Articles Tagged "Robert Tracinski"

I do not deny the reality of climate change. No, this is not a change of mind, reversing my longstanding skepticism toward claims of human-caused global warming. I have never denied climate change—and that is precisely why I reject the global warming hysteria. But a fascinating new scientific contribution from Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who is single-handedly blowing away the alleged "consensus" on what drives the climate, has given me a whole new appreciation for climate change.

The term "climate change denier" is obviously objectionable because of the word "denier." That word is carried over from the phrase "Holocaust denial" and is meant to smear global warming skeptics by associating us with the vicious motives of those who airbrush the crimes of the Nazis. But the more substantive objection to this phrase is that we skeptics do not deny the reality of climate change. We embrace it all too thoroughly.

We understand that the climate is changing and that it has always been changing. The four-and-a-half-billion-year history of the Earth is a history of constant, wild swings in global temperatures and weather, from the steamy jungles that nurtured the dinosaurs to the vast equatorial glaciers of "Snowball Earth."

(If you follow the link about Snowball Earth, by the way, you may notice that the theory is controversial and has its own skeptics. Funny how that works. In genuine science, for any new theory there is a competing theory, and the question is settled by more evidence and not by people lining up behind some top-down political "consensus.")

For years, we've been lectured at by the global warming establishment about how anyone who doubts them is an enemy of science. One of them in particular, a fellow named Peter Gleick who was the chair of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics, kept lecturing us about how much more scientific integrity the warmists have compared to us unscrupulous skeptics.

Well, now we know what the "scientific ethics" of this global warming establishment actually amounts to. It's not just that Gleick has confessed to stealing internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a think tank that supports global warming skepticism, or that he is suspected of forging another document in an attempt to defame Heartland. It's the fact that a whole section of the scientific establishment is defending Gleick on the grounds that it's OK to lie to promote their cause.

It should go without saying—it doesn't, apparently, but it should—that this is a complete inversion of genuine scientific ethics, in which there is no value higher than the truth. But that is how deeply the global warming dogma has corrupted the scientific establishment.

It starts with science journalists and commentators. In Britain's leftist newspaper The Guardian, for example, James Garvey writes that Gleick's lie was "justified by the wider good." The "wider good" is defined as suppressing any opposition to the global warming establishment. "What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action," Garvey writes. So, "If Gleick frustrates the efforts of Heartland, isn't his lie justified by the good that it does?"

The promoters of the global warming hysteria never really recovered from Climategate, the release of e-mails and data which demonstrated that climate insiders were using questionable data, promoting misleading arguments, and conspiring to block dissenting views from the scientific literature. It was a fatal blow to the credibility of the warmists, and it has been followed by a steady stream of distinguished scientists standing up publicly to withdraw their backing from the global warming "consensus." The latest example is an op-ed by sixteen such scientists in the Wall Street Journal, followed up by a devastating response to their critics.

The global warming alarmists are losing the argument, and the latest scandal—James Delingpole calls it Fakegate—shows just how desperate they have become.

This was supposed to be a scandal that would undermine the global warming skeptics. In fact, it was supposed to be an exact parallel of Climategate, but this time discrediting the Heartland Institute, a pro-free-market think tank in Chicago that has been a leader in debunking the global warming hysteria.

Someone calling himself "Heartland Insider" released a series of internal documents from Heartland. On the whole, the documents were unremarkable. They revealed that a think tank which advocates the free market and is skeptical of global warming was raising money to, um, advocate the free market and promote skepticism of global warming. As Delingpole put it, "Run it next to the story about the Pope being caught worshipping regularly in Rome and the photograph of a bear pooping behind a tree."

In a potential preview for America, the Australian Senate has just defeated that country's version of cap-and-trade by a vote of 42-30. Most of the overseas coverage of this event, however, has missed the most interesting feature of the defeat. The BBC report, for example, claims that the bill was blocked because "opposition senators...feared the legislation would harm the country's mining sector."

In fact, the bill was defeated because there is now serious disagreement in Australia on the very existence of human-caused global warming. That's the backbone behind the collapse of what was supposed to be bipartisan agreement. As Senator Nick Minchin put it in a blistering speech opposing the bill, "this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.... The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century."