If the AGW folk happen to be right, and the climate really can be affected by humans, and we someday sort out how that happens and what to do about it, there will be none who have done more damage than this cabal of scientists and political activists who have perjered themselves advocating certainty when all they have is an immature science, saturated with the imperfections of man.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522005
A "study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, allegedly confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that sea levels would rise due to climate change. The IPCC put the rise at 59 centimeters by 2100. The Nature Geoscience study put it at up to 82 centimeters.
Many considered the study and the IPCC's estimates too conservative in their warnings. After all, Al Gore, in his award-winning opus, "An Inconvenient Truth," laughingly called a documentary, foretold an apocalyptic vision of the devastation caused by a 20-foot rise in sea levels due to melting polar ice caps "in the near future."
Now Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at England's University of Bristol, has formally retracted the study. "One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years," he said."
"The IPCC claimed glaciers in the Himalayas would likely disappear by 2035. The only thing they had to back it up was a 1999 non-peer reviewed article in an Indian mass-market science magazine."
"It's been revealed that researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been systematically eliminating weather stations, with a clear bias toward removing colder latitude and altitude locations. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35, with only one station used by the NOAA as a temperature gauge for Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle."
I actually watched "An Inconvenient Truth." Al did not predict a 20 foot rise. He said if [a certain, I forget which] Antarctic ice shelf were to drop into the ocean, we'd get a 20 foot rise.
ReplyDeleteHe made no statement of the likelihood of such. I think he did say something about nonlinearity and unpredictability.
As a sidenote: compare the global warming panic mongers' predictive record to that of the Hayek quoting gold bugs over the past few decades. I'm still waiting for that hyperinflation. (Actually, I do expect some Carter-era levels of inflation within the next few years.)
For the record I favor harder currency and a carbon tax.
Carl, thanks. Would you propose a basis of taxing carbon? IOW - absent the fact that we apparently can be taxed for any political whim in this country now - what's the basis for depriving someone of their life energy through a carbon tax?
ReplyDeleteI think the cartoon image of the 20 foot wall of water flooding Manhattan is what most folks remember, vice the nuanced qualifications Mr. Gore presented. Either way, the forecasts are a freak show of science. "If this if that if the other, then, the sky is falling." It's good fear mongering, though.