Hackers exposing climate games
Get going, get emissions reductions done, says a new very scary publication put out by climate scientists insisting global warming could be worse than we imagined and that irreversible calamities could soon be with us, and I say this in response: Let’s hear it for some extraordinarily illuminating hackers. Not that I applaud people who break into computers and spy on what’s there, but it’s hard not to see some public service in the case of the unknown gang that is now distributing e-mails and other materials written by global warming researchers from around the world and stolen from a climate research operation in England.
Some of the stuff may sound worse than it is, but a great deal of what has been revealed seems clear and awful. Scientists who are supposed to be in the business of getting at the truth seemed far more interested in defending their dogma against contrary evidence. They did not want skeptics to get hold of data they could not explain away, and they wanted simply to shut up voices with messages different from their own.
None of this should be overly surprising. The highly regarded physicist Freeman Dyson has written that catastrophic, man-caused global warming has become an article of faith for many researchers whose environmentalism is more secular religion than science. Even though the history of science shows the scientific consensus of one moment is often the discarded, disreputable theory of the next, they want an end to debate. Dyson did not go on in a New York Review of Books piece to explore some of the ad hominem attacks on skeptics, but I will.
It’s a favorite, despicable ploy of warming alarmists to insist any skeptic is selling out humanity on behalf of special interests paying him to do so. Time and again, this trash has been shown for what it is, but you can find it all over the Internet, as if ad hominem attack is the end of any discussion. What gets ignored, of course, are the counter arguments. One of late has been that we’ve had some leveling off of temperatures over the past decade, and that this hardly fits snugly with the prognostications of the doomsayers.
Calling people evil is one way to dominate the conversation. Another is to predict the end of the world unless your policy proposals are carried out, which brings us to this latest warning from 26 scientists that ocean acidification, sea level rise and other indicators show a worst-case scenario unfolding.
These people may be on to something very real here, but my scientist friends keep telling me we just don’t know enough to make such proclamations with any assurance, and I can’t help thinking that there’s a politically important global warming summit in Denmark next month, that some of the public concern about warming has been ebbing and that it may have seemed an opportune time to underline the most frightening data you have on hand.
There is that other data about temperatures leveling off, you know, and that could pose a problem for the summit. One of the subjects discussed in the e-mails stolen from the English climate center was this relative cooling, and the great sense from some of those e-mails is that if the facts won’t carry you to the policies you want, play games with them. Is this being done right now?
Such questions are important because only the best science, the freest debate, the utmost honesty will carry us to policies that make sense, and some of the policies to supposedly save us from warming, such as cap-and-trade, carry huge costs, including recession at home and prolonged Third World impoverishment unless the United States and other industrialized countries simply transfer enormous amounts of wealth there.
Let dogma guide us, and we’ll get it wrong.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.