Item: I spent last weekend with friends. He is a retired police officer and she has just retired as an environmental scientist for a Midwestern city. She told me that she was glad to have retired because there has suddenly been a mass of regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, none of which will do much for the environment, compliance with which will be very expensive and most of which have a mechanism allowing one to pay a fee and get an exemption.
Comment: It is that last “pay to not play” feature which should raise an eyebrow or two in the media, but doesn’t.
Item: The EPA has been wasting a lot of energy this year trying to get CO2 regulated as a pollutant. The operations of some municipalities and companies apparently cause an excess of it. Now CO2 is the equivalent of oxygen to all plants, so it is hardly a pollutant as we currently think of them. Animals breathe oxygen and breath out CO2 while plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, a classic symbiotic relationship.
Comment: Assuming that the CO2 levels are high enough to worry about, shouldn’t the EPA just mandate the planting of trees to convert the CO2 to oxygen? Of course not. You’re thinking too rationally. The EPA wants all sorts of fees, fines and fiats which will clean nothing up but create a lot of jobs for lawyers.
Item: Meanwhile, in order to argue that climate warming is anthropogenic (i.e., caused by humans instead of occurring naturally), global warming alarmists have to confront paleoclimatology, the study of prior weather patterns. There is abundant evidence that the climate was a lot warmer than it is now. Deep under thick sheets of ice in central Greenland are a number of Norse farming villages. It’s a pretty good bet that humans weren’t responsible for THAT global warming. There weren’t that many of us and we certainly hadn’t invented the internal combustion engine then.
The response of the scientists has been less than honorable. First came the infamous “hockey stick graph” made famous by “An Inconvenient Truth,” the discredited “documentary” produced by Al Gore. In one paper, the global warming enthusiasts relied on the tree ring data of a single tree in Siberia, ignoring contrary data from all the other trees in the surrounding forest, a literal failure to see the forest for the tree. More important, there was a leak of 1000 emails and 3000 other documents – a total of 160 MB of data in computerspeak - from the Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU”) at the University of East Anglia, which The Daily Mail tells us plays “a leading role in compiling UN reports” and has many of the most prominent paleoclimatologists in the world. The University of East Anglia, as well as some of the authors, have acknowledged the accuracy of the leaks.
These documents show a disturbing willingness of leading scientists to destroy the lives of anyone who dissented from their ideology (their methods are too political to give them the dignity of calling their work “science”). They would threaten to withhold data from journals which published dissenting views, they would ruin the reputation of any scientist who published papers which didn’t tow their party line. Even The New York Times, always sycophantic towards leftist thinking, quoted Patrick J. Michaels, a prominent climatologist who was a victim of the CRU hit squad as saying “this shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways.”
Comment: Perhaps worse than the crime itself was the reaction. Even though global warming researchers, including many implicated in the fraud perpetrated by the CRU have received billions of dollars of government research money, no government entity has even bothered to investigate. Those academic entities who bothered to look into the issue seemed more intent to whitewash the issue than to deal with it seriously. And, of course, The New York Times spent most of the small space it devoted to the story tut-tutting that gentlemen don’t read other peoples’ mail. Berthold Brecht’s great play “Galileo” portrays an establishment so protective of the status quo that it is willing to block all dissenting opinions. That provides a perfect analogy to the state of the intellect in modern establishment America.
Item: Of course, there was something always a bit suspicious about a movement which pushes the Kyoto Treaty which imposed economically crippling restrictions on developed countries while exempting the world’s worst polluters in their entirety; a movement which tells us that the sky is falling even as it books annual conferences, on the taxpayers bill, to carbon footprint intensive destinations like Bali and Rio de Janeiro. It is common to find even moderate and normally sensible commentators who argue that since the scientists believe one thing, we are forbidden to disagree and must also ignore scientists with equal credentials who disagree. This is a movement that doesn’t search for the truth, but claims to have found it as a Revealed Truth and damns anyone who asks to look behind the curtain.
