consensus that is propelling the gigantic anc fabulously lucrative industry of com bating global warming.Copenhagen is the culmination o: the post-Kyoto maneuvering by peopkdetermined to fix the world’s climate by breaking the world’s — especially America’s — population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also i: prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth’s last chance, until thlt; next one.COMMENTARYThose phony Afghan costsnVnnrmeiv inhoritpH a universal health insurance, accorron him - he obviously inherited a universal health insurance, accomp;JAY AMBROSE recession — but, as one example of nied by all sorts of whistles and bellrecklessness, he did insist on rush-job The average cost of a Senate versicComing as it did from a passage of a $787 billion stimulus that over a normal 10-year period wou spendthrift, a phony-sound- has since done diddlysquat to stop the be $2.5 trillion, according to Sen. Mi ing moment of President unemployment surge. The price tag is Baucus, the Democratic chairman Obama’s nationally televised more than three times the cost of just the Senate Finance Committee. I West Point speech came when he said the war in Afghanistan (some $233 the time you figure in government in so many words that, if we didn’t end billion), and some think the true cost waste, understatements and gimmic the war in Afghanistan quickly, the of that stimulus legislation could be Baucus likely failed to calculate, ylt; cost would sink us economically. several trillion dollars over the next can almost certainly add another hi“In the wake of an economic crisis, dlt;iade ause °f expanded program trfflion on t0 that, s„me say, too many of our friends and neigh- fundm«that could 8° on mtiefmitely go you are ta,king about a ne bors are out of work and struggle to Defense spending, it should be annuai governmental health cost th pay the bills, and too many Americans observed, is nowhere near the behe- wouj^ Be more than twice the cost are worried about the future facing moth it once was. After the collapse Afghanistan and Iraq, and here’s t mir children ’’ he intoned. “Meanwhile, of the Soviet Union, cutbacks began kjcher: At least one alternative pi
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Barstow Press Dispatch
Barstow, California, US
Sun, Dec 06, 2009
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