The Goracle Returneth

A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

George Will, Global Warming Advocates Ignore The Boulders, 21 Feb. 2010

Gore has emerged from his Climategate hibernaton – and he is in full hysterics mode as he attempts to protect his gravy train in a lengthy NYT op-ed. He opens his tome of yesterday by warning that we face “unimaginable calamity” if we don't institute the “large-scale preventive measures.” Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory posits that as man introduces more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then temperatures around the globe will warm. Gore:

- ignores that there is no historic link in geological history between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and temperatures. Sometimes there have been high temperatures and high CO2, such as during the Cretaceous, but at other times the link does not appear. For example, a recent study shows that 81,000 years ago, sea levels were 1 meter higher than today, but that carbon levels were significantly lower.

- ignores that the world warms and cools naturally – and that even the IPCC in its pre-hockey stick days admitted that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was both a reality and warmer than today, even though there was no human contribution to carbon dioxide then. High priest of the AGW Church Phil Jones admitted the other day that global proof of the MWP would undercut the AGW theory.

- ignores that the very computer models he relies on to forecast “unimaginable calamity” are fatally flawed. Gore is relying on them to forecast doom a century from now, yet not a one of these computer models predicted the apporximately 15 yr. period through today in which temperatures have plateaued even as ever more carbon has been pumped into the atmosphere. The link between carbon dioxide and warming temperatures is not established.

And if carbon isin't the culprit, those “large-scale preventive measures” he wants in place, most of which would involve a sizable transfer of the world's wealth to Gore and his cronies in the name of minimizing carbon dioxide output, would be worse than useless.

I say “worse than” because it would take away our ability to respond to real climate crisis. For example, in the name of AGW, we have moved to highly subsidized “bio-fuels,” a move that has seen a significant increase in agricultural land being used for fuel rather than food. That move alone has driven a significant portion of the worlds poor from above to below the poverty line and contributed significantly to world hunger. It harms, not helps, the environment, and actually leads to more carbon dioxide production than it saves. Moreover, if those who predict that the sun is the prime driver of temperatures – hardly an unreasonable thesis – are correct, than we may actually be in for a period of global cooling which could very seriously impact agricutural production.

The one very valid point that Gore makes in his tome is that “we . . . still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil.” I couldn't agree more. Which is why we need to be exploiting our own natural resources to their fullest potential. Drill baby drill - and mine baby mine. We have the resources to substantially, if not in the near term completely, reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But we are doing next to no new drilling, we are not even able to explore in many locales, and Obama is waging a war on coal. Instead, Gore and the left would have us bet our nation's economic future on “alternative energy” that is neither cost effective nor proven to scale. In the UK, where a similar scenario is already playing out, energy prices have doubled in five years and portend to grow exponentially over the next decade. While this doesn't sound like too good a deal for the unwashed masses, it would make Gore and his ilk fabulously wealthy.

According to Gore, the sum total of the case against AGW amounts to nothing of any import:

[T]he reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

This charlatan is shameless. He would have us pity the poor climate scientists who hide their data and refuse to make their methodology and code public to allow testing of their experiments. To paraphrase Gore - “why can't you just take it all on faith.” And it is no wonder that AGW theorists have been able to operate so long with so few errors made public. The worst thing that the IPCC and climate scientists have done is to corrupt the “scientific method” and to substitute a bastardized peer review process in its place as a facade of reliability. As the Institute of Physicists wrote the other day:

The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

In other words, Gore is asking us to trust the work of “thousands” even though the wide spread practice among them is to publish results but not the materials that would allow reproduction and verification of their published results. To put this into perspective better, read Steve McIntyre's submission to the British Parliament on the corruption of the scientific process by the IPCC scientists. As he opines:

CRU has manipulated and/or withheld data with an effect on the research record. The manipulation includes (but is not limited to) arbitrary adjustment (“bodging”), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data. The problem is deeply rooted in the sense that some forms of data manipulation and withholding are so embedded that the practitioners and peer reviewers in the specialty seem either to no longer notice or are unoffended by the practices. Specialists have fiercely resisted efforts by outside statisticians questioning these practices – the resistance being evident in the Climategate letters. These letters are rich in detail of individual incidents.

As to the errors found, there are more than two, and they are being found at rapid pace. For example:

- Gore ignores that the “hockey stick” graph – of parmount importance to the AGW theory - continues to be an issue that has regular revelations – the most recent of which is Ken Briffa's cherry picking of the Yamal tree ring data – indeed, so outrageous as to amount to scientific fraud – all in an effort to shore up the hockey stick. It took years to get Briffa to put up his data – just as it took seven years and an act of Congress to get Michael Mann to post even the basic data for the original hockey stick graph, MBH98.

- Just recently, it was found that the IPCC, again relying on non-peer reviewed data, understated by half the annual increase of Antarctic ice.

- Just recently, it was found that the IPCC's claim that global warming will reduce African crop yields by 50% by 2020 was wholly unsubstantiated.

- Gore ignores the fact that, as the CRU e-mails clearly demonstrate, many of the central theories of “AGW” remain unchallenged because a cabal of AGW scientists made damn sure that the work was not published. Possibly the most infamous story of this type concerns physicist Henrik Svensmark who has theorized that our climate is driven by cloud production seeded by solar rays. It is a theory still being tested, but that seems borne out in large measure by the historical record. Not merely was he ostricized for articulating this theory, but he was publicly criticized by the IPCC chairman as “naive” for positing his theory.

Here is one of my favorites from the Goracle's tripe in the NYT: “even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.”

Would those climate deniers include Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth, two scientists at the very top of the AGW cabal? Both have concluded its not warming and, as Jones points out, hasn't been for "15 years."

The problem with the surface data temperature is that it, like seemingly everything else in AGW, is subject to massive manipulation and adjustments. It is fundamentaly untrustworthy. Measurements themselves are not standardized. Rural and colder measuring stations have been culled by the thousands, leaving 80% of the data stations in the U.S. in locals that are below standard. Raw data from these stations show adjustments that cannot possibly be justified, but which invariably act to more warming in recent decades even while ignoring the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. We know this not because the changes are transparent and the code is provided for public inspection, but by individuals pulling reverse engineering that CRU and others have done in back rooms. It is a massive fraud.

The rest of the Goracle Manifesto is mostly pure drivel. He attacks capitalism, free markets and Faux News. Then he comes to this:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

"Redemption" is the language of sin and theology. In biblical terms, redemption is an individual choice, and to be redeemed, a person must want it. As the Goracle uses the word, he uses the language of the inquisition, where “sinners” were forcibly redeemed by the police powers of the state using the auto-de-fe. Is there any person of rationale mind who thinks that using the police powers of the state for “human redemption” is a good idea?

My suggestion, let's feed Gore to the polar bears and be done with it.