An Inconvenient Truth

 

     The several decade long crusade to achieve directorship of the western world’s economies through the mantra of stopping so-called anthropogenic global warming is finally beginning to come up against the rocks of unbiased scientific analysis.  As leaders of this blog know, I have been a long standing skeptic of the argument of human directed global warming for its lack of historical perspective, the nonsense of arguing the concept of investigatory science as “settled” when the science is in its infancy, and the obvious and overt political overtones of those who would “redirect” our resources in an effort to “stop” the unstoppable.  Science as politics has been a long standing failure in regard to scientific truth, and a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who rest their argument on their superior will, rather than the available data.  Whether it was the Church’s long standing earth centric vendetta against the science of Galileo or Copernicus, or the race theories of the National Socialists propped up in the pseudoscience of Eugenics, there has been a dark suppression to individual thought and contrary opinion through history by those who desired to “own the truth” for their own political purposes and profit. 

      The critical tenets of linking the natural processes of climatic warming and cooling to man’s societal advancement through the use of carbon based energy offered a massively powerful tool to those who would seek to “control” man’s individual initiative in favor of some specified collective good.  The weapon of choice was to tie the natural component of the atmosphere the gas carbon dioxide to the moniker “greenhouse” gas, and the production of it as a byproduct of an advanced society, the driver of ‘dangerous and irreversible’ global warming.  Through such linkage lay the mother-load of environmental activism, governmental activism, and massive fortunes for politicians and politically connected scientists and industrialists.  The king of the scare Prophets was the American politician Al Gore, who recently rejected by the American electorate in the close election of 2000, found a post-election venue for political idolatry and personal fortune in the narrative of anthropogenic global warming.  His thrown together cinematic slide show of patchy science and ludicrous predictions, An Inconvenient Truth, electrified the political left and created the edifice for the argument that only through the reining in of the superior economic position of the West through elimination of their reliance on a carbon energy economy and the ‘redistribution’ of the West’s ill-gotten wealth to the impoverished, less developed world, could the globe be saved from utter destruction.  It was a socialist’s wet dream – the critical key to reforming 500 years of individual initiative and progress, and putting the acquired wealth into the hands of the bureaucratic few who would be considered ‘smart and sensitive to the planet’.

     Whole nations have stood in line since the Kyoto protocols of the 1990’s to profess their subservience to the dogma of “settled science” and thereby prove their fidelity to the mother Earth.  They have allowed the climate data to be collected and doled out by a few chosen oracles such as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without asking the critical questions all science should be required to withstand- is the data sufficient to prove a hypothesis, is the data set reproducible, are the data points incontrovertible or corrupted, does the science hold up to skeptical scrutiny?  It turns out, with the billions and billions of dollars and euros at stake, the delicious conclusions were too desirable for those responsible for the science to question their own observations for risk of being cut out of the moneytrain or the exalted position as oracle to the world.

     The “settled science” has finally come under appropriate scrutiny, and we have the intrepid computer hackers of the East Anglia University e-mails to thank.  The thousands of e-mails between the oracles of the settled climate science have shown them to be data corrupted, politically biased, suppressive of their own contrary evidence, and willing to bend their own work to fit the narrative they had established regardless of the facts – a perfect storm of pseudoscience and politically twisted desires.  The fact that scientists can be tempted into self corruption based on their all too human flaws of ego, political bias, or evangelical sense of mission shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone given the immense power, money, and influence that was waved in front of them by political pirates such as Al Gore for whom they served his purpose.

     Thankfully, despite the willful suppression of information, a more balanced interpretation of the science of climate and the multiple effects upon it are beginning to emerge.  The inconvenient truth that appears to be forming is that multiple factors influence global temperatures, and that man’s effect is difficult to isolate, and perhaps minimalist in effect.  It has been clarified that the computer models that suggested direct correlation between CO2 levels and temperature have been shown to be incorrect, with the world in a cooling, not warming,  phase since 1998 while Co2 levels have continued to climb.   As Karin McQuillan’s review article in the American Thinker cogently observes, climate scientists are finally finding the courage to speak out when the data does not fit the assigned narrative:

But within a week, Muller’s lead co-author, Professor Curry, was interviewed in the British press (not reported in America), saying that the BEST data did the opposite: the global “temperature trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.”

       This is nowhere near what the climate models were        predicting,” Prof Curry said.  “Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”  In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.  They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

          The telling argument regarding global warming hysteria is that it fit a political rather than scientific narrative, long before the infant science had a chance to develop into a rational understanding of the influences on climate, and man’s relationship to them.  No one desires a world without clean air, clean sources of water, efficient utilization of resources, but the dominance of bureaucratic oversight at the risk to personal freedoms must be understood for what it means for humanity’s future development.  The argument ultimately turns out not to be one of the temperature of the earth, for we live on a globe that was dramatically both hotter and colder than the one we currently inhabit, but rather, who will define human progress, individual rights, and the means to achieve personal happiness.  We are stumbling our way to an inconvenient, but, universal truth, that the last five hundred years of human achievement, driven as it was by the hard fought acquirement of individual expression, property rights, and individual freedom, is the best possible device to preserve the world for the greatest proportion of those who inhabit it.

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