Tuesday, February 25, 2014

More bad news for the Church of Global Warming


CLIMATE-CHANGE CONSENSUS: THERE IS NO CONSENSUS - John Hayward/Human Events @Doc_o

Clearly there is no “consensus” among climate scientists, and there never really was, not even in the salad days of the Church of Global Warming. There were a lot of hard-core scientific frauds running in the Eighties and Nineties, creating academic pressures that scientists were reluctant to resist. In the early years of the “pause,” it was more reasonable to suppose the problem itself existed in a big way, leaving human involvement the major topic of debate. But even then, nothing like the “consensus” claimed by fanatics and opportunistic politicians ever existed. At best, the number of scientists who would answer a binary “do you believe in climate change” question in the affirmative was somewhat higher than it is now… but as the AMS survey shows, it was never truly a Yes or No question.

And science is not a matter of consensus. That is the realm of politics, which has always been one of the greatest corrupting influences upon the scientific method....

It’s long past time we put paid to the illusion of climate-change believers as disinterested seekers of truth and saviors of the planet, while all who question their edicts must be hired knives in the employ of Big Oil. Big Climate is perhaps the biggest business on the planet, one of the largest special interests you can find. Gigantic amounts of money, and enormous political power, are riding on this ideology. It’s one of the most useful tools for the expansion of government in the free world, hovering right on the line of “because I said so” dictatorship, as you can see from the movement’s easy lapse into totalitarian denials that honorable dissent is possible at all.

It’s long past time strip the climate-change movement of the pretense they represent a consensus of scientists… because there is no consensus, and they represent interests that have nothing to do with science. Those who possess high-quality data don’t have to protect their hypotheses by invoking peer pressure to silence doubters. Take away the peer pressure, and nothing remains except brute government force… which we should also take away.