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Friday, December 04, 2009
A ClimateGate
Primer
A
Canadian commentator. Commenting. Not as pretty as Brian Williams,
though.
And his colon probably isn't as telegenically charismatic as Katie Couric. Oh well.
And his colon probably isn't as telegenically charismatic as Katie Couric. Oh well.
RETURN TO THE LOONY BIN. I've been putting this off because there's a lot of tedious work involved in assembling this post, but it's too important to delay any longer. Regular readers here know that we've been biting the ankles of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) set for a long long time. Now it appears that our suspicions of scientific dishonesty on behalf of a political and (of course) financial agenda are being confirmed on a staggering scale.
I want to thank our friend and valued commenter "Lake" for firing the opening shot on ClimateGate at InstaPunk. It's taken me longer than it should have to convert his post from Word to our format, but it's now posted here, and I urge everyone to read it before continuing further with my own post. He does an excellent job of framing the key issues the MSM have been endeavouring mightily to ignore, and he's provided links you might not find anywhere else. His conclusion should inspire all of us to become students of this mess, even if it takes work to get up to speed.
The dust has far from settled,
especially with Copenhagen coming up later this month, but a few things
have become clear from the emails and documents at the heart of
Climategate / Climaquiddick / the CRUtape Letters (my personal favorite
reference).
Anything from CRU has rightly lost its credibility, and so will climate science in general. New practices will need to be followed, with all data and number manipulation made available to the public. Science has been revealed to be just as given to dogma, tribalism, and underhanded practices as law, government, politics, and religion. This has always been known, but there is now a very solid, modern, relevant example that can be referenced.
The Copenhagen conference will be affected, and the public will begin to look more critically at the IPCC and global warming. Is it too much to hope that Climategate will be the rope that hangs cap-and-trade? AGW believers will try to brush it off, but no honestly objective thinker will be able to buy man-made climate change without reservation.
In the long run, this will be good for science. It’s the perfect example of how to NOT go about taking and analyzing data, responding to criticism, and using an unpredictable and chaotic system to ram a political agenda down the world’s throat. This example bears watching closely over the next month as it plays out, and it’s worth educating yourself about it – trillions of dollars and the future of the world’s economy depends on it.
Anything from CRU has rightly lost its credibility, and so will climate science in general. New practices will need to be followed, with all data and number manipulation made available to the public. Science has been revealed to be just as given to dogma, tribalism, and underhanded practices as law, government, politics, and religion. This has always been known, but there is now a very solid, modern, relevant example that can be referenced.
The Copenhagen conference will be affected, and the public will begin to look more critically at the IPCC and global warming. Is it too much to hope that Climategate will be the rope that hangs cap-and-trade? AGW believers will try to brush it off, but no honestly objective thinker will be able to buy man-made climate change without reservation.
In the long run, this will be good for science. It’s the perfect example of how to NOT go about taking and analyzing data, responding to criticism, and using an unpredictable and chaotic system to ram a political agenda down the world’s throat. This example bears watching closely over the next month as it plays out, and it’s worth educating yourself about it – trillions of dollars and the future of the world’s economy depends on it.
And, God bless him, he's a teacher, with a mission to enlighten his students about the lessons of this imbroglio:
Speaking of educating, I’ve got four
science classes to teach tomorrow. I’ll be sure to bring this up before
we start our next lab.
What do I have to add to Lake's excellent digging? A few comments, a few more pertinent links, and some tips on how to follow the unfolding controversy. (Plus, some perhaps amusing InstaPunk flashbacks on this sore toe of a subject.)
First, it cannot be emphasized enough that the mainstream media don't want to cover this story at all. That should scare us to death. This is the 'Pentagon Papers' of the climate science field, which is not to say that it's a lesser story because it originates in academe rather than the much sexier realm of the military. Ultimately, if world governments succeed in persuading us that AGW is real and needs to be addressed, the cost will be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars and the loss of almost everything we conceive of as liberty -- from control over our own thermostats to the demolition of advanced industrial civilization as we know it. All in the name of saving "the planet" from an invented pollution called carbon that also happens to be the largest building block of our own human bodies.