Comment: This is not, of course, a conspiracy. We are, rather, in one of those intellectual air pockets the world finds itself every once in a while in which discovery and innovation are a threat to the established order and any failure of policy results from our not believing hard enough – we all must clap loud enough to bring Tinkerbell back to life. There are four toxic intellectual flaws which have created the mess we’re in, not just environmentally, but in all forms of intellectual endeavor:
Stupidity – as Abe Lincoln said “it’s better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re dumb than to open it and prove it to them.” Although most believers of global warming have no knowledge of its source, they know that if they blame America, no one will fault them, whereas alternates will put you on the hot seat. There is, therefore, an incentive to tow the party line. Original thinking always involves some flaws in the argument, rightfully exposing one to criticism. Hiding in the pack with other believers of a flawed theory lets you escape responsibility for your own beliefs.
Arrogance – if you believe what everyone else believes, you can hide behind others even while you take credit for their ideas. This breeds arrogance and arrogance shuts down the innovative part of the intellect: you already know the truth, so there is nothing more to learn. Al Gore believes that he is so important to the environmental fate of the world that he is entitled to fly around the world on private jets despite the much higher carbon footprint than commercial air travel. This creates a lack of empathy for others that is startling. I met a former Secret Service Agent who was assigned to protect Mr. Gore when he was Vice President. One day, Mr. Gore was criticizing his son’s poor grades in front of the Agent and, pointing to the Agent, said “if you don’t get your grades up, you’ll end up just like this guy!”
Self-interest – not coincidently, Al Gore is the first environmental billionaire and those scientists who silence dissent do so because they count on billions of dollars in grants from governments, charities and people with more dollars than sense. There is a conflict which cripples rational thinking.
Self-hatred – you can never overlook the power of self-hatred, which usually takes the form of hatred for your culture and your heritage. The other day, I met a nice, conservative lady in church who told me very matter-of-factly that “before the white man came to America” (she was white herself, of English descent), rattlesnakes didn’t bite, that they would drop by Native American village and sort of hang out and the Native Americans would talk to them. Look around you and you’ll find this self-hatred to take many forms and to be found among all classes and races in the world (there were even a few Jews in the Nazi Party, which has to be the ultimate example of self-hatred). It is certainly evident in the environmental movement.
Comment: does this mean that global warming is a fraud? No, it does not. Although the data has an annoying habit of moving around a lot – it is constantly rising! no, says the same institution later, it has stayed at current levels since the late 90s; it has risen to a certain level, says someone, whoops! they say later, the data was off by 40% - and even though I am not a scientist, I am willing to attest that the weather SEEMS to be behaving differently than when I was a child. However, what is clear is that the toxic intellectual flaws I mention above have rendered much of the raw data and all of the hype dubious. The answer is not to write off the concept, but to find some honorable scientists to study the issue, real scientists, not just with degrees behind their name, but with the integrity to lead them where their research takes them.
Item: And it looks like this has already been done. The Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long argued that changes in the sun, such as sunspots, have caused the bulk of climate change in the world. In a project only recently finished, working under the auspices of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Dr. Svensmark and 63 scientists from 17 European and American institutes built a chamber which modeled the effect of the sun on the earth’s atmosphere and proved that cosmic rays control the atmosphere and that the suns magnetic fields control the amount of cosmic rays hitting the earth. This is a major turning point in the science of global warming, although we can expect powerful forces suffering from the four toxic intellectual flaws to be arrayed against it.
Sadly, you might include cowardice as a fifth intellectual flaw, a flaw which the Director General of CERN shares. It was the Director General who ordered Dr. Svensmark not to interpret the results or speak publicly about the project, not because there is anything wrong with the results, but because the results “would go immediately into the highly political arena of climate change debate.” As if that is a reason to suppress an important scientific breakthrough: we might further the progress of a debate and - apocalypse now! – actually change the premises on which our faulty knowledge is based!
When moral courage is lacking, the truth takes a longer time to break through.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
