RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the climate alarmists weren’t still so politically powerful and represented in Congress by their devoted cult members, it would almost be easy to pity them. Why? Because they’re so spectacularly wrong about so many things.

They keep the hype coming regardless, as in this article that cites the fact that it’s hot in the desert in the summertime to say that air travel may be doomed.

But science, or something.

The cult’s leader — Al Gore — said in 2009 that there was a 75 percent chance that the entire arctic polar ice cap would melt by 2014.

It’s still there.

The year before the North Pole was supposed to be gone, noted climate scientist Hans von Storch went against cult orthodoxy in an interview with Spiegel Online in 2013 and had some interesting things to say about the climate prediction models so revered by the alarmists.

After noting that “climate change seems to be taking a break,” von Storch had this to say about the models:

“If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”

He followed that up with this after being asked what might be wrong with the models:

There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.

After so many swings and misses while attempting to predict doomsday as being just around the corner, the alarmists have decided to provide themselves a little cover:

Climate alarmist James Hansen’s prediction of Manhattan being underwater by 2018 seems to not be happening, so he’s moving his own goal posts and saying “50 to 150 years” now.

That’s the beauty of being one of the “we believe in science” people: there’s never any penalty for being wrong. Every prediction that doesn’t come true isn’t a cause for reflection about perhaps adjusting the conclusion; it’s merely an opportunity to pull a new prediction out of thin air.

Perhaps they are finally getting embarrassed, though. Tossing all of the predictions a century down the road at least saves them from having to be around when those are proved wrong.

Unless, of course, the real scientists who are working on aging and extending life have some big success soon.

This is a commentary piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

The hysterical reaction of the left to Scott Pruitt’s plan to create two competing teams of scientists to study from opposite positions the left’s pet myth, man-made global warming, shows just how anti-science the left has become. The left is a single, stupid collective mind that is utterly incapable of truly independent and free thought. The left is very much like the Inner Party in Orwell’s classic, 1984, where party members believe things that are obviously not true and in which dissent is – quite literally – unthinkable.

All totalitarianism purports to rest upon “science,” and all totalitarian science slavishly follows what the state and the party of statism desire. Institutions are inevitably infiltrated by leftists and used to rubber-stamp whatever the state wants. Ben Stein in his documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed showed how any academicians who question Darwin’s increasingly silly theory of evolution by natural selection are hounded, denied tenure, and even fired for questioning authority and deviating from orthodoxy.

The drones turned out by academia who willingly put on blinders and indifferently accept as scientific dogma whatever the left wishes are not scientists, whatever credentials institutions may give them. They are simply cadres or hacks who reject scientific inquiry and embrace political correctness by blessing it as “science.”

Global warming is a perfect example of how this works. Leftists parrot the line of “settled science,” oblivious to the fact that “settled science” is murdered science. Science is a process, not a result, and science demands that conventional opinion be rigorously questioned. The true scientists are those who do just that, but institutions vomit these true scientists out and recoil in horror that anyone dare question the party line.

The history of science has often been the history of a Newton or Maxwell or Kelvin or Einstein or Heisenberg proposing new explanations for phenomena that turned “settled science” on its head. The consensus opinion of scientists has been wrong so often that it is a wonder that anyone who professes to be a “scientist” would ever present this sort of “majority rules” science as anything but comedy.

It is a sad commentary on life today that the will of the majority permeates almost everything we do as social creatures, including, now, the pseudo-science of institutionalized “science.” As sad as that is – because it means the death of real science – it is frightening that so many political leaders have so suspended any critical thinking or independent reflection that they follow the herd mentality even in this area.