Hot Air And Global Warming

OpinionJournal has an excellent piece on the orthodoxy of global warming:

Back in the late 1990s, American geoscientist Michael Mann published a chart that purported to show average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years. The chart showed relatively minor fluctuations in temperature over the first 900 years, then a sharp and continuous rise over the past century, giving it a hockey-stick shape…

This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal’s Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions. All the same, Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data, and doubts about his statistical methods have since grown. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann’s method “preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data.” Other reputable scientists such as Berkeley’s Richard Muller and Hans von Storch of Germany’s GKSS Center essentially agree.

Global warming is not science. Science is rigorous, controlled, and done under controlled condition under double-blind circumstances. Global warming is psuedo-science, an ideological movement using the trappings of science in order to justify itself.

The arguments made by the proponents of global warming aren’t scientific ones: anyone who spends their time belittling others who dares challenge the dominant orthodoxy as being “corporate shills” or the like isn’t a scientist and doesn’t deserve to be considered as one. Such arguments are nothing more than ad hominem attacks. Arguing that someone who disagrees with the global warming orthodoxy is somehow instantly a corporate shill while those who are receiving grants for organizations with an ideological bent are paragons of scientific truth is absolutely absurd.

If global warming were handled in a scientific way it might be persuasive. However, the global warming issue has become so relentlessly politicized that unless someone steps up to the plate and conducts a rigorously scientific double-blind study free of the political baggage and bias that finding the truth is virtually impossible.

The overall climate may be warming (and no, because this year was hotter than the last, it doesn’t prove global warming is true, and anyone who argues such a thing is ignoring the basic tenets of hard science). It may have something to do with human activity. It may have later ramifications. However, even if all three of those assumptions are true, it doesn’t make Kyoto or any of the other radical action plans but forward to “combat” this problem any less foolish.

What we have is a movement that A:) seeks to ostracize and attack anyone who dissents from the dominant ideology B:) uses radical scare tactics to influence public opinion and C:) demands immediate and drastic action without full consideration of the ramifications of those actions.

None of those traits are traits of hard science. If anything, they stand against the core tenets of the scientific method which is designed to be dispassionate and analytical. Global warming may or may not exist, but the hot air coming from its partisans is undeniable.