The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by physicist Rodney W. Nichols and geologist and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt that makes perfect sense. Here’s its start: polls show that climate change is low on the list of voters’ priorities. For good reason: In the U.S., and for much of the world, the most dangerous environmental pollutants have been cleaned up. U.S. emissions of particulates, metals and varied gases—all of these: ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen … [Read more...]
How do Climate Alarmists Appear Moderate?
Climate alarmists have long faced one uphill battle in public discourse: the very fact that they're thought of as alarmists, embracing positions that, tested by empirical science, seem at the outer---and scary---edges of possibility. What can make them seem moderate instead? Nothing better than for one of the world's most prominent science journals, Nature, to publish an article that is many times more extreme. That's what just happened September 26 when Nature published Carolyn … [Read more...]
Rescuing Science from Itself: How to Restore Rationality to an Increasingly Irrational Endeavor
“You can give respectability to mythology if you couch your myth in sufficiently academic language.” —Dr. R.C. Sproul Who in twenty-first century America would say that “science … our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble” because “much of [the] supposed knowledge” it brings us “is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong”? Obviously an anti-intellectual, benighted holdover from the Dark Ages. Right? Wrong. It’s Dr. Daniel Sarewitz, … [Read more...]
Why Not to Trust Wikipedia—and Search Engines—on Climate Change
The indefatigable James Delingpole, drawing on a lengthy and thoroughly documented blog post by Kenneth Richard, writing at No Tricks Zone, has a great little article exposing the intentional bias not only of Wikipedia but also of Google and other search engines when it comes to anthropogenic climate change. The gist: Wikipedia sends the global cooling scare of the 1960s and 1970s, which was a dominant scientific position, down the Orwellian memory hole in an attempt to prevent its use as an … [Read more...]
Will France Follow Britain on Climate and European Union?
French Presidential hopeful "Nicolas Sarkozy reckons that climate change is not caused by man and that the world has far bigger problems on its hands than global warming," as reported by The Local FR. Sarkozy was the President of France from 2007 to 2012, when he was defeated by Socialist François Hollande. He now hopes to regain the Presidency, and rejection of climate alarmism has become one of his talking points. Climate has been changing for four billion years. Sahara has become a … [Read more...]
Whom to Trust? NASA GISS, NASA, or Cornwall Alliance?
After citing a couple of Cornwall Alliance's articles in discussion, an educator friend got this response from one of his former students: The problem with referencing the Cornwall Alliance to discredit statistics from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies is that one (the Cornwall Alliance) is a political advocacy organization with no scientific relevance while the other (NASA) has the weight of objective fact and science behind it. To me there is virtually no legitimate way one can … [Read more...]
Murder of the Scientific Method and Free Speech
As The Washington Times recently reported, a University of Colorado (at Colorado Springs) professor recently told his class that no debate would be allowed on climate change. The course is entitled, Medical Humanities in the Digital Age (whatever the heck that means and whatever the heck that has to do with climate change). The professor went on to quote a completely bogus statistic that is an ongoing favorite of climate alarmists saying, “Opening up a debate that 98% of climate … [Read more...]
Louisiana’s Flooding: Brought to You by Climate Change?
Did climate change cause Louisiana’s flooding? The New York Times, Al Gore, Vox, Congressman Raul Girjálva, Chris Mooney (citing evangelical climate-alarmist darling Katharine Hayhoe) in the Washington Post, and lots of others in the mainstream media think so. But more sober voices disagree. Adam Sobel of the Earth Island Institute at Columbia University, no “climate-change skeptic,” writing at Phys.org, says, no study can tell us that climate change caused an event like this to happen, … [Read more...]
Who Are the Real Science Deniers?
So you think of science (or maybe I should say “science”?) as a solid, objective, trustworthy activity? Certainly a whole lot more credible than, say, philosophy, or theology, or fortune telling? Before I go on, let me assure you that I value science (without the scare quotes) a great deal. (Philosophy and theology, too—but not fortune telling!) But today a lot of what goes by the name of science deserves the scare quotes. And that should scare us, for a lot of reasons, because it means we’re … [Read more...]
Climate Models: Uncertain? Inaccurate? What’s the Difference? Why Does it Matter?
For years I have been pointing out that the super-sophisticated computer climate models on which the IPCC, national environment agencies, national academies of science, and of course the many climate-alarmist advocacy groups and journalists depend for their predictions of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) predict, on average, 2 to 3 times the warming actually observed over the relevant periods; that they failed to predict the complete lack of statistically significant … [Read more...]
