Finally--A Warm Day!

The year 2011 is now forty-four days old.  That doesn't mean much, fully expectable and all that.  What is important is today is the very first of those forty-four days where the temperature has actually reached a normal high value.  All the other days, each miserable bloody cold one of them was below normal--as much as thirty-seven degrees.

In this pattern the Geek's canyon has mirrored the experience of much of the US in this, an alleged La Nina winter.  Record cold, snowfall from some Norse hell, frozen pipes, never ending chilblains, teeth chattering without letup.  And, according to the advocates of anthropogenic climate change, all the result of global warming.

The Geek has been following the We-Are-All-Going-To-Fry campaign since its opening days back in 1997.  That was the year he first saw the (in)famous "hockey stick" graph resulting from the statistical prestidigitation and mathematical thaumaturgy of "climate scientist" Michael Mann.  The graph purports to demonstrate that all manner of global warming had occurred during the years following World War II and thus resulted from the increased use of fossil fuels.

Being a historian the Geek couldn't help but notice that the flat part of the stick--the handle covering the past several centuries did not show the signs of the Late Roman Warming period or the Medieval Warming or the Little Ice Age from which clutches the world escaped in fits and starts in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.  The Geek was sore amazed.  These events were all well known.  They are in all the history books--even Western Civ texts such as may have been used when Dr Mann was an undergrad.  He might even have seen references, but, apparently the magic of statistics was capable of removing even the most well documented, long duration experiences from the human record--if a compelling reason to do such exists.

Of course, compelling reasons to send centuries down the memory hole exist for Dr Mann and others of his persuasion.  These include professional status, research money, the gaining of influence on the movers and shakers of the planet.  Scientists are no more immune to the appeals of money, power, and status than members of other occupations.

The Geek's suspicions regarding the agenda driven nature of "climate science" were solidified in recent years by a recurrent trope--The Science is settled!  Now, there is one thing which separates true scientific inquiry from all other forms of human investigation.  That thing is simple.  It is that nothing is ever "settled" in science.  Even long standing theories with a repeatedly demonstrated capacity for robust descriptions and predictions is open to challenge.  Indeed, one suspects there are eager young guns out there in scienceland hoping to find a fatal flaw with Newtonian mechanics, or quantum realities of "spooky action at a distance."

In religion any matter can be settled.  It takes only a central authority with the power to bind, the authority to investigate, the ability to punish, to read out of good standing any who proclaim heterodox beliefs.  The same applies to politics.  Or social and fraternal groups.  It does not apply to science.

We know from the emails of "Climategate" notoriety that Dr Mann and his fellows such as those at East Anglia University did attempt to bar the heterodox from publication or attendance at international conferences.  We know as well that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did constitute a small group empowered with the ability to define the acceptable.  The IPCC might have concealed its actual small size ( a couple of dozen main authors at most) behind an impressive wall of apparent mass mob size, but the insiders, the climate vatican as it were, was smaller by far than the College of Cardinals.  Smaller and far more potent in terms of defining dogma, ruling dissent out of bounds, and limiting the nature of the debate.

The IPCC was not alone in its hijacking of science.  It had any number of very potent facilitators most of which can be found littering the corridors of power in assorted national governments to say nothing of the ever ambitious United Nations bureaucracy.  For assorted reasons including ideology, personal needs, money, the list goes on, politicians and bureaucrats signed on to the IPCC headed crusade to limit human freedom, redistribute wealth, accretate power to central governments or international organizations and generally muck up the global economic dynamics.

Fast, rash actions were justified by the cry, "The science is settled!"  As the sounding of alarms, the pointing at clear and present danger is great for circulation and ratings, there is no surprise that the global media joined in the crowd sourced hysteria.  Scientifically illiterate or dishonest journalists assisted the process, giving a high platform for the approved gloom and doom bunch while marginalizing any with the wit and courage to dissent.

Never did the media ask even the most basic questions regarding the allegedly settled science.  In the ready acceptance of the basic contention of the global warming cabal, no one from the media, for example, inquired why the designated bad guy was carbon dioxide.  It is a matter of the most elementary sort that water vapor is a far more potent "greenhouse gas" than is carbon dioxide.  Water vapor is responsible for roughly seventy-five percent of the heat retention and downward reflection effects collectively described by the term "greenhouse" while carbon dioxide causes scarcely three percent of the effect.  Even methane whether from natural organic decay or the flatulence of cows and other large herbivores causes a greater impact--some twenty percent of the total.

Why did not one MSM inquire into this?  Even now when the EPA is seeking to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and accusing the Republicans in the House of promoting public health threats by seeking to defund the regulatory effort has not one MSM bothered to investigate just how little impact on global warming the much maligned but central to all vegetable life little molecule actually has.

Nor has the scientific press been any better.  One might expect that journals purporting to present science to the informed layperson might have done more to underscore just how little is known about the mechanisms which drive climate.

No work has been focused on, for example, what is known and unknown about the irregularities in solar radiation and how they affect climate.  The sun is a slightly variable star--kind of a small scale, slow action pulsar with regular fluctuations in its radiation budget which are overlain by the waxing and waning of sunspots and solar flares.  All directly and substantially impact both daily weather and long term climate.

It is known that extra-solar ionizing radiation is related directly to the causation of low and mid-level clouds which in turn directly affect weather and climate.  But, the devil is in the details and the details are not well known or understood.

The same applies to the large scale non-explosive volcanic activity occurring in the shallow water of the Western Pacific Ocean.  The heat load directly modifies oceanic currents with consequences which may involve the long cycle oscillations of that ocean or may render the periodic oscillations less important.  We know very little about this critical aspect of climate and weather making.  Indeed, we know remarkably little as yet regarding the overall meshing of the oceans with atmosphere, which meshing is central to all weather, all climate whether routine or extreme.

