January 30, 2005

Chicken Little Environmentalism

Ran into this link at INDC. Bill says: bq. I'd Say ... that this qualifies as a reasonable blog post that takes a stab at refuting the conventional narrative around global warming. The this that Bill is talking about is an excellent post at Hold The Mayo. The author, Stephen Macklin, talks about the recent dire prediction that we will have severe warming in about ten years from now: bq. Chasing the Unicorn Another august group of politicians and environmentalists recently released a report positing that we've basically got 10 years left before the effects of global warming become irreversible. If we don't take immediate and drastic action to reduce greenhouse gasses we are doomed to rising ocean levels, catastrophic weather, and widespread death disease and famine. Remember all those teenage fantasies about what you would do if you knew the word was about to come to end? Well it's apparently time to put those plans into action. Let the bacchanal begin. bq. The report has been the subject of much discussion and controversy. bq. Here's the truth. bq. Global Warming is the environmentalist's unicorn. It is the mythical beast that they have devoted their lives to pursuing. It's capture, they believe, would give them the power to return the world to a simpler more edenic time. bq. The holy grail of their quest to turn back the industrialized world is the Kyoto Protocol, their church the United Nations, and their bible the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The foundation of their belief system is based on what they call the settled consensus of science. This foundation is weak one, as there is no real consensus among scientists about the reality of global warming, man's roll in causing global warming, or what the effect of global warming might be. And recently another major crack has opened in that foundation. bq. According to an article recently published in Geophysical Research Letters a good deal of the consensus science my be based on very bad research. Steven then goes on to quote from this article and cite another. The issue here is that the environmentalists claims are based on computer modeling and that the modeling has been 'tuned' by the researchers to agree with what they are looking for. The famous Mann et. al "hockey stick" shaped temperature curve is discussed as well as McIntyre and McKitrick's debunking -- this I wrote about here, here and here. Good stuff! Posted by DaveH at January 30, 2005 1:03 PM