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| Dem Dodges on School Choice | Bernanke's "Rookie Mistake?" |
Climate Change Deniers
by Christopher Chantrill
August 17, 2007 at 9:18 am
IT’S TURNING out to be a rough year for the Climate Change Deniers, you know, the chaps who deny that the main driver of the Earth’s climate is the Sun. And it’s a bit embarrassing when a blogger, albeit an older, well-qualified blogger shows up NASA and its claim that 1998 was the warmest year in US history. Roy Spencer explains:
First, NASA’s James Hansen and his group had to fix a Y2K bug that a Canadian statistician found in their processing of the thermometer data. As a result, 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record in the United States - 1934 is.
Amanda Carpenter got to interview Steven McIntyre, who runs climateaudit.org, and to lead him through his interactions with NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies.
What comes out clearly is that NASA doesn’t really want anyone looking at how they came up with the numbers. McIntyre knew about the difficulties of normalizing temperature data, given the vagaries of weather stations and their locations, and he was interesting in finding out how NASA adjusted their data.
So, that type of adjustment is a statistical issue that interests me. And, so I wrote to NASA in May and asked them for the source code for the adjustment software that they used to fix these stations and they refused to provide it.
Why on earth, you wonder? Well, it’s not really remarkable. Data adjustments are fiendishly difficult to do well, and the chances are that NASA’s adjustment is a fudge. Naturally, they are reluctant to give anyone the chance to look through their data and find problems with it. Bureaucrats are self-selected for the quiet life. They don’t want to have to spend all their time explaining their mistakes.
And they were right. They should never have let that chap Steven McIntyre near their data or anything else.
The bigger problem is that the whole temperature series that is used to validate the global warming hypothesis is probably a gigantic fudge, guided by the knowledge that “of course” the planet is getting warmer, and of course a comprehensive and mandatory global government program is needed to save the planet.
Maybe, of course, the planet is getting warmer, and maybe man is responsible for a good deal of it. And maybe the Greenland icecap will melt and maybe we will all have to run for higher ground.
That’s an awful lot of maybes when you are proposing to compel people to change their way of life at a cost of trillions of dollars
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Comments:
Posted by: Marklad on 08/19/07 12:56am
"That’s an awful lot of maybes when you are proposing to compel people to change their way of life at a cost of trillions of dollars" There is a reverse side to your argument. - There are an awful lot of maybes in your arguments when you consider the total risk that is faced from climate change. www.talkclimatechange.com
Posted by: Steve on 08/17/07 10:33pm
Based on your logic, no-one would have home insurance because it is just "maybe" that we will have a fire.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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