This is by no means a coincidence. Make no mistake. The AGW true believers are in thrall to a post-modern religion masquerading as science that mimics on an existential scale the post-modern American liberal's hatred of America. Where ivory-tower types like Noam Chomsky hate their own country and do everything possible to seek its downfall in the name of social justice, the AGW devotees hate mankind itself and dare to conceive of a kind of "planetary justice" whose morality consists of conspiring in the death of billions of human beings whose lives are somehow synonymous with the carbon pollution they paradoxically celebrate when it takes the form of polar bears and other creatures too 'natural' to be cursed with poisoned self awareness and absurdly arbitrary moral relativism.
What the Kyoto-Copenhagen-cap'n'trade-Al Gore-Obama "climate change" evangelists have always been after is a species-level punishment straight out of the Old Testament. Only with themselves cast in the role of Yahweh, the angry evicting landlord of Eden and the merciless bringer of the Flood. What are they so destructively riled up about? The same thing as the Judeo-Christian God they despise so much: Original Sin. But the original sin of Mankind as they define it is, ironically, even more rudimentary than the one defined by the Creator of Genesis. He sought to punish apostasy and immorality. They seek to punish existence itself. Why? Having rejected the concept of divinity and therefore meaning, they hunger for suicide. They don't have the guts to put their own heads in the oven, though. So they engage in the most absurd megalomaniacal projection in all human history; we -- our entire species -- are convenient stand-ins for a purely personal, malignant narcissist's irredeemable self-hatred. We are them by proxy. And so we deserve to be freed by utter extinction from a consciousness they don't have the courage or will to live with.
Sound overstated? It isn't. Why doesn't the MSM with its legions of highly educated and privileged intellects want to cover a scandal which intimates that AGW is more than just possibly a hoax? If it is a hoax, given the monies and governmental control issues involved, it's far bigger than Watergate. Careers could be made, icons of journalism, fame, fortune, celebrity, and future book contracts galore. (Look at the opportunities afforded Woodward and Bernstein over the years...) More than that, has it occurred to anyone that if AGW is a hoax, it's actually GOOD NEWS FOR EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD? New York and Miami won't be submerged, we won't have to repeal the entire Industrial Revolution, and we won't be confronting the 30-year lifespans of neolithic man that Luddite idiots like Ed Begley, Jr., want to inflict on our children and grandchildren. Think about it. A huge news story that isn't bad news for its potential worldwide audeince of 6 billion souls. Who could resist that?
The mainstream media can resist it. They are resisting it. More proof that we are looking at a faith rather than a fact.
Looking for analogies? Think Galileo. Think Inquisition. Inconvenient truth, indeed. But what's so inconvenient about it? Irrational, unexamined beliefs are involved. It turns out that these are far more important to individual egos than career possibilities and even hope for all mankind. They'd rather be right in their dumbest long-term assumptions than actually achieve something worthwhile. They hate fundamentalists who take the Bible literally? They are the NEW fundamentalists, the ones who take the corrupt affirmations of science literally. Because for them the meaning of life is that there is no meaning, and they'll die to defend that principle against all comers. (I'm wide open to explanations about why Tiger Woods and a flat-chested Redskin cheerleader are headlines while improved odds for the continuation of civilization are not.)
Why I have such utter contempt for sanctimonious atheists.
I was going to produce a list of Instapunk posts about AGW. Beginning with the one from 1997 about "raw data" from the precursor to this website (eerily prescient of the current scandal if I do say so myself). Instead, I'm going to put the ball in your court: you cite the posts you like the most, the ones that pertain most closely to the current controversy (with some juicy quotes included, please), because it's occurred to me, as it probably has to you, that not all the most relevant ones even mention climate change. (A gold star to the first one who finds a working link to The Apunkrypha's Book of Andrew...)
I was going to offer a list of recent news links about how ClimateGate is being handled in the world press. But beyond noting that it's getting more attention in Australia, Canada, and the U.K. than it is here, I won't. (Except for this, I suspect, monumental one.) I'm asking you to hunt down some links. If you find them, I'll post your comments here on the main page.
I think I've given you something to think about. I'll conclude with a link to a site that's a very good way of keeping up with the ClimateGate News. It's Planet Gore at the National Review.
And just so you know that human beings are funny creatures indeed, here's the single most significant MSM coverage of ClimateGate.
Make sense? No. But thank God for it. Despite the silence of CBS, NBC, and ABC news, the libs have heard of it. I'd feel sorry for them if they weren't actively plotting my (and your) death in the name of Gaia.
P.S. Here's Strike One:
Sorry, Anonymous.
