Vin Suprynowicz

“Too many elected officials in Washington are still calling climate change a liberal hoax,” declared U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, in prepared remarks as he opened his fifth annual “National Clean Energy Summit” show in Las Vegas Aug. 7. “They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet. …”

But “This year alone, the United States has seen unparalleled extreme weather events — events scientists say are exactly what is expected as the earth’s climate changes. The Midwest is experiencing its most crushing drought in more than half a century — or maybe ever. … Corn crops are withering and livestock are dying — or going to slaughter early — as heat waves parch America’s breadbasket, breaking records set during the Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl years.”

(Frankly, I’m surprised the senator is even familiar with old Woody.)

“Now ravaging wildfires have replaced the dust storms of the 1930s,” Sen. Reid continued, just getting warmed up. “Devastating fires have swept New Mexico, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada and other parts of the Mountain West, destroying hundreds of homes and burning millions of trees. These fires are fed in part by vast areas of dead forest ravaged by beetles and other pests that now survive through warmer winters. … Our nation’s infrastructure is literally falling apart because it wasn’t designed to withstand these conditions. Runways are melting, trapping planes. Train tracks are bending, derailing subways. Highways are cracking, buckling and breaking open. … Yet despite having overwhelming evidence and public opinion on our side, deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits. These people aren’t just on the other side of this debate. They’re on the other side of reality. It’s time for us all … to stop acting like those who ignore the crisis or deny it exists entirely have a valid point of view. They don’t.”

Good heavens. And I’ve even left out Harry’s chilling account of the monsoons of Bangladesh. Who ever heard of a monsoon hitting Bangladesh, before?

“The more extreme climate change gets, the more extreme the weather will get,” the senator asserted. “In the words of one respected climate scientist: ‘This is what global warming looks like.’ Dozens of new reports from scientists around the globe link extreme weather to climate change. …”

Responding to this rhetorical version of a Godzilla movie, Norman Rogers, Ph.D. in physics from the University of Hawaii, member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, and senior policy advisor at the Heartland Institute, Chicago, posted on the following Friday at http://tinyurl.com/92bhl58:

“The advocates of global warming are beginning to have the classic doomsday cult problem. The Earth hasn’t been warming for 16 years, and that’s starting to get very embarrassing. The first adjustment to the dogma was to stop talking about global warming and start talking about climate change. The latest version of the party line is that we are going to have more extreme weather. The reality is that the weather is not any more variable or extreme than in the past. But with suitable fishing in the data, it is easy to make a case that this or that weather phenomenon has become more extreme.

“The scientist Richard Lindzen has pointed out that the extreme weather theme is inconsistent with the global warmers’ own theories,” Mr. Rogers continues. “The global warmers have long claimed that the poles will warm faster than the tropics. One of their key scary claims is that vast amounts of ice at the poles will melt and raise sea level. So, according to warmer theory, the temperature difference between the poles and the equator will lessen. But it is that very temperature difference that drives weather, particularly extreme weather. … So the warmers’ claims are fundamentally contradictory. How can weather become more extreme when the driver of extreme weather, the pole-to-equator temperature difference, is supposed to weaken?”

‘I MADE A MISTAKE’

Sen. Reid insists: “Virtually every respected, independent scientist in the world agrees the problem is real, and the time to act is now. Not tomorrow. Not a week from now. Not next month or next year. We must act today.”

In fact, it would be foolish to a degree which would rival the crop rotation mistakes of the ancient Maya and the dietary preferences of the Norse settlers of Greenland (who appear to have starved rather than eat fish) to further cripple our economy by continuing down this road, when even the patron saints of global warming are falling out along the route of march, recanting their former faith for all the world like starched-collar sailors “going native” in Tahiti.

On April 23 of this year, London’s Daily Mail reported (at http://tinyurl.com/9aygh3h):

“‘I made a mistake’: Environmental scientist James Lovelock, renowned for his terrifying predictions of climate change’s deadly impact on the planet, has gone back on his previous claims, admitting they were ‘alarmist’. … He added that other environmental commentators, such as former vice president Al Gore, are also guilty of exaggerating their arguments.

