Scientists

I’ve been saying for years that I thought global warming was a load of BS. I would get a little passionate about it, to the point that whenever the words “global warming” came out of my mouth my family ran from room, arms flailing and screaming “No Mas! No Mas!”

Looks like I was right all along.

Just a few months ago, even the President of the United States was saying the “science is settled” and we should quit debating it and get on with fixing it. However, for years there have been these tiny little voices from out in the wilderness, relegated there for not toeing the global warming line, arguing that even if the data is accurate its interpretation to conclude that global warming is man caused and will result in horrific disaster for the planet is far from settled. Now we know that not only were the interpretations highly suspect, the key data itself is not accurate, or missing, or misrepresented, or never existed in the first place, or is the result of such awful science that the folks who promulgated it ought to have their degrees revoked.

For example, key historical warming data are drawn directly from temperatures recorded over the years at weather stations scattered around the globe. The average among those stations has gone up. Wow. What more proof do you need that the place is getting hotter? Come to find out, a large number of the old weather stations, mostly located in high cooler elevations or remote areas, were dismantled, abandoned or destroyed over the last several decades. In the 70’s there were about 6,000 such stations worldwide, now there are 1,500 or so. Canada used to have 600 or so, now they have about 35. The weather stations remaining are mostly in populated areas or near heat sources like factories and the end of jet washed runways. Any high school math student getting a C grade will be able to tell you that if you remove the cooler measurements from the average, the average temperature will go up. Duh!

There is also the whole problem about what temperatures do you average to get an average. Do you take the high temp of the day or the low one, or the median, or just what exactly? I don’t know where you live, but I’ll bet its quite a bit warmer at 3 pm than it is at 5 am, whether in the Florida Keys or the Fargo, ND. All it takes is a little fudge to the afternoon this decade versus some other method last decade and, “My, is it hot in here?”

It is almost amusing watching all the “warmists” scrambling to explain how even though there are suddenly all these problems with so much of the data, or lack of it, upon which the global warming theories hinged, that doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t true. Those who have read my piece on Dan Rather and the forged Bush National Guard documents will appreciate the irony when I remind them that the New York Times, in acknowledging the Bush documents were forged, nevertheless ran a headline about the documents that said, in essence, “Fake But Accurate.” That’s exactly the message so many of the rabid warmists now find themselves giving out.

I also love the irony surrounding the whole weather thing.

Do you recall back when Hurricane Katrina hit that all the global warming supporters were saying that the hurricane and all the other recent bad storms were the result of global warming? It was further proof, they said, that we needed to do something right now or we would find our civilization devastated by increasingly severe storms. A bunch of folks with more sense suggested that this was too much a stretch to come to that conclusion. They were shouted down or ignored, the usual response by warmists for anyone who disagrees with them. So naturally, now that the country is buried in snow, I had 16 inches at my house last week, people are asking how there could be global warming with so much snow all around. Snow is cold, it is not warm, so what’s up? I literally laughed aloud when I read two different answers to the question.

The first made the reasonable argument that global warming is a worldwide phenomenon and we can’t judge it by the amount of snow in Ohio or Alabama. We must distinguish between “weather” and “climate.” Weather is a current event, while climate is a long-term one. It is possible to have snowy weather even as the global climate warms. The amusing thing is that this is not what the warmists were saying when Katrina hit. Then global warming was driving Hurricane Katrina, remember?

The second is from Kevin Trenberth, head of Climate Analysis for National Center for Atmospheric Research (by the way that would be a US government agency). He said recently that the heavy snowfall is caused by global warming.

Okay, so which is it?

Global Warming is just the latest science fraud foisted on us by advocates with science degrees. Remember Alar? It’s a chemical that they spray on apples to keep them on the tree longer so they ripen but don’t rot before they fall. It sort of prevents premature apple jackulation (sorry, couldn’t resist).

A bunch of environmental group scientists put out that Alar was a carcinogen. All their studies proved it. The EPA piled on with its own studies that concluded the same thing. Then they all tested apple sauce and baby food, and found traces of Alar in both. The hunt was afoot. 60 Minutes did one of the typical hatchet attack jobs. Meryl Streep did TV commercials wailing the question “What are we doing to our children?” Soon, Alar was banned from sea to shining sea. It hit Washington State’s apple growers hardest. The market virtually collapsed and bankrupted apple growers left and right.

Later, it turns out that the level of Alar used to cause cancerous tumors in lab rats would require a child to eat a boxcar of apples a day to get the same dosage. Even Consumers Union, which had been pushing the Alar scare, later admitted that their own studies concluded that Alar would only cause 5 cancers in a million, and that kids were at less health risk eating an apple than a candy bar.

