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Sunday, December 6, 2009
Drinking the Copenhagen Kool Aid
posted by Rick Blue at 13h49
The baby seal of the 21st century.
With the release of hacked emails from prominent climate scientists, it has become evident that among many of them ideological considerations have trumped any scientific quest for truth.
They believe that climate change is taking place and man-made greenhouse gases are causing it. So they set out to find data that supports that conclusion. And they suppress and even destroy data that conflicts with that conclusion. And they belittle, demonize and ultimately censor other scientists who tried to find out what might really be happening.
There are many more climate change skeptics out there than you might think. After all, there is so much to be skeptical about. Now, since Climate-gate, they can come out of the closet. No longer can they be dismissed and vilified as “deniers.”
Even the undying faith of the CBC was punctured. Last Thursday, on their flagship news program The National, Rex Murphy spoke out against the corruption of “climate science”. He joked that apparently science had gone to bed with advocacy and they both had had a good time.
So is climate science a new oxymoron?
I have always been suspicious of people who predict the end of the world. It has been done so many times in the past and the world has always survived. And it is such a cliché that the weatherman is wrong that it provides a universal punch line to any joke. So when environmentalists put the two together, I must admit that I had difficulty swallowing the Kool Aid.
But all around me, people I respected swallowed it – hook, line and sinker. And they did not want to hear any doubt. So I was left to try to figure out how all these common-sense realists have had their brains sucked out of them and why they so enthusiastically leap like lemmings over the cap-and-trade cliff.
(So many metaphors - so little time.)
Even now these new email revelations, which in any other field of endeavor would constitute a full-blown scandal, are still being explained away as the excesses of a few.
(Imagine if emails were hacked from the CIA outlining how they placed controlled demolition explosives in the World Trade towers.)
The media is quick to make sure we all understand that “the basic science is sound.” To make sure that we are all onside with their plans to set up some world supra-national body that will tax us on the basis of the energy we all consume. What a beautiful concept: Al Gore meets George Orwell.
Science gets funding and power. Academia flexes its muscles in the real world. The media will have new bans and restrictions to advocate and discuss for decades. The government will create more departments and reap more taxes. And corporations will pass the tax along to consumers.
Everybody wins. So who cares if it’s true or not?
Months and months of relentless propaganda has probably already convinced you that the fate of your planet hangs on the talks going on this coming week in Copenhagen. But I still have trouble believing.
Because in spite of what we have learned from the leaked emails this is what we are still expected to believe.
1) We have to believe that it is possible to take the daily temperature of a planet that is simultaneously day and night, summer and winter, water and earth.
2) We have to believe that the simple analogy of a greenhouse actually does describe the Earth’s weather system even though the Earth’s “greenhouse” has no walls and is not a closed system like a real greenhouse but is, in fact, an open chaotic system in which simultaneous day, night, winter and summer are in constant motion balancing and equalizing over the entire planet.
3) We have to believe that the evidence of climate science is accurate and not exaggerated for political reasons.
4) We have to believe that the evidence of climate science has been presented in an objective way and is not spun for political and ideological reasons.
5) We have to believe that contrary evidence is taken on board and worked into the overall data, just as it would be in any scientific pursuit of the truth. And that healthy scientific skepticism has not been suppressed and censored because of the “urgency of the problem.”
6) We have to believe that even if the evidence is true, in spite of this new proof of “cooking of the books,” that the climate of the Earth is being changed by human activity and not by any natural cause, like the sun.
7) We have to believe that even if the climate is changing, and even if it is due to human activity that the overall outcome will be only negative so it must be stopped.
8) We have to believe that all of those who are skeptical about climate change are misinformed morons or malevolent humans who do not care about the fate of their own children and are being paid off by the evil empire known as “Big Oil.”
9) We have to believe that a world organization created to tax and regulate all human energy usage will not become a boondoggle where a self-appointed elite that contributes nothing to human prosperity will feed at a trough of forced funding.
10) We have to believe that money diverted from the oil and gas industry, on which we now base our entire economy, into “green” energy production by wind, batteries and nuclear fission will not end up creating bigger problems, like how to dispose of worn out batteries from millions of electric cars, or will become a shameful disaster like the ethanol fiasco.
11) We have to believe that the money globally redistributed from rich, energy using economies to poor, energy deficient economies by this new supra-national agency will not simply prop up corrupt dictatorships as historically been the case with our well-meaning foreign aid to Africa.
12) We would have to believe that there is nothing suspicious in the way the name of the problem was quietly changed from “global warming” to “climate change” a few years ago when it was discovered that the actual warming had levelled off and yet the crisis had to be continued at all costs.
13) We would have to believe that there is no correlation between the explosion of environmental departments in the last 30 years turning out environmentalists with degrees predisposed to discover environmental problems and the current world environmental crisis.
Now I do not consider myself an unreasonable person. But there is a lot to swallow here. The Kool Aid tastes a little weird. Is there something in it? Does that taste all right to you?