Suppression of climate debate is a disaster for science

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Environment Minister Peter Kent has done us all a favour by stating the obvious: Canada has no intention of signing on to a new Kyoto deal. So long as, the world’s biggest emitters want nothing to do with it, we’d be crazy if we did. Mr. Kent also refuses to be guilted out by climate reparations, a loony and unworkable scheme to extort hundreds of billions of dollars from rich countries and send it all to countries such as China. Such candour from Ottawa is a refreshing change from the usual hypocrisy, which began the moment Jean Chrétien committed Canada to the first Kyoto Protocol back in 1998.

Yet even though a global climate deal is now a fantasy, the rhetoric remains as overheated as ever. Without a deal, we’re told, the seas will rise, the glaciers will melt, the hurricanes will blow, the forest fires will rage and the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will do their awful work.

Or maybe not. As Roger Pielke Jr., one of the saner voices on the climate scene, points out, the hurricanes have failed to blow since Hurricane Wilma hit the Gulf Coast back in 2005. Despite the dire predictions of the experts, the U.S. has now experienced its longest period free of major hurricanes since 1906.

It’s possible to accept the underlying science of global warming, as Mr. Pielke does, while also maintaining that substantial uncertainties still exist. Why wouldn’t they? Climate science is relatively new, and it’s also insanely complicated. No one knows with any certainty the exact impact of carbon dioxide emissions, what long-term climate trends will be or the effect of other factors, such as the sun.

But don’t take it from me. Take it from the climate scientists themselves.

By no coincidence, a new cache of hacked e-mails from leading climate scientists hit the Internet last week, just in time for the lead-up to the United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa. The e-mails are not recent – they are a new instalment in the so-called Climategate affair, which broke two years ago. They deal with a small area of global-warming studies that addresses the question: How do we know the Earth is warmer now than it was 1,000 years ago? The evidence is not straightforward, because it relies on proxy data such as tree rings.

Although Climategate has been widely dismissed as nothing more than the usual academic sniping, it is much more than that. In some of the e-mails, scientists propose ways to massage the data to make it look better. They try to figure out how to get dissident scientists fired. Others are unhappy because they believe important information has been simplified, suppressed or misrepresented for public consumption.

“There have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change],” one scientist complained, also arguing that calculating the climate’s sensitivity to increased levels of carbon dioxide “cannot even be done using present-day data.” Another wrote, “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.” Or, as another doubter put it, “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably…”

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Any one who listened in Mr. Hartman’s 9th Grade Science Class would have doubts about the current climate science. The scientific process of stating a hypothesis and proving or disproving it with evidence is not used by current AGW scientists. They use computer models that can not even predict the results of the documented changes in the last century. Yet, we should all run out and spend billions of tax dollars to combat something that may not even exist. Talk about tilting at wind mills!

@Randy: Are you talking about the 14,000 abandoned windmills littering our country?

@Marine72: Is there only 14,000 abandoned windmills? It seems like as soon as the subsidies run out, the turbines quit turning! http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/46519

Let no one forget that the republican front runner, Mr. Newt, was and may still be a supporter of “climate change” policies. The AP reports how the Artic ice is melting and getting darker and absorbing more heat from the sun, oh my. However, they do not report that Antartica has been getting cooler for the past 12 + years and the ice is getting thicker.

In my recent article on the Paleolithic during the last Ice Age, glaciers one mile high covered one-third of the land mass of the world. The ocean depths were reduced one hundred meters. Please think about that ratio and tell me a change of one degree Celsius will cause a twenty foot rise in sea levels.

In the mean time, remember the tide tables have not deviated one inch in over a hundred years.

The “Tempest In A Teapot” syndrome has been unleashed on a gullible and largely ignorant public; they took the bait and swallowed the hook, and now we are supposed to redistribute our wealth to the rest of the world because a hoax has been implemented on the civilized world. Please note, civilized does not necessarily imply an appreciable level of intellect.

We should quiz Newt on his current position regarding the Hoax; there is no way, we can support someone who is involved in this lunacy and fraud.