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Leftist Guardian to Any Global Warming Skeptic: Shut Up — Jim Lakely
The Australian edition of The Guardian — probably the most hard-left of the lefty daily newspapers in the English-speaking world — published a story Thursday about how Attorney General George Brandis stood up for skeptics of the theory of man-caused, catastrophic global warming.
Brandis is not a skeptic himself. He believes in man-caused, catastrophic global warming, but he also believes in liberty. So he gave a “passionate” speech in which he said it was “deplorable” that skeptics are being excluded from the climate change debate. People who say the “science is settled,” Brandis said, are “ignorant” and “medieval.” He did all but call the climate alarmists in Australia’s government fascists.
Good stuff. And good for him, no matter his motivations — painted, of course, in the worst possible and distorted light by the leftist Guardian.
The comments under the story were heavy on the “science is settled” point. So, against my best judgment, I left the following comment:
The climate is always changing. But is human activity causing runaway global warming? Is man causing a climate crisis? On those questions the science is not settled.
Pretty innocuous, right? It was removed 10 minutes later for not adhering to The Guardian’s community standards. Fascists! …who prove Brandis’ point.
Just before learning my comment was taken down, a gentleman added to the conversation by writing:
You’re embarrassing yourself.
I replied:
So, in four minutes you’ve already read the reports (or at least the summaries)! Fantastic. So I look forward to you rebuttals to the following points:
- Research published in peer-reviewed science journals indicates the model-derived temperature sensitivity of Earth accepted by the IPCC is too large. And how negative feedbacks in the climate system reduce that sensitivity to values an order of magnitude smaller.
- Strong empirical correlations have been reported from all around the world between solar variability and climate indices including temperature, precipitation, droughts, floods, streamflow, and monsoons.
- The IPCC fails to consider the importance of the demonstrated empirical relationship between solar activity, the ingress of galactic cosmic rays, and the formation of low clouds.
- During the past 25,000 years (late Pleistocene and Holocene) glaciers around the world have fluctuated broadly in concert with changing climate, at times shrinking to positions and volumes smaller than today.
- The relationship between drought and global warming is weak, since severe droughts occurred during both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
- And how despite the supposedly “unprecedented” warming of the twentieth century, there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally or in any of the specific ocean basins.
You wouldn’t want to embarrass yourself by not having anything to say about those points, right?
Again, that reply was posted as I was being deleted. (I looked for it on the site immediately after hitting “post” and saw that I was erased.) So, I tried putting up another post — which may be taken down, as well. Who knows:
My last comment was deleted. I thought it was innocuous enough to meet the Guardian‘s “community standards.” For the record …
I insulted no one. My comment contained no personal attacks, and it was not an act of “persistent trolling” (Guideline #1). I did not smear anyone or misrepresent the Guardian or its journalists (Guideline #2). It was not “offensive” or “threatening” (Guideline #3), or part of a “flame war (Guideline #4). Nor was it racist, sexist, homophobic or any other form of “hate-speech” (Guideline #5). My comment was not libelous (Guideline #6), nor was it spam (Guideline #7), though I did include a link. It was relevant to the discussion (Guideline #8), it was reasonable (Guideline #9), and objectively constructive to the conversation (Guideline #10).
So, in the spirit of the Guardian‘s stated mission to make its website “a welcoming space for intelligent discussion,” I will try again. My original comment, just about verbatim:
The climate is always changing. But is human activity causing runaway global warming? Is man causing a climate crisis? On those questions the science is not settled.
I then put in a link to ClimateChangeReconsidered.org. I don’t hyperlink it here … for fear of violating some sort of “community guideline,” but you can copy and paste the URL yourself.
Argument victory strategy of the left: When you’re losing the argument, construct a straw man. When your straw man is burned up, yell and scream. When your throat gives out, ban all who disagree.
Published in General
It’s amazing how someone can express doubts that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of global warming and give all the reasons you laid out, and be regarded as an unscientific fool. I don’t have a formula that explains all the changes in climate over the last million years, but neither does anybody else.
I’ve mentioned before seeing a program on the History Channel that talked about how the climate is changing on Mars and some other planet. They had scientists give different theories for the changes and the program did not declare who was right and who was wrong. In other words, the science was not settled. But the narrator explained that climate change on Earth was caused by CO2 and that was indisputable fact. Period.
Every other area of science, Randy, is unsettled. We’re discovering new things about the universe all the time — or at least we think we’ve got the universe figured out … until another scientist comes along and moves us in a smarter, more logical and truthful direction. Saying “the science is settled” about what drives our climate is as reasonable as saying “the science is settled” in medicine, or biology, or physics.
Not too long ago, the “science” of eugenics told us that dark-skinned people were less intelligent than fair-skinned people. Progressives produced that “science,” and got a long way toward making all of society believe it. We came to our senses.
Progressives today believe the “science” of man-caused catastrophic global warming. The common denominator: Saying the science is “settled” means progressives have the justification to order our society to match their aims — and always in a direction that reduces our freedom and (in the extreme of eugenics) destroy our very humanity.
This is not a coincidence.
I posted the following comment on that site. Wonder how long it will stay posted:
I fail to see any science supporting AGW. None of the models have predicted accurately. CO2 is way up, but it hasn’t gotten a bit warmer in the past 18 years, and it has arguably gotten colder. So the science says that either CO2 does not cause any warming, or it actually causes cooling. At what point is the whole AGW thing just deemed a fraudulent scheme to increase taxes and control lives?
In fact it is even worse than that. Such a statement in and of itself is inherently irrational and could never be made by an honest practitioner in any scientific field. Open inquiry is all but the exact definition of science. Sir Karl Popper in elucidating the philosophy of science stated this so well in naming testing of theory via falsification as the true definition of science.
Gould had an interesting essay on this. A sample:
The parallels I imagine are quite clear.
Great essay, Roberto. Thanks for sharing.
-E
Richard Feynman put it best to a class at Cornell in 1964. It only took 62 seconds.
If I were in charge of the IRS, you’d already have agents at your door…
I’m sure they’ve been at my “virtual” door for some time. I hope when the visit the homestead they trip over my 14-year-old retired racing greyhound. Then I’ll have a chance to escape. :-)
Love the Feynman video.
Nice post. Well done. One of the things I love most about Ricochet (and I suppose the internet) is that after reading your post, and watching the Feynman video, I’ve spent the past 20 minutes learning about who he was. Amazing guy and a ton of fascinating videos of him available. Thanks for the introduction!
That’s over-stating it: there are many scientific propositions that we have tested and verified so many times over the years that we can say we have a real (if incomplete) knowledge of them. The hypothesis that the force of gravity decreases with the square of the distance is “settled science” is correct.
That said, there are at least two ways this analogy fails the Greens:
Relevant quote on Quantum Mechanics from Jacob Bronowski: