"Can we talk about climate change like civilized adults? Yesterday, I wrote a column asking that question. The response from the internet suggests: "no.'" Mann tweeted back: "Then he blocked me. You will correctly infer that I was also inundated with other interlocutors on social media and e-mail. Many of them were respectful. Others were … less so. At worst, they suggested, I was a paid shill for fossil fuel interests. (Not so. I accept no pay from anyone other than Bloomberg.) At best, they said, I was a fool who was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. My editor was thusly chided for the column: “shame on you for publishing it, especially if you have children.”
Look, I understand the bunker mentality that has beset many climate-change activists. Climate skeptics have their own set canards about how climate activists are all crypto-communists and authoritarians looking to force their political views on the world. Too many glibly dismiss climate models entirely because of their high degree of uncertainty, rather than grappling with the downside risks that these uncertain models suggest. In particular, Republican politicians, who have considerable policymaking power, have eschewed making the difficult case that whatever warming will occur is not worth taking radical action to prevent, and instead have resorted to throwing snowballs on the Senate floor." Of course Mann blocked Megan, he has the conflict resolution skills of a spoiled pre-tween. I don't find Megan's summary of the skeptic side particularly accurate. You can go read Warren Meyer's book: Table of Contents: A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming | Coyote Blog This is the model for clear headed, objective analysis of a complicated problem. Unlike the spume and froth which emirates from the alarmist camp. And as for grappling with downside risks, I believe Bjorn Lomborg has carefully addressed these issues in his books, "Smart Solutions to Climate Change," "Cool it," "The Skeptical Environmentalist," and "How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place." There might be more to do, but really this is a damn good start. "This is understandably frustrating if you think warming is apt to be catastrophic. And the long years of hurling increasingly angry imprecations has radicalized both sides to the point where it’s hard to imagine having anything constructive to say to the folks on the other side." But this is not what has happened at all. The skeptics, outside of a few politicians and a vanishing few bomb throwers, don't hurl angry imprecations. These people are commonly just looking for the underlying information which supports a global warmist paper, i.e., Mann's infamous "Hockey Stick Graph." They are not just blocked, pilloried, and libeled, but the alarmist camp goes to great length to stop the skeptical side access to peer reviewed journals, going as far as threatening to stop publishing in journals which do not toe their political line. The large release a few years back of emails between members of the global alarmist camp showed just how willing they were to subvert the law, lie, and bully to make sure no contrary positions were heard. There are entire books written about the alarmists' corruption of science, for example: "REVEALED: THE ABJECT CORRUPTION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE The gallant whistleblower now faces a police investigation at the instigation of the University authorities desperate to look after their own and to divert allegations of criminality elsewhere. His crime? He had revealed what many had long suspected: – A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research. -The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities. -The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons. -The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report. -They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors. -They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate. -They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled. -They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers. -They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint. -They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes. -They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created. Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent." Lord Monckton’s summary of Climategate and its issues Compare this reasoned and rational approach to a global warming problem, By PAUL C. “CHIP” KNAPPENBERGER and PATRICK J. MICHAELS: The Climate Alarm Death Knell Sounds Again With the irrational, resolution adopted by the Portland School Board here: The Portland school board's climate-change meltdown: Editorial Agenda 2016 "By a unanimous vote, the board adopted a resolution that directs district officials to do two things: Develop a climate-change curriculum and, to that end, review textbooks for accuracy." This undersells the what it is the resolution actually does. The authors later clarify exactly what it is the Portland School Board intends to do. "The board's climate-change resolution is not intended to teach students to think critically, which is what schools should do. It's designed, instead, to produce acolytes." Exactly correct. But this is probably unfair comparing a scientist to a school board, so compare the Knappenberger article to the Mann hockey stick graph paper. You will need to look high and low to find some problem with Knappenberger, or the underlying data, and if found, the authors will likely admit whatever problem and correct it, or explain why it is not an actual problem. Mann, on the other hand was found to be telling porky's in his Hockey Stick Graph. "In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue. But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records. But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken. Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and Mckittrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape! That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others." Global Warming Bombshell Lord Monckton’s summary of Climategate and its issues McIntyre and McKitrick tried to publish a paper with this and more information in Nature, but were denied. "McIntyre and McKitrick sent their detailed analysis to Nature magazine for publication, and it was extensively refereed. But their paper was finally rejected. In frustration, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports on a Web page for all to see. If you look, you'll see that McIntyre and McKitrick have found numerous other problems with the Mann analysis." Why would Nature refuse to publish a bombshell paper showing how the Hockey Stick Graph was wrong? The author rightly concludes: "A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one–if we know it is broken. It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow. When we discover a mistake, we admit it, learn from it, and perhaps discover once again the value of caution." Oddly, this is just the beginning of the story not the end. Mann marches even deeper into the BS from here, but you will need to find that story on your own. Nor are these problems limited to one scientist. This hiding of data, using improper algorithms, failing to statically validate data, and even manipulating the actual raw data are all problem rampant and rife on the global alarmist side, the side which controls the mechanisms of tracking, recording, and publishing for all of global warming. The myriad scandals, and the huge number of emails found in the Climategate email scandal all point towards the alarmist group acting more like the clerisy of a religious order, protecting hidden truth from the prying eyes of all who wish enlightenment and truth. Climate science is simply the pre-Vatican II Catholicism model applied to Environmentalism's Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming secular religion. Megan stumbled upon the truth that within the nescience of global warming alarmism there is a cabal of men seeking not to reveal truth, but to maintain control. They are at the top, they are true believers in the cult, their very sinecures, reputations, and careers depend upon maintaining the cult. To do so, they will impugn the reputation, and even slander the character of any unbeliever, heretic, or apostate. Climate science is no longer a science it is a religion. You might as well get used to it.
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