A few bits on the ever-expanding, always boiling Climategate scandal.
First, here’s a link to, of all things, a single post in a Slashdot thread that concisely articulates a very important point: The lamentable tendency of many Global Warming boosters to label anyone who questions any part of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) narrative as “deniers.” There are varying degrees of skepticism, ranging all the way from “Global warming is all completely bunk and nothing you ever say will change my mind” to “Hey, I believe it’s every bit as bad as the AGW proponents claim, but maybe Kyoto and Copenhagen aren’t the best way to address it.” I myself am in the “Global warming may be real, but we don’t know how bad it is, don’t know how much of it is natural and how much (if any) is man-made, and in any case we should do a lot more study and measurement before ceding control of vast stretches of our economy to unelected transnational bureaucrats” camp.
However, the response of Global Warming proponents to just about any criticism of the consensus AGW narrative seems to be “The science is already settled, and anyone questioning it is as bad as a Flat Earther, a Creationist, or a Holocaust denier. Now sit down, shut up, and hand over all your money and power to us.” (And here’s the LA Times attempting a textbook “scientists are smart, Americans are stupid, questioning global warming is as bad as Creationism, so shut the hell up” approach.) As long as they keep trying to pull this “Nothing to see here, now move along” crap about Climategate, more and more people are going to question what they say. And rightly so. Especially since the overwhelming majority of people pushing AGW are the very same people who push bigger government and higher taxes as the solution to just about every problem. A lot of the people questioning the consensus narrative aren’t just random bloggers, they’re people with PhDs in related fields who are saying the science just doesn’t add up.
Here’s the reply of Watts Up With That author Willis Eschenbach to the Economist article (which can be found as the source link for the aforementioned Slashdot thread), rebutting their analysis (or lack thereof) of his original article (which I linked to here). (For extra credit, diagram that previous sentence.)
Here’s the actual IPCC reports, which some who have read them all the way through (Disclaimer: I haven’t managed to do that myself yet. Mea culpa.) say don’t make anywhere near the ironclad case for AGW that many proponents claim.
Is Google trying to suppress Climategate? My own quick search would tend to suggest no, they aren’t. I see a few AGW-critical sources (American Thinker (hey, is that the same J. R. Dunn that writes science fiction?), Washington Times) near the top of my date-sorted list. Clearly Google leans fairly heavily to the left, and I’m nowhere near the “Google can do no wrong” camp, but sometimes it just takes time for their server caches to be updated. At least once before (antedating this blog by several years) I jumped the gun on accusing Google of hiding something, only to have it show up a day or two later. (Mmmm, egg. It’s what’s on my face.) If they are trying to suppress the story, they’re doing a pretty piss poor job of it.
Finally, here’s Ralph Peters in the New York Post: “A thriving economy can do more to protect the environment than a desperate one. And let’s not forget the ‘human ecology’ of families struggling to put food on the table. Extreme environmentalism is a rich man’s sport that rides hell-for-leather through the poor man’s fields.”
Tags: Anthropogenic Global Warming, Global Warming, Google, IPCC, Ralph Peters, Slashdot, Willis Eschenbach
[Editor’s Note: The commenter seems to have posted this same essay/rant on several other sites. I’m going to go ahead and publish this because it is on topic, but reserve the right to change my mind, and sugest the poster refrain from such actions in the future, since posting the same thing over and over again is bad form — LP]
CLIMATEGATE
THE FALLACY
The Lebensraum doctrine of Green activists rests on three tenets they accept with an act of faith:
• We are running out of space. World population is already excessive on a limited planet and cannot grow without dire effects.
• We are running out of means. The planet’s non-renewable resources are being depleted by consumption at a rate that renders economic expansion unsustainable.
• We shall fry. Carbon dioxide emitted by human economic activity causes global warming that shall make the planet uninhabitable.
When such tenets are quantified, the contrast between true and false stands out sharply.
