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Skeptics Score at Climate Change Conference



But don't expect the climate horror industry to decline anytime soon.



March 14, 2009 - by

James Lewis



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Be still my beating heart. There is hope for honest science, even in the gruesome Age of Algore.

But only if we really grasp what's happening with the Global

Horror Picture Show these days. The biggest danger to good science is that rational skeptics

will continue to be outgunned by the fear peddlers: A big

lie can go around the world before the truth can get its boots on. The fear merchants just have

to make up new scares faster than they can be knocked down,

and honest scientists will always get there too late. Thoughtful skepticism takes thought. New

alarmist scenarios can be made up by science fiction scribblers

on an assembly line. It's the Nazi panzers against the Polish cavalry. Sure it's heroic, but

it's

not really a contest.



So here's the good news. The skeptics are winning against the global warming mythogogues.

The polls show

a drop in public faith in the global warming meme. Last week a stellar skeptics' conference was

held in New York City and the New York Times actually covered

it - in its usual bitchy fashion, but they decided to

cover it anyway.

There are many excellent talks

at this website

, notably by Viscount Monckton, Margaret Thatcher's former adviser, who provides a truly elegant

and devastating deconstruction of the infamous IPCC "consensus

statement" - done for the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, and of the bureaucrats. Any real

scientific analysis

and debate was left out of the IPCC statement, and Lord Monckton simply shoots it out of the

water with a satisfying bang. Others like Fred Singer and Richard

Lindzen were there as well, and you can listen to their presentations online. They are heroes.



But that's not why I think the skeptics are winning. The rational skeptics are winning because

the global warming crowd has simply dropped the two words

"global warming" from its vocabulary. No more official global warming! This is like the old

Soviet Communist Party. You have to analyze not just what's

said but what's not said. You have to look to see who has been airbrushed out of the pictures of

the Politburo waving on top of Lenin's tomb watching

the May Day parade. And "global warming" has disappeared from respectable scientific discourse.

Only the elementary school teachers of the world will keep

teaching about global warming, because their lesson plans are already written, and they're a

little slow on the uptake.



Somehow it's all morphed into climate change.



What's "climate change?"



It's a scientific surrender by the Algore-James-Hansen Planetary Fear Brigade. No more global

warming, folks. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.



But it's a silent surrender, so millions of readers of the New York Times will never notice a

thing. Al Gore just has to drop one solitary slide from his

infamous PowerPoint lecture. James Hansen just needs to pretend that all those horrific mistakes

over at the NASA Climate Playstation Center were tiny

computer glitches. Anybody can make an honest mistake, right? And they always fixed the

published data after they were caught - I mean, after the errors

were called to their attention. That's what

honest scientists do.



(Funny thing, though, how those glitches always favored the global warming faith?)



Still, real scientists have to use words with precision, and when all the big science journals

change the words "global warming" to "climate change," all

at the same time, you know somethin's up.



It is. The real scientists have simply, silently acknowledged that the skeptics were right all

along, as a child of six might have figured out. And since

everybody knows that "climate change" has been going on for a half billion years, it's sure to

keep happening. Now there's a solid scientific prediction

for you.



Nobody can object to "climate change."

So nobody has to apologize to the skeptics. (Hint: If the New York Times deigns to cover

skeptics who challenge their orthodoxy for the last decade or two,

it's because they are doing a quick

CYA.

They are not recanting. They are not doing the skeptics a favor. If you want a favor, go ask

Tony over in Joisey.)



/>What really happened there, it seems, is that the science section of the NYT caught on, and

hired a skeptic named John Tierney, who

blew the cover

off the scam. Check out the columns by Tierney, who sounds like an honest man in a impossible

job. The science section people have to actually know something

about science. They also have to stay respectable to real scientists, and they must have smelled

the fraud for years and years. It didn't take much. Even

the Weather Channel caught on, for goodness' sake!



What about those highly respectable scientists who were constantly giving scare headlines to

their friends in the media? Well, they can pretend they were

right all along, too. After all, they told us about climate change, didn't they? And now

everybody agrees that, yes, the climate is changing. Gotcha!



As for the media, they don't care - most of their readers can't remember yesterday's stories

anyway. With the 24/7 news cycle you can just swamp yesterday's

scare headline with bigger ones today. In fact, the imaginative scribblers of the media now have

even more room to let their horror fantasies soar.



Which is exactly what's happening. If you think global warming gave the media a lot of room for

planetary fear stories, just wait till you see all the

really catastrophic climate change stories to come.



Who needs warming?



How about . the oceans are turning acid and killing all the little carbonaceous critters?

Yesterday, Nature magazine proclaimed that the oceans are turning

acid and reducing the calcium in Pacific Ocean marine carbonate organisms. But skeptics will

note that this study suffers from a huge sampling error. There

is no way to cover an enormous ocean region with vast underwater mountain ranges and make

generalizations about the acidity and the actual population of

all carbonate organisms in that enormous volume of sea water. So it's just another scare study

that is grossly overgeneralized. Sounds like the good old

"global warming," right? But it did get published in the oldest and one of the most highly

respected scientific

journals in the world.



Or,

how about

"World leaders told to act on climate before it's too late!!"? That's one by the reliable

eco-prop specialist Lewis Smith in the London Times. Mr. Smith

is the environment reporter of the formerly respectable Times, and is a reliable bellwether to

see which way the imaginary winds are blowing. His headline

is illustrated by the infamous propaganda picture of a lonesome polar bear on its

fast-disappearing little crag of ice in the vast Arctic Ocean. Now polar

bears swim like sea lions for dozens of miles in search of prey. But this is the iconic "ET call

home" image of the Arctic warming crowd. It's a fraud,

but they can't let go of it.



Mr. Smith is a one-man shop for eco-horrors. Just within recent days

he had

"85% of Amazonian rainforests at risk!!!" Then there was "World heading for resources war!!"

And "Hopes of climate change accord 'are sinking.'"



Or how about

this story?

"Oil spill disaster on Australian beaches!" This is also from the Times, which is the new voice

of the Euro socialist elite.



Well, as Bill Ayers told us 'way back when, "you don't need a Weatherman to see which way the

winds are blowing." That's not metaphorical. Apparently they

meant it literally, and now we don't need any weatherfolk at all, because the winds are always

blowing the same way. This is like those mythic battles

between the gods and the demons, where both sides are always shape-changing. The eco-props have

figured out they don't really need global warming, but

I don't know whether the skeptics have figured out how to keep pace with the assembly line

production of ever-new "scientific" scare stories. It's a matter

of supply and demand, and the fear industry is constantly cranking out new models to be greedily

gobbled up by the scare-hungry masses. It's a new genre

of fiction parading as science, and until a whole new generation learns how to exercise rational

skepticism, to laugh at the frauds on their own initiative,

they are going to get suckered over and over again.



President Obama just sent $400 million to replenish the eco-scare industry. With that kind of

money coming in on a regular basis, and the new "science czar"

in the White House who is one of the true believers, the climate horror industry is not going to

decline

anytime soon.

We may be losing our banks, the dollar may crash, and you've just lost half your savings, but

here is a growth industry with fabulous prospects for the

indefinite future.





James Lewis is a scientist by trade, and carps as a hobby about the passing parade of human

fraud and folly.





Ray T. Mahorney

WA4WGA