Tag Archives: Dissent

News

Does global warming increase the frequency of hurricanes?

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Story by Michael Fumento in Forbes magazine. (H/T ECM)

Do greenhouse gases corelate with increases in hurricane frequency?

Here’s the data we have today:

True, both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote a paper to demonstrate that hurricane frequency was independent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Pielke published a report in the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society… that analyzed U.S. hurricane damage since 1900. Taking into account tremendous population growth along coastlines, he found no increase. His paper was dutifully ignored by the powers that be.

How did the global warmists at the IPCC respond to Pielke’s paper?

But the so-called Climategate scandal, which illuminated efforts by climate change scientists to squelch opposition viewpoints, has now caught up to one scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who vociferously and influentially demanded that Pielke’s paper be shunned.

Trenberth works in the same town as Pielke and is one of the top researchers on the strongly warmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a leaked e-mail from two months ago, he admitted to colleagues what he had hidden from the outside world: that there’s been no measurable warming over the past decade.

Yet two years earlier he told Congress that evidence for man-made warming was “unequivocal” and things were “apt to get much worse.” And in 2005 he told the local newspaper that Pielke’s Bulletin article was “shameful” and should be “withdrawn.”

My recommendation is to test everything by watching debates. Unless you hear both sides in a debate, you just can’t have any degree of confidence about what is really true. Be wary of people who say that “the debate is over” or that “everyone agrees” or that “there is no case on the other side”. That’s how people lie. Find the two best people you can on either side and watch them duke it out. A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.

Commentary

Climategate e-mails recall tactics used by Darwinists to stifle dissent

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Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, writing in Human Events.

Excerpt:

There have been parallels cases where e-mail traffic was released showing Darwinian scientists displaying the same contempt for fair play and academic openness as we see now in the climate emails. One instance involved a distinguished astrophysicist at Iowa State University, Guillermo Gonzalez, who broke ranks with colleagues in his department over the issue of intelligent design in cosmology. Released under the Iowa Open Records Act, e-mails from his fellow scientists at ISU showed how his department conspired against him, denying Dr. Gonzales tenure as retribution for his views.

To me, the most poignant correspondence emerging from CRU e-mails involves discussion about punishing a particular editor at a peer-reviewed journal who was defying the orthodox establishment by publishing skeptical research.

In 2004, a peer-reviewed biology journal at the Smithsonian Institution published a technical essay of mine presenting a case for intelligent design. Colleagues of the journal’s editor, an evolutionary biologist, responded by taking away his office, his keys and his access to specimens, placing him under a hostile supervisor and spreading disinformation about him. Ultimately, he was demoted, prompting an investigation of the Smithsonian by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

Global warming alarmism and Darwinism are two sides of the same coin. The former is embraced to achieve socialism, the later is embraced to achieve secularism, which leads to moral relativism. Neither is true, so neither is interested in authentic scientific inquiry nor open-minded debates with dissenters. Non-theists don’t have a worldview that rationally justifies the moral requirements of scientific inquiry, so for them science is just something to be twisted to support hedonism.

News

Michael Crichton lecture on whether aliens cause global warming

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This lecture delivered by Michael Crichton, an atheist, at Caltech is a classic.

Consider this excerpt about “nuclear winter”, which is a myth that “scientists” like Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich invented in order to scare the public into voting for leftist foreign policies:

In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations” but the report estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to be relatively minor. In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report on “The Effects of Nuclear War” and stated that nuclear war could perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on the environment.

[…]At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now?

Ehrlich answered by saying “I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists…”

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

This is very relevant considering the latest news about Climategate. Liberals view science as a tool to get the public to enact policies that they think are enlightened, like socialism and secularism. Often, public sector scientists will advocate for policies that attack business and grow government, so that they will get bigger grants and higher salaries. But they also use “science” to try to undermine traditional morality and religion so that public policy does not prevent them from acting immorally. They want to be evil and they don’t want to be judged or punished.