When Academia’s Weathertellers Lost Credibility

What Happens When Establishment Institutions Make a Business of Trading in Fear and Favor for Power?

“As we [The New York Times] reflect on this week’s momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling, that preceded it,” publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Dean Baquet now promise readers the NYT will begin reporting “America and the world honestly.” Really?

No one believes they can rely on the NYT to be impartial or report fairly or that it would have held a Clinton administration to the same level of scrutiny that a Trump administration will receive. Climatologists of Western Academia face a similar situation: they no longer have credibility.

The election forecast models were wildly wrong. Climate prediction models share one thing in common with them: even if they could be right, their creators will not want to believe them if predicted results do not correspond to politically correct preconceived notions of the establishment about how they should be…

Still, no matter what the consensus of establishment opinion may be, “CO2 is not a pollutant, like black carbon aerosol and mercury” (Judith Curry). And, what of the models that would indict CO2 as an evil chemical, making us all criminals for releasing it into Earth’s atmosphere?

The “relatively coarse spatial and temporal resolutions of the models” says Curry, fail to capture, “many important processes that occur on scales that are smaller than the model resolution (such as clouds and rainfall).” But, do we bring everything into sharper focus by using ‘parameterizations’ as substitutes for reality? “Parameterizations of subgrid-scale processes,” says Curry, “are simple formulas based on observations or derivations from more detailed process models,” that must then be, “‘calibrated’ or ‘tuned’ so that the climate models perform adequately when compared with historical observations.”

And, given all of this massaging of, physical processes, that Curry says are, “either poorly understood or too complex to include in the model given the constraints of the computer system,” if we look to science to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, we must then rely on the integrity of the creators of the models and their knowledge of statistics.

If climatology is to be considered a real science and not just an exercise in numerology that should be given the seriousness we accord to the ancient science of astrology, we must trust climatologists. There’s the rub: we don’t. Politically approved, establishment science has proven itself to be nothing more than a useful hoax and scare tactic – a soapbox – that helps Leftists advance an ideology that Americanism is evil.

Trump’s upset victory proves that enough voters learned again what all of our parents knew so well: politicians are not trustworthy. Unfortunately, Western academia also has earned the public’s mistrust. The electorate gave Republicans 2 years to help Trump drain the swamp.

I love this country. ~Donald Trump (acceptance speech)

The outgoing Democrat leadership does not love the country and their vision of America was rejected. With whom will Western academia stand now? Hopefully, a pause in the permanent campaign of Clinton, Inc. will help change education for the better and help make Climatology something better than a politically-motivated car-chase science: Donald Trump’s winning of the presidency hopefully will help crack the glass ceiling of global warming alarmism.

As a result of US elections last week, Leftists’ headlock on the spoils system was slipped, the Clinton money train has been sidelined and the Democrat party now lies exposed and naked. We now look for change in the economy and how the wealth that is generated by the productive will be spent; and, we don’t want more faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats to throw millions of dollars at us without leaving a trace.

We also need a change when it comes to dealing with the weather and how we think about climate. When it comes to the science of climate, the huge ‘cone of uncertainty’ tells us that despite spending billions of dollars we still don’t have a handle on the ‘God factor.’

“In short,” says Bjorn Lomborg (The Wall Street Journal), “climate change is not worse than we thought.” The only alarming thing about climate change has been bad policy decisions based on, “exaggerated, worst-case claims,” that according to Lomborg, “ignore a wealth of encouraging data.”

It is an indisputable fact that carbon emissions are rising—and faster than most scientists predicted. But many climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected. This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging. The latest study from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that in the previous 15 years temperatures had risen 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. The average of all models expected 0.8 degrees. So we’re seeing about 90% less temperature rise than expected. ~Bjorn Lomborg

In any event, the endless climate summits promulgated by the progressive movement cannot stop the continuing rise in carbon emissions coming from Brazil, Russia, India, China and the African continent. Subsidizing solar power and windmills is simply flushing the wealth of the country down the toilet–i.e., “simply expensive, feel-good measures,” says Lomborg, “that will have an imperceptible climate impact.”

The election reality show gone mainstream is now over. The country voted against a global warming alarmist and voted for a more sensible climate policy by putting a climate change realist into the White House.