Newsweek's Intellectual Bias

Intellectual Bigotry is something that sticks in my craw. I have always hated bigotry of any kind, and get upset when my good name is impugned by someone using bigotry to do so.

In the recent Newsweek Article "Global Warming is a Hoax: Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change," the staff author Sharon Begley displayed a horrible intellectual bigotry in the August 13, 2007 issue of Newsweek.

In his blog, Okie, of Okie on the Lam, described the article as "an Orwellian tipping point in the Man-Caused Climate Change debate" in which he described, "lies becoming truth while the search for truth gets abandoned in the ensuing maelstrom."

Well said Okie.

The Newsweek article in my opinion resembled less an Orwellian Nightmare than an exercise in repression similar to that used in the Spanish Inquisition.

The most telling was the comparison to the tobacco industry. It is almost as bad as the comparison that was made about me to the racist jim crows during that one religion class.

“They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,” says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.”

The Tobacco Industry, really? Is there any more tired comparisons they would like to trot out?

How about some link to the Nazi's? After all, some of the Warming Forum/Blog Trolls can't go more than a few words about those who disagree with them without making numerous references to Nazi's and the Waffen SS.

Well, the link was made, in a round-about way, but it was still made.

In what may be a key tactic of the denial machine - think tanks linking up the like-minded, contrarion researchers - the report was endorsed in a letter to President George H.W. Bush by MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. Lindzen, whose parents had fled Hitler's Germany, is described by old friends as the kind of man who, if you're the minority, opts to be with you. "I thought it was important to make it clear that the science was at an early and primitive stage and that there was little basis for concensus and much reason for scepticism," he told Scientific American magazine. "I did feel a moral obligation."

The emphasis was added by myself in the writing of this blog. Otherwise, it is word for word the story that was published in the magazine.

Then, there is this little gem of an argument that made me throw the magazine across the room in exasperation.

Groups that opposed greenhouse curbs ramped up. They "Settled on the 'Science isn't there' argument because they didn't believe they'd be able to convince th public to do nothing if climate change were real," says David Goldston, who served as Republican chief of staff for the House of Representatives science committee until 2006. Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a reporter, is "anything severe." Michaels had written several popular articles on Climate Change, including an op-ed in the Washington Post in 1989 warning of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which he called "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesotta on coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than &165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry funding, asking, "What is this, a hatchet job?")

Wow, the amount of emphasis in that is eyecatching. The most telling is this Inquisitor's use of the funding argument. I would like to quote from Michael Chrichton's State of Fear here for a moment.

In this exchange, Peter Evans, a lawyer for Hasle & Black, is arguing with a group of Scientists over the data found in the Antarctic Post that I placed on here earlier today.

Evans picked up the sheet of paper again, and folded it carefully. He slipped it into his pocket. "These studies are probably financed by the coal industry."
Probably," Kenner said. "I'm sure that explains it. But them everybody's paid by somebody. Who pays your salary?"
"My Law firm."
"And who pays them?"
"The clients. We have several hundred clients."
"You do work for all of them?"
"Me, personally? No."
"In fact, you do most of your work for environment clients," Kenner said. "Isn't that true?"
"Mostly. Yes."
"Would it be fair to say that the environmental clients pay your salary?" Kenner said.
"You could make that argument."
"I'm just asking, Peter. Would it be fair to say environmentalists pay your salary?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Then would it be fair to say the opinions you hold are because you work for environmentalists?"
"Of course not-"
"You mean you're not a paid flunky for the environmental movement?"
"No. The fact is -"
"Your not an environmental stooge? A mouthpiece for a great fund raising and media machine - a multi-billion-dollar industry in its own right - with its own private agenda that's not necessarily in the Public Interest"
"God damn it -"
"Is this pissing you off?" Kenner said
"Your damn right it is!"
"Good," now you know how legitimate scientists feel when their integrity is impugned by slimy characterizations such as the one you just made. Sanjong and I gave you a careful, peer-reviewed interpretation of the data. Made by several groups of scientists from several different countries, and your first response was to ignore it, and then to make an ad hominem attack. You didn't answer the data. You didn't provide counter evidence. You just smeared with innuendo."

Though it is long, it is a very effective look at the mindset of the Goraclist Inquisitor who wrote the Newsweek article.

It continues:

Just before Kyoto, S. Fred Singer released the "Leipzig Declartion on Global Climate Change." Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria as a boy, had run the U.S. weather-satellite program in the early 1960s. In the Leipzig petition, just over 100 scientists and others, including TV weathermen, said they “cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes.” Unfortunately, few of the Leipzig signers actually did climate research; they just kibitzed about other people’s.

Wow, so because some of the people where "TV Weathermen," a diminutive term for a Meteorologist, they do not count. So Weather Scientists do not count huh? Wow, that is the most elitist comment I have ever heard.

