Climategate Claptrap, II

[Viking12]

At last! The controversy is over. It turns out the "scientific" claims promoted for decades by whiny self-righteous liberals were a lie, a fraud, a con--and we don't need to change after all. The left is humiliated; the conservatives are triumphant and exultant.

The year is 1954, and the "science" that has been exposed as a "sham" by conservatives is the link between smoking and lung cancer. Welcome to Tobaccogate, as Fox News would call it. The conservatives are championing professor Clarence Cook Little, who says he has discovered insurmountable flaws in the use of statistics and clinical data by "anti-tobacco" (and quasi-commie) scientists. The press reports the "controversy," usually without mentioning that Cook Little is being paid by the tobacco industry. A relieved nation lights up--and so, over the next few decades, millions of them die.

It is happening again. The tide of global warming denial is now rising as fast as global sea levels--and with as much credibility as Cook Little. Look at the deniers' greatest moment, Climategate, hailed by them as "the final nail in the coffin" of "the theory of global warming." A patient study by the British House of Commons has pored over every e-mail from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and interviewed everyone involved. Its findings? The "evidence patently fails to support" the idea of a fraud; the scientists have "no case to answer"; and all their findings "have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified" by other scientists. That's British for "it was a crock."

Yet a startling amount of denialism now, like Climategate, travels across the Atlantic from my country--Britain--to the United States. Yes, I know our accents make us sound instantly plausible, but it's time Americans knew who these Brideshead bull-scientists really are. Look, for example, at their doyen--a man named Christopher Monckton. He has been lauded by the Wall Street Journal, National Review and Rush Limbaugh for exposing the truth about global warming, and is used by the New York Times as a balancing voice against the claims of climate scientists. In fact, Monckton is an English aristocrat with no scientific training. He studied ancient Greece and Rome, and worked as a policy adviser for Margaret Thatcher.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100503/hari

[The Doctor.]

1. Kick.

They won't believe it, but they should see it anyway.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. How the hell did Monckton even get a microphone pointed at him?

I initially thought he was a Highly-Regarded Climate Scientist, the way he was being written about.

Until I actually found his bio. (Hari's version makes much better reading, unfortunately.) The Monty Python sketch about "Upper Class Twits" is just as valid about Monckton today as it was about the British upper class in general in 1973.

At least some of OUR "skeptics" have done some solid scientific work before they sold out -- Fred Singer, maybe, but of course John Gray.

But Monckton?

I recently read a book about how the British LOVE playing at being other people (I'll post about it if I can find it mentioned online, fast enough). This is the only thing that really makes sense.

Indeed, in so much of the world, what makes sense anymore?

--d!
a.k.a. Rt. Rev. Sir Dame Susie-Fred "Snookie" Rockefeller-Roosevelt-Windsor-Saxe-Coburg-A-Go-Go-Zedong, MD, PhD. LLD, DDS, OBE, CBE, EEPROM, EKG, LS/MFT, Certifiable Expert In Deception Detecting and Not Getting Involved With Dames While On A Case

[bergie321]

3. It's easy

To prove or disprove a scientific theory put forth by a real scientist who is denying global climate change.

It is a lot harder to disprove the theory that global warming is a communist plot by Obama to turn us all into gay clowns(or whatever his "theory" is).