In the Pacific Northwest back in the 90’s, there was much ado about that poor little creature the spotted owl. Turns out the little bugger could only live in old fir forests, being evolutionarily incapable of adapting to young or middle aged forests. A whole bunch of scientists said so, government scientists to boot. Of course, everyone knew that the issue wasn’t really about the owl; it was about a bunch of folks who got all goo-goo eyed every time they thought about a tree older than any human alive being cut down. The owl was the excuse to stop all that evil logging of those old trees. The Ents might go to war, justifiably and finally, you know? However, not to worry, according to the scientists the poor little owl really was in serious danger of going extinct because we were cutting the trees down.

The fir forests of the Northwest have a curious life cycle. I’m talking about the cycle for the forest, not the trees themselves. Too many can’t see one for the other, or tell the difference. If the old trees aren’t periodically destroyed, they will live so long that they will eventually choke off all other life, including that of any young fir trees. It’s the shade from the old trees, you see. It is so dark in those old forests that seedlings don’t get enough sun to survive, nor do any other plants. When the trees eventually fall down and leave a little light, faster growing hardwoods fill the space and choke out everything else; the baby firs don’t have a chance. I have been in truly old forests comprised of really old trees, and I can tell you that they are dead places. Nature took care of this problem by periodically burning the forests down. The cycle repeated for millions of years. Once the old trees are down, fir seedlings can take root because the hardwoods are not adapted to move into the burned landscape as easily. These firs eventually take over and grow to be old trees until they too burn. If they didn’t burn, the fir forests would become hardwood forests, similar to those of the Eastern US.

Along came the white man who started cutting the trees down. Of course, as a trade-off we stopped the all-consuming forest fires. We have traded logging the forests for burning them down. The irony is that if the folks who can’t stand the thought of those old trees dying either by saw or fire have their way, eventually they will cause those very forests to disappear by interrupting the cycle.

One thing always puzzled me about the spotted owl. Not one of those scientists ever explained where the owls went and how they lived each time their forests burned down. The owls have been doing it for quite a long time. Seems to me a rational scientist would have asked that question at some point.

You can almost hear the eco-terrorist response: What’s the temporary economy of a few states or the disruption of a few hundred thousand people on the chance that we could save the owl from extinction. Being extinct is forever! Besides, it’s not like anybody got killed.

Yeah, right. Tell that to the millions of people who have died over the last 30 to 40years from Malaria. They need not have died but for the off chance that we might save some birds from extinction. Oops, sorry, we can’t tell those people that because THEY ARE DEAD!

DDT is the evil scourge of all creatures avian, or so a bunch of scientists said. The stuff doesn’t break down very fast and sort of hangs around a long time. It gets into birds’ blood and organs and stuff, you see, from the insects and seeds they eat that are covered in DDT that evil men spray about indiscriminately. Once enough accumulates, every time poor mama bird lays an egg the shells are all wrong and the baby birdies die.

Bird lovers led by the Audobon Society launched a massive and successful campaign to ban DDT worldwide. Their inspiration was a pseudo-scientist named Rachel Carson, whose research is more than just suspect (it's doo-doo, really).

But, no matter. Yippee, the birds were saved!

The trade off was that Malaria, which had been on the decline worldwide from the use of DDT to reduce the mosquito populations, suddenly exploded back into prevalence. Had DDT continued to be used, millions of people who died from Malaria would not have done so. Still, one supposes that sacrifices must be made. Look at all the birds and who knows what other creatures that were saved from certain extinction by banning the evil DDT.

The only problem with all this is that it has been conclusively proved that DDT is not what was killing the birds. Indeed, it has been shown to not have any damaging effects to humans or other animals. The truth is it is relatively harmless to everything but some bugs, especially killer mosquitoes. Take a look at this site for more on the issue:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article847896.ece

When I was a kid, scientists were heroes. They cured diseases like polio and smallpox that had killed millions for centuries. They created new materials like plastics, sent rockets to space, split the atom, invented computers, and on and on. We all thought of them as smart, honest, and full of integrity. In contrast, the mad scientist was often the villain of the movie or book because of some passion or delusion that kept him from being rational about what he was doing and thereby imperiling the world.

A great number of the today’s scientists qualify by definition as mad scientists. They have crossed over the line from science to advocacy, and in so doing have let their beliefs, their passions, and ultimately their delusions, remove from them any scientific rationality they might have had. Scientists who actively plot ways to prevent those who disagree with them from being published or peer reviewed are scientifically irrational. Scientists who knowingly insert falsehoods into UN sponsored reports because they think it will help the politics of their position are scientifically irrational. Scientists who begin their research with the answer they want already in mind and pay attention only to the results that support this answer violate one of the basic tenets of the scientific method and are, therefore, scientifically irrationale. Irrational is another way of saying insane. It makes me mad.

All this leads me to the conclusion that anymore I don’t trust scientists about anything they say. Do you?

It also makes me very sad.