Imagine a World with No Junk Science

I now am persuaded that the far greater danger is that researchers and government bureaucrats will use claims of harassment to hamper public debate and as excuses to hide information from the public that would embarrass them. ~Ronald Bailey

The 21st session of the Paris Climate Change Conference took place November 30th. More heads of state, political leaders and government bureaucrats gathered there that day than ever attended a UN event. The speech-making went on until the 11th of December and it was a wonderful forum for those who are angling to head the UN agency that is tasked to save the world from capitalism, America, prosperity, modernism and the evil oil companies that provided the energy, champagne, baguettes and brie needed to put on this dog and pony show that was 100% paid for by the unemployed.

The intolerance of the ‘humanity is causing global warming’ AGW True Believers is palpable. The Left declared its own jihad on the West, demonizing everyone and thing that provides them with what they demand: the economy, morals, ethics, traditions, principles, the productive and the futures of their children. Appeals to panic has become the tool of choice in the superstitious grab bag of the ideologically-driven.

AGW is a story of conspiring and collusion, politics, hate and fear. If climate research money had been spent to find the actual causes of global warming – and not for the single purpose of proving humanity’s CO2 was responsible for it – it would by now be perfectly clear to everyone that, “temperature variations over the last 2,000 years suggests global warming (and cooling), are the rule, not the exception.” Unfortunately, as Dr. Roy Spencer reminds us when talking about a 2005 article by John P. A. Ioannidis and irrespective of whether we’re talking about medicine or global warming, Most Published Research Findings are False.

Officially sanctioned alarm about global warming has been driven by the Left’s demand for legitimization of the secular, socialist state bureaucracy. In pursuit of that goal, academia has been the proving ground for every phony idea the Left could dream up to knock society down.

One of the key reasons why the statist left has so much control over the nation is that it has succeeded in its project of taking over the education system. In particular, they have wormed their way into schools of education and use their domination of the training grounds for future teachers (many of whom aren’t particularly bright; the education curriculum repels students who don’t want to waste their time on pabulum) to impart collectivistic, pro-government, anti-market ideas in the students’ minds. ~George Leef (National Review)

So, the fact that, global warming is caused by humanity, becomes a new reality. Like indulging a fascination about vintage analog watches in an age of supercomputers, secular, socialist academia has taken reason to the opposite extreme: wishing to live in a virtual world instead of the real one. Meta-world academics and the political bureaucracy to which they are beholden – like Renaissance artists to the doctrine of the Catholic Church – have given wings to a new kind of mystical thinking where the sterile results of unverifiable computer models are more real than dew on daisies.

Untethered from reality and more than willing to stab the culture in the back, Western academics have become good atheists just like Germans became good Nazis. To push back against the gaping nihilism that darkens their dreams, academia has taken onto itself a new theology called climatology, which amounts to nothing more than the putative science of preventing the seas from rising as the productive shovel the snow.

The world is not a hotter and more intimidating place to live than it ever was. And, humanity faces no actual threat from global warming. But, these are not the conclusions of the West’s academics who churn the data in search of humanity’s heat. Of the murderous examples of failed socialism we witnessed during the 20th century, the UN/Euro-communist science of global warming has been the greatest Nobel prize winning anti-humanism movement in history.

Humanitarians and lovers of liberty are rightfully skeptical of AGW goupthinkers. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” says Judith Curry. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.” Obviously, record snowfall such as occurred during the North American Winter of 2014-15 seriously challenges modern academic pseudo-reality and dampens what Curry calls, climate tribalism. But then, superstition will raise its icy metropolitan head again and again because it’s not how many feet of snow fell last year in Boston that matters when it comes to the politics of global warming tomorrow.

The science of climate change makes us stupid. As the weather service tells us readings might not make it out of the 30s this week, followed by another hard freeze next week, with blustery northerly winds sending wind chill values into the single digits, the AGW True Believer Cult must pray for a swift end to all of the global warming. That is how schoolteachers in the Western Education Industrial Complex are trained to act, all the while being heedless of their lack of value to society as they push their runaway global warming climate porn on innocent children.

There is no reason to believe that climate change is so terrible at the moment. Unless you raise funds for Greenpeace or are a politician who presents themself as the savior of mankind: then you gain by exaggerating things. The reality is that the climate hardly affects our wellbeing and our prosperity. There are happy and rich people living in boiling hot Singapore, but also in freezing cold Canada. There are unhappy and poor people in boiling hot Kenya but also stone cold Mongolia. Climate change is not the main environmental problem. Dirty air causes currently roughly four million deaths each year. ~Richard Tol