“The admission comes as a devastating blow to proponents of climate change who regard Lovelock as a powerful figurehead,” the Daily Mail reported.

“Five years ago, he had claimed: ‘Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.’

“But in an interview with msnbc.com, he admitted: ‘I made a mistake.’”

And it’s only been a couple of years since, on Feb. 14, 2010, the Daily Mail reported (at http://tinyurl.com/yb2loyt): “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.

“The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information,” the Mail reported.

“Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. … The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

“Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now Ð suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

“And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

“The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made,” The Daily Mail reported.

Professor Jones is the guy who stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit “after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data,” the Mail reports.

I’ve read some of those leaked files. “Manipulating date” is gentle. They were making stuff up.

The two sides will continue to claim they have some hundreds of scientific signatories on some new petition. But “science,” as I understand it, is decided not by majority vote, but rather by empirical observations and relevant reproduceable experiments, which seem to be curiously lacking from the alarmists’ current bag of tricks.

So instead, I’d like to introduce a new and more useful question, especially aimed at scientists:

How do you feel about the esteem in which science is currently held, in our culture?

‘SCIENCE’: IF YOU’VE GOT THE MONEY, THEY’VE GOT THE TIME

I submit “science” and the scientific method have has been held in extremely high esteem for two full centuries — something for which Ben Franklin gets far too little credit — and that both science and western culture have benefited. Science tells us diseases are caused by germs, that we should build sanitary sewers, wash our hands, sterilize our surgeries. We do. It works.

Now imagine a culture in which the majority declare: “Scientists? They’re the bought-and-paid for agents of government and the big corporations. They’ll rig their results to please whoever’s footing the bills. If one of these ‘scientific’ scum tells me something, I believe just the opposite.”

What could be the long-term costs of such a massive shift in public opinion?

Yet “scientists” increasingly run this risk, succumbing to the urge to produce the results being paid for. When initial studies of second-hand tobacco smoke failed to show the correlation with disease desired by the sponsors, was the required degree of probability cut in half to make the study “come out right”?

Yes, it was. See http://tinyurl.com/7pjpnfc . Yet the radio is now full of “public service” ads — funded with our tax dollars — arguing “there is no proven safe level of second-hand smoke,” when it would be more accurate to say “There is no proven UNSAFE level of second-hand smoke.”

Do FCC “scientists” tell consumers that cell phones and “smart” electric meters are safe because they cause no tissue heating or electric shock? What about the cumulative dangers of the electromagnetic radiation itself, detailed at places like www.usobserver.com/archive/aug-12/devvy-smart-meter-thuggery.htm?

And what will become of the reverence in which “science” is held in this culture if, 20 years from now, “scientists” are forced to concede the most likely climactic event toward which we are now loping is the next ice age … as famously ballyhooed on the cover of Newsweek magazine on April 28, 1975?

Since they contend (however absurdly) that mankind has it within our power to impact the earth’s temperature by increasing or reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases (in Europe and North America alone, no less!), will they agree in the event of global temperatures FALLING, the answer is that private industries and individuals must be urged to generate all the greenhouse gases they can — burning unlimited amounts of the “dirtiest” fuels possible, driving heavier, safer motor vehicles with V-8s and V-12s that get fewer than 15 miles per gallon?

If not, then I submit the “remedies” now proposed have nothing to do with “science,” at all, but are rather part of a globalist scheme to bring the technologically advanced economies of Europe and America to their knees, while allowing India and China and the Third World to “catch up” by bringing a new coal-fired power plant on line every week, that draconian “emissions control” is not a solution to any real problem, but rather an a priori agenda — crippling the West, with the secondary benefit of handing them a level of bureaucratic power over the economy unknown since the days of Stalin and Mussolini — that has simply latched onto “global warming” as the handiest convenient justification.