The usual theme on the left is that Republicans are opposed to science. Usually this is accompanied by some link to a GOP legislator talking about the Bible. A typical example is seen in this thread on Powerline, The original post refers to this article about the coldest temperature ever recorded.
A commenter says: “First of all, this is a bit of a joke. Mr. Hayward is not a scientist by any reasonable stretch. He has never done research on climate change; rather, if you read his blog writings, he represents an extreme ideological view which is not supported by fact. Any reputable scientist at NOAA would be embarrassed to debate someone like this. Scientists debate all the time in the literature. That is where ideas are tested against data. Mr. Hayward doesn’t participate in that debate, it is likely he is unable to. In fact, a debate against someone like Mr. Hayward would look great for his resume but (as I stated before) be embarrassing for a real scientist. You can see that we would never send such a debate request to one of our members. Sorry.”
That was from John Abraham (who, by the way, does not work for NOAA or accept money for his work on climate change).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Abraham_(professor)
Conservative peer-reviewed scientific thinking here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44958.html
(We still think it would be cool to see Hayward flail in front of a real scientist. Maybe Hayward can contact NOAA himself…? Propose a debate…? All ya gotta do is call! Go for it! It would look great on your resume!)
http://www.boulder.noaa.gov/?q=node%2F4
The “Conservative peer-reviewed scientific thinking ” is, of course, a link to a Congressman saying something foolish. “Rep. John Shimkus is standing by a controversial comment that global warming isn’t something to worry about because God said he wouldn’t destroy the Earth after Noah’s flood. ”
Ha ha ha. Stupid Republicans.
I see no mention of the state of science in the Democrats’ public statements. For example:
Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson is worried that stationing more Marines on Guam could cause the island to capsize. Guess what party he belongs to.
Then there is the redoubtable Sheila Jackson Lee who wants the Mars Rover to find the American flag left on the Moon by the astronauts. Again, guess what party ?
The global warming hysteria began about 25 years ago. There was evidence that the planet’s average temperature was rising. The end of The Little Ice Age about 1850 began a warming trend that seems to be ending now. Wikipedia is not reliable on the subject of global warming and related topics because the editors are members of the alarmist community. Al Gore, of course, is the most prominent member although he has no scientific credentials at all. In fact, his academic record was quite modest.
The last warming period, The Medieval Warm Period, was warmer than it is now as shown by the evidence of farming on Greenland which is not currently possible.
In fact, global warming has occurred in cycles since the last major ice age and the period of warm climate is called The Holocene Epoch.
The Holocene is the name given to the last 11,700 years* of the Earth’s history — the time since the end of the last major glacial epoch, or “ice age.” Since then, there have been small-scale climate shifts — notably the “Little Ice Age” between about 1200 and 1700 A.D. — but in general, the Holocene has been a relatively warm period in between ice ages.
The question is why the Earth has been relatively warm the past 12,000 years when previously there were cycles of glaciation?
The cycles can be seen above and the current warm period is much shorter than the preceding ice age. It can also be seen that the rise in atmospheric CO2 began AFTER the temperature rise. A rise in dust particles is suggestive that volcanism might have had an effect although this would be expected to be on the cooling side.
Why is the political left so invested in the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory ? Al Gore wrote a book some twenty years ago called called Earth in the Balance in which he proposed a theory that earth was being ruined by capitalism and prosperity. As described in the Amazon Editorial Review: we must “stabilize world population growth, spread social justice, boost education levels, create environmentally appropriate technologies, and negotiate international agreements to bring us back from the brink.”
Note the “Social Justice” theme. This is a call for all the leftist agenda to be enacted as an emergency. Skeptics have called environmentalists, especially the radicals, “Watermelons.” Green on the outside, red on the inside. The political left has adopted this agenda wholeheartedly. In fact, deviation such as that by Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist cannot be tolerated anymore than deviationists could be tolerated by Stalin or Mao Tze Tung. Lomborg is a simple teacher of statistics. He published his book questioning some of the publications on global warming as excessive. As a result he was attacked in an 11 page article in Scientific American that is noted for its heated tone and angry rhetoric. Some of the tone is derived from the fact that several of the people asked to write SA;s rebuttal were mentioned unfavorably in Lomborg’s book.
“Frustrated with the incessant claims that the Earth would run out of oil, food and raw materials, the economist Julian Simon in 1980 challenged the established beliefs with a bet. He offered to bet $10,000 that any given raw material to be picked by his opponents would have dropped in price at least one year later. The environmentalists Ehrlich, Harte and Holdren, all of Stanford University, accepted the challenge, stating that “the lure of easy money can be irresistible.” The environmentalists staked their bets on chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, and they picked a time frame of ten years. The bet was to be determined ten years later, assessing whether the real (inflation adjusted) prices had gone up or down. In September 1990 not only had the total basket of raw materials but also each individual raw material dropped in price. Chromium had dropped 5 percent, tin a whopping 74 percent. The doomsayers had lost.
Among the losing doomsayers were two of the authors of the SA piece attacking Lomborg.
More recently, we have the matter of the University of East Anglia scandal. EAU was one of the principle sites where climate research had supported global warming alarmism. Then, a series of e-mails were leaked by someone with internal access. A world wide scandal ensued.
The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
The hockey stick graph was one showing that the past 30 or 40 years were the warmest in Earth’s history. This was to show that the Industrial Revolution and the modern economic model was destroying the Earth. More “Social Justice.”
Then in 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
Those skeptics have been designated as “Deniers” as in Holocaust deniers. The scandal and argument rages with Mann even suing National Review magazine for ridiculing the fact that Pennsylvania State University, having had a football coach scandal on child abuse, conducted an abbreviated and superficial review of Mann’s research. Discovery should be interesting. What we have now, is the rather amorphous field of “Climate Research,” a field dependent on observation and on government funding, which has been adopted by the radical left in its anti-Capitalism agenda, growing more strident in its claims as the world begins to cool off. Unfortunately, the present US administration is among the most radical members of the alarmist world view. Congress is resisting, just as they refused to adopt the Kyoto Accords on climate 20 years ago. Obama and his agencies, staffed with radicals, are capable of ignoring everyone else and trying to take the country off the AGW cliff even as new technology promises to solve our energy dependence on the middle east and other disturbed trouble spots.
Tags: energy policy, politics