There will be more on this little piece of filth later. For now, I need to take a break. All this bigotry hurts my brain.

Antarctica

The Antarctic Peninsula has been the subject in Al Gore's Travesty of a movie, though the conclusions made by the film are wrong.

First: In the movie, Al Gore talks about how the breakup happened in March. All the while, he was fooling the people by "failing" to mention the fact that March is the end of the Southern Hemisphere Summer, and that the Peninsula breaks up every year.

Second: The Peninsula is only 2 percent of the entire continent.

Third: The continent is getting colder, starting in 86, at .7 degrees Celsius per decade. This leads to a total of 1.4 degrees Celsius. That is twice the warming of the earth that the Goraclists are claiming. (Documented in "Antarctic climate cooling and terrestrial ecosystem response" in Nature Magazine by Doran, P. T., Priscu, J. C., Lyons, W. B., et al. in 2002.)

Fourth: Side-Looking radar has shown that after 6,000 years of melting, the Ice is increasing at 26.8 gigatons/yr. in the West Antarctic. (Documented in "Positive mass balance of the Ross Ice Streams, West Antarctica" in Science Magazine, Joughin, I., and Tulaczyk, S., in 2002)

Fifth: Ninety Percent of the water in the world is locked in Antarctica. Therefore, when a person talks about how the Arctic is melting, point out that with four percent of the Ice locked up in Grennland, only six percent of the ice is divided around the glaciers and the North Pole. That is not a lot of Ice.

So, based on this, there is no threat from the Arctic Circle melting. After all, the Antarctic is growing at four times the rate that the Arctic is melting. Something to remember.

A Near Fatal Moment

Well, my friends, today could have been a really bad day. Senator Inhofe, the Republlican from Oklahoma ho I have to call the Senate's Head Heretic, was on C-130 Hercules Military Cargo Plane going from Baghdad to Amman when three RPG's were fired at their plane.

For those of you who do not know about Inhofe, he is the man responsible for tying Al Gore into philosophical knots during the recent Climate Change Panel before the Senate.

May the lord protect our good friend Inhofe, as he continues to try and expose the Goraclists at every turn.

A Consensus Eroding (Part 2)

I remember sitting through the cannon of the Church of Global Warming in my Religion classes in high school, and coming across a point that I had already heard many times. They blamed Kilamanjaro’s melting Ice Cap on Global Warming. However, as I sat, looking at the pictures that they showed, I noticed something odd. At the base of the mountain, the first photo showed jungle surrounding it. Lush, tropical, wet, Jungle. Then, when they showed the second, more recent image, much of that Jungle had disappeared, replaced with stumps, buildings, and savannah. I though o myself, hmmm, that is odd, could it be that the dryer air is sapping the Ice?

When they showed the melting Ice, I realized that not only was it possible, but it was likely. When glaciers melt, they get smaller in all directions. However, the Ice images show tall pillars of Ice left behind in the center of the glaciers. The problem with this being that the height shrinks along with the circumference when Ice melts due to temperature. However, when the decrease is caused by dry air, it takes from the sides before it takes from the top, and that is what the images show you.

Recently, Climatologist John Daly was quoted as saying,

“The only problem with that knee-jerk explanation is that there has been no measurable atmospheric warming in the region of Kilimanjaro. Satellites have been measuring temperature since 1979 in the free troposphere between 1,000 and 8,000 meters altitude, and they show no tropospheric warming in that area. None.”

In fact, Betsy Martin of the journal Nature, was quoted as saying that

“Without the forests’ humidity,” Mason reports, “previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.”

Extrapolating on that, John Daly was quoted as saying

“Kilimanjaro is above most of the weather and is thus exposed to the equatorial sun, a sun that has been hotter during the twentieth century than at any time since the medieval period. That would be a sufficient explanation in itself for the depletion of the ice cap.”

So, that is one more blow to the “Concensus” of Global Warming. More to come tomorrow.

Keeping the Heresy

A Concensus Eroding

In the cannon of the Church of Global Warming, Al Gore made some very bold claims. One of them was a claim that no honorable scientist disagrees with Global Warming. Well, to quote Glen Beck on this subject, "Warning: You are about to meet people who are not really real!"

In Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, he quoted history professor Naomi Oreskes, who had done a survey of scientific papers from 1993 - 2004, and had found no disagreement with Anthropomorphic Global Warming.

Well, that has changed. According to the DailyTech, medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte has done an examination of papers ranging from 2004-February of 2007, and submitted the results to the journal Energy and Environment, with results that frankly, do not surprise me.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

48% neither accept nor reject the consensus. That is startling, and shoves the claim right down the Prior's throat. However, it gets even better.

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

Only ONE claimed that there would be any kind of catastrophic climate change. Guess that guy is probably an Arch Prior in the Church of Global Warming.