Shallow science and its victims

Sunday, 15th March 2009

More from last week's International Conference on Climate Change in New York (which I wrote about here)-- the one that was supposed to have ben attended by just a handful of cranks who don't agree that it's environmental apocalypse now:

Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with scores of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit, said he is 'embarrassed and puzzled' by the shallow science in papers that undergird the proposition that the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming. Soon told the second International Conference on Climate Change here, 'We have a system (of peer reviewing scientific literature) that is truly, truly appalling.'

... [John]Sununu and Soon both said global warming alarmists, particularly the politicians and the few scientists who wrote the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, have captured the scientific paper process, and in Sununu's words, have been successful in 'taking control of who gets funding, who gets published, who gets acclaimed, and who gets demonized.'

And in a keynote address Lord Monckton delivered this impassioned if despairing plea for reason:

Last summer, just as the President of the Royal Society, the world's oldest taxpayer-funded pressure-group, was telling us, 'Global warming is happening now,' global temperatures had already been plunging for nearly seven years, at a rate equivalent to almost 4 Fahrenheit degrees per century. Has your favourite news medium reported that? Probably not. Maybe that's why the President of the Royal Society didn't know. He doesn't get his science from the learned journals. He gets it from the media.

Just as Tony Bliar [sic] was announcing on his blog that 'global warming is getting worse,' just as Al Gore was testifying before the Senate--during an ice-storm--that we face a 'climate crisis,' global temperatures plummeted still more. They have been plummeting at a rate equivalent to 11 Fahrenheit degrees per century throughout the four years since Gore launched his mawkish, sci-fi comedy horror B-movie. At this rate, by mid-century we shall roasting in a new Ice Age.

... Thirty years ago, the soi-disant 'Greens' agitated for DDT to be banned. They killed 40 million people of malaria, most of them children. Eventually, after a third of a century, the WHO at last caved in to humanitarian pressure from me and others and reversed the ban. Dr. Arata Kochi, announcing the end of that murderous ban, said, 'Usually in this field politics comes first and science second. Now we must take a stand on the science and the data.'

...Now the very same soi-disant 'Greens' are killing millions by starvation in a dozen of the world's poorest regions. Their biofuel scam, a nasty by-product of their shoddy, senseless, failed, falsified, fraudulent 'global warming' bugaboo, has turned millions of acres of agricultural land from growing food for humans to growing fuel for automobiles. If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing Osamabamarama's stated ambition of shutting down nine-tenths of the economies of the West and flinging us back to the Stone Age without even the right to light fires in our caves. The prosperity of the West is not only our sustenance. It is also the very lifeblood of the struggling nations of the Third World. If our economies fail, we are inconvenienced, but they die.

Indeed; man-made global warming -- the indulgence of an intelligentsia for whom conscience is a fashion accessory – is not just an intellectual fraud but has consequences, already fatal, for the wretched of the earth.