A few bits on the ever-expanding, always boiling Climategate scandal.
First, here’s a link to, of all things, a single post in a Slashdot thread that concisely articulates a very important point: The lamentable tendency of many Global Warming boosters to label anyone who questions any part of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) narrative as “deniers.” There are varying degrees of skepticism, ranging all the way from “Global warming is all completely bunk and nothing you ever say will change my mind” to “Hey, I believe it’s every bit as bad as the AGW proponents claim, but maybe Kyoto and Copenhagen aren’t the best way to address it.” I myself am in the “Global warming may be real, but we don’t know how bad it is, don’t know how much of it is natural and how much (if any) is man-made, and in any case we should do a lot more study and measurement before ceding control of vast stretches of our economy to unelected transnational bureaucrats” camp.
However, the response of Global Warming proponents to just about any criticism of the consensus AGW narrative seems to be “The science is already settled, and anyone questioning it is as bad as a Flat Earther, a Creationist, or a Holocaust denier. Now sit down, shut up, and hand over all your money and power to us.” (And here’s the LA Times attempting a textbook “scientists are smart, Americans are stupid, questioning global warming is as bad as Creationism, so shut the hell up” approach.) As long as they keep trying to pull this “Nothing to see here, now move along” crap about Climategate, more and more people are going to question what they say. And rightly so. Especially since the overwhelming majority of people pushing AGW are the very same people who push bigger government and higher taxes as the solution to just about every problem. A lot of the people questioning the consensus narrative aren’t just random bloggers, they’re people with PhDs in related fields who are saying the science just doesn’t add up.
Here’s the reply of Watts Up With That author Willis Eschenbach to the Economist article (which can be found as the source link for the aforementioned Slashdot thread), rebutting their analysis (or lack thereof) of his original article (which I linked to here). (For extra credit, diagram that previous sentence.)
Here’s the actual IPCC reports, which some who have read them all the way through (Disclaimer: I haven’t managed to do that myself yet. Mea culpa.) say don’t make anywhere near the ironclad case for AGW that many proponents claim.
Is Google trying to suppress Climategate? My own quick search would tend to suggest no, they aren’t. I see a few AGW-critical sources (American Thinker (hey, is that the same J. R. Dunn that writes science fiction?), Washington Times) near the top of my date-sorted list. Clearly Google leans fairly heavily to the left, and I’m nowhere near the “Google can do no wrong” camp, but sometimes it just takes time for their server caches to be updated. At least once before (antedating this blog by several years) I jumped the gun on accusing Google of hiding something, only to have it show up a day or two later. (Mmmm, egg. It’s what’s on my face.) If they are trying to suppress the story, they’re doing a pretty piss poor job of it.
Finally, here’s Ralph Peters in the New York Post: “A thriving economy can do more to protect the environment than a desperate one. And let’s not forget the ‘human ecology’ of families struggling to put food on the table. Extreme environmentalism is a rich man’s sport that rides hell-for-leather through the poor man’s fields.”