Is overpopulation a grave problem? The sum of urban areas of the United States is equivalent to 2% of the area of the country, and to 6% in densely inhabited countries such as England and Holland. And there is plenty of green in urban areas. If comparison is limited to land covered by buildings and pavements the occupied land in the whole world amounts to 0,04% of the terrestrial area of the planet. With 99.96% unoccupied the idea of an overcrowded planet is an exaggeration. Population forecasts are uncertain but the most accepted ones foresee stability of world population to be reached in the 21st century. According to some, world population may begin to decline at the end of this century. With so much elbowroom it is untenable that world population is excessive or shall ever become so.
Strictly speaking, no natural resource is non-renewable in a universe ruled by the Law of Conservation of Mass. In popular form it holds that “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, all is transformed.” Human usage is not subtracted from the mass of the planet, and in theory all material used may be recycled. The possibility of doing so depends on availability and low cost of energy. When fusion energy becomes operative it will be available in practically unlimited quantities. The source is deuterium, a hydrogen isotope found in water, in a proportion of 0.03%. One cubic kilometer of seawater contains more energy than can be obtained from combustion of all known petroleum reserves of the world. Since oceans hold 3 billion cubic kilometers of water, energy will last longer than the human species.
There is no growing shortfall of resources signaled by rising prices. Since the middle of the 19th century The Economist publishes consistent indices of values of commodities and they have all declined, over the period, due to technological advances. The decline has been benign. The cost of feeding a human being was 8 times greater in 1850 than it is today. In 1950, less than half of a world population of 2 billion had an adequate diet, above 2000 calories per day. Today, 80% have the diet, and world population is three times greater.
There is a problem with the alleged global warming. It stopped in 1998, after having risen in the 23 previous years. It unleashed a scare over its effects. Since 1998 it has been followed by 11 years of declining temperatures, in a portent of a cold 21st century. This shows that there are natural forces shaping climate, more powerful than manmade carbon dioxide and anything mankind can do for or against world climate. The natural forces include cyclical oscillation of ocean temperatures, sunspot activity and the effect of magnetic activity of the sun on cosmic rays. All such cycles are foreseeable, but there is no general theory of climate with predictive capacity. What knowledge exists comes from one hundred fields, such as meteorology, oceanography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology, etc. with partial contributions to the understanding of climate.
Devoid of support of solid theory and empirical data, the mathematical models that underpin alarmist forecasts amount to speculative thought that reflects the assumptions fed into the models. Agenda driven computer simulations offer no rational basis for public policy that inhibits economic activity “to save the planet”. And carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the nutrient needed for photosynthesis that supports the food chain of all living beings of the planet. But carbon dioxide became a toxic-by-decree of the Obama administration, with an act that smells of rotten bananas of a comic opera republic.
Stories of doom circulate daily. Anything that happens on earth has been blamed on global warming: a Himalayan earthquake, a volcanic eruption, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, tribal wars in Africa, a dust storm in Australia, recent severe winters in North America, the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, known for five centuries, the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota. Evo Morales blames Americans for the summer floods in Bolivia.
Global warming is not a physical phenomenon; it is a political and journalistic phenomenon that finds parallel in the totalitarian doctrines that inebriated masses deceived by demagogues. As Chris Patten put it: “Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off”. In the view of Professor Aaron Wildavsky global warming is the mother of all environmental scares. “Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population’s eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.” Their dream is the hippies’ lifestyle of idleness, penury, long hair, unshaven face, blue jeans, sandals and vegetarian diet, imposed on the world by decree of Big Brother, and justified by the Lebensraum fallacy.
You may find this interesting,
Who is Willis Eschenbach?
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/10/who-is-willis-eschenbach.html
As of 2012 Mr. Eschenbach has been employed as a House Carpenter.
He is not a “computer modeler”, he is not an “engineer” and he is certainly not a “scientist” (despite all ridiculous claims to the contrary).
“A final question, one asked on Judith Curry’s blog a year ago by a real scientist, Willis Eschenbach…”