Cooling-Off Period

Many Westerners are blind to the bias of the anything-but-objective global warming charlatans. About half of Western scientists seemingly were devoured by pea pods from Mars, and replaced by doctors of doom. Disregarding the scientific method, they use a trillion techniques guaranteeing chicken-little conclusions: inventing, hiding and editing data, tweaking or deep-sixing results to gain a leg-up for the next government grant, gutting objective peer review and banning all but true believers from leading trade journals, while fomenting worldwide witch hunts aimed at the fifty percent who disagree, ignoring factors contrary to their nihilist notion that warming's caused by Western civilization. The truly lazy substitute assertion for observation.

Ironically, though pro-despair forces claim there's a consensus, the current cacophony is anything but: widespread uncertainty, dozens of distinct climate models -- none more reliable than a coin toss -- most of which predict temperature increases within the margin of error, culminating in a treaty presuming warming's from man-made CO₂ (despite growing contrary evidence), which mandates unachievable objectives. Yet, even were warming real, the price tag's still a secret -- in cash, opportunity costs and societal disruption. And almost no one is comparing costs with benefits. Congressional Democrats suppose similar slip-ups in Bush's FY06 budget and social security reform--but believe dividing by zero changes the weather.

The press provides a second layer of lies, headlining every pronouncement of warmer (or cooler) weather, eliding a fact-check that would have revealed, for example, glacier melting has not increased. The media rarely acknowledges scientists who predict no or insignificant global warming. But if noticed, dissenters become hostile witnesses: Scientific American devoted an entire issue to an un-scientific lynching party for warming skeptics. Reportedly, the heretics had to bring their own rope.

Since he wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, the biased science and media complex's most frequent target is Bjørn Lomborg, adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School. But Lomborg combats madness with reason, most recently in this week's Telegraph (U.K.):

Their argument is that global warming is due to mankind's use of fossil fuels, that the consequences 100 years from now will be serious, and that we therefore should do something dramatic. We should make substantial and long-term reductions of greenhouse gases along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol. . .

But to inform us accurately they have to go further than that. They should tell us what will happen even if we implement the fairly draconian measures of Kyoto - which they curiously do not.

They do not tell us that even if all the industrial nations agreed to the cuts (about 30pc from what would otherwise have been by 2010), and stuck to them all through the century, the impact would simply be to postpone warming by about six years beyond 2100. The unfortunate peasant in Bangladesh will find that his house floods in 2106 instead.

Moreover, they should also tell what they expect the cost of the Kyoto Protocol to be. That may not come easy to natural scientists, but there is plenty of literature on the subject, and the best guess is that the cost of doing a very little good for the third world 100 years from now would be $150 billion per year for the rest of this century.

Even after the Brown/Blair exertions to extract more aid for Africa, the West spends about $60 billion helping the third world. One has to consider whether the proportions are right here. . . In fact, . . . Kyoto [caps] . . . actually cost more than the good they do.

In short, climate change is anything but science: it's pure politics--a cynical misuse of pseudo science to stampede voters toward "environmental standards" providing trivial greenish benefits but forcing greater income equality via massive transfers of wealth from the West to developing nations--in effect, a tax on Western Civ. Though most lefties hide the ball, a few lie in plain view, most famously former Senator Tim Wirth (D-Co), later Clinton's Undersecretary of State for climate issues:

We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

As John Ray at Greenie Watch argues:

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists.

In sum, ignore alarmist science geeks and the Pulitzer pursuing press. As I've suggested, climate change can be solved by applying (Jonah) Goldberg's rule: "Don’t just do something! Stand there."

More:

MaxedOutMama's arresting metaphor: "It has been clear for years that the Kyoto treaty was a lunatic measure, the triumph of ignorance over science, of innumeracy over numerical literacy, a superstitious virgin sacrifice to a volcano that has not yet even been observed rumbling."