A Bad Couple Of Months For "Settled Science"

The theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has gone, in a short period of a few months, from "settled" to "suspect." The reputation of the IPCC, dedicated as it is to propagandizing the AGW theory, has likewise seriously suffered. No need to take my word for it - you can take Hitler's:



The WSJ weighs in on the state of AGW and the reputation of the IPCC in the wake of what seems to be a tsunami (man caused) of negative revelations in the past few weeks. This from the WSJ:

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously. . . .

All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby's regulatory agenda.

The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC's shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny.

That scrutiny will occur only over much kicking and screaming. There is still an amazing amount of hubris among the AGW crowd.