While we are at it--where are the guardians of the public's sacred right to know when it comes to past climate cycles?  If carbon dioxide drives temperature increases then why have any number of previous periods of global cold, global glaciation been marked by carbon dioxide levels much higher than today's?  Or, why were carbon dioxide levels so much lower back during both the Roman and Medieval Warm periods if it takes increased carbon dioxide to drive higher temperatures?

There are other equally salient matters, bucko, but you get the point.  The deal is simple: There is no settled science.

This is not to say there is no global warming.  There has been.  Ever since the end of the Little Ice Age a century and a half back we have been on a slow warming trend.  The bad news is this trend apparently ended in 1998 (a date accepted even by Dr Mann and Dr Jones of East Anglia.)

A little more global warming would be good for life generally and human life in particular.  The historical record is clear on that.  So also are the data from the historical sciences such as all of those with the prefix "paleo" in their name.

So, a demand to the MSM, politicians, bureaucrats and others of an agenda driven, ideological nature, give us--and science--a break.  Stop insulting intelligence and the truth with assertions regarding "settled science."  And, stop trying to make cold a symptom of excess heat.

The Futility Of "Climategate"

Ever since the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK were posted on the web there has been an enormous brouhaha over the apparent squashing of dissent, massaging of data, and similar sins of both omission and commission. By and large the contretemps has been confined to the blogosphere, particularly sites such as Pajamas Media which reside on the right side of the political spectrum. Coverage by the MSM has been slight and rather biased against the contention that there is anything amiss at CRU.

Government officials, particularly in the UK, as well as outlets such as the London Times have decried the hacking itself as well as assuring all who might listen that the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change was both real and robust. Those who dissent from this consensus are dubbed "deniers" and "flat earthers."

While branded as being nearly paleolithic in mentality, the range and competence of the many climate contrarians have been gaining traction and credibility with the public both in the US and Western Europe to the dismay of the It's-Getting-Hot-And-We-Did-It crew. Given that thirty or so years ago the same sort of "climate scientists" who today predict death by heat prognosticated death by arctic emergency as the globe was cooling and the glaciers must be coming soon, a healthy dose of skepticism is appropriate.

The sorrow and the tragedy surrounding human driven global warming and its political expressions such as that forthcoming in Copenhagen is not that the science may be shaky or questionable--or that the consensus may be driven not by objective science--but rather by the human needs of scientists for status, power, and the other good things of life.

The sorrow, the tragedy, the pity of it all is that neither science nor truth matter in the slightest. As the Geek has posted before, the issue of global warming is simply too attractive to politicians and bureaucrats--particularly of the international sort--to allow to pass unexploited. Ever since Al Gore and other exemplars of The-Sky-Is-Falling school of thought latched onto the initial, fragmentary, contradictory data concerning temperature changes over the past century of so, the potential for further governmental power enhancement has exercised a hypnotic appeal to both governments and the elites affiliated with them.

In a way quite similar to earlier expansions of governmental authority, of public space into the private space of individual decision making, key political, bureaucratic and, oh yes, scientific personalities have adopted global warming and its halting as a way of further narrowing the private space available to individuals. As a high ranking member of the US National Institutes of Health once said to the Geek regarding the absence of sound science in support of the second hand smoke kills hypothesis, "That's true. But it doesn't matter. A political decision has been made."

Global warming, or, more properly, the halting of the menace provides an exceptionally fertile field for the pursuit of manifold agendas.

Left leaning politicians can avail themselves of the global warming fig leaf to cover their actual genitalia--those of controlling, restricting, perhaps removing the residuals of the free market and gaining more and more control over even such trivial personal decisions as what sort of light bulb does one buy.

Internationalists as well as bureaucrats at the UN, the EU, and other regional organizations can use the specter of global cooking to gain power over national entities as well as private citizens and everyone's (particularly if one is on the Left) favorite evil--the soulless, multi-national corporation.

As a sort of secondary reward, the multi-cultural, multi-lateral, nations-are-evil-and-reactionary portion of Western and American elites can use the lever of global warming to foster more and more reliance upon supra-national entities at the expense of national ones.

Then there are the national leaders, the national governments, who see global warming as an opportunity to mulct the "wealthy, developed nations." The unseemly behavior of a number of African delegations at the preliminary climate meeting last month in pursuit of extortion demonstrates this use of global warming with perfection.

The scientists--that is the scientists who hold "correct" views on the subject--can use the global warming threat to gain grants, acquire power, elevate status. Some from the physics community might even construe the global warming warnings as a sort of penance for the "sins" of physics such as nuclear weapons and long range missiles.

Overall there is much to be gained and little or nothing to lose in the pursuit of ameliorating the presumed planetary catastrophe of global warming. That is if one is a member of one of the components of the elite which would gain power by doing so.

If, however, one is not a member of one of the elect groups, the "healing of Gaea" will be costly. Costly in money. More costly in the loss of personal freedom, in the further diminishment of private space.

History demonstrates that encroachments by public space on private, by the authority of the state on the liberties of the individual, are rarely reversed. And, any reversals are normally purchased in blood.

The expansion of public space, of national and international remote authority, is reason enough in and of itself to make the science utterly irrelevant to the process. The process of gaining power needs no real objective, scientific basis. It only requires the existence of a plausible fear. That plus the will and means to exploit and stoke fear will result in the goal of power acquisition being achieved.

Climategate does not matter in the slightest. Even the harboring of doubts about the scientific base of the global warming hypothesis by a majority of We the People doesn't matter.

Science--and public desires--be damned! Full speed ahead at Copenhagen and its successors. Full speed ahead to a brave new world order of less personal freedom as Authority protects against the thermometer.