Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has a short editorial in USA Today on the bad science behind the Kyoto Treaty:
Until recently, the foundation of climate change alarmism has been the so-called hockey stick graph. The graph, constructed by Dr. Michael Mann, a professor at the University of Virginia, and shaped like a hockey stick, purports to show a link between rising temperatures and human activity.
Recent Canadian research discredited the graph because of its errors and improper methodologies. An Environment Canada statistician agreed Mann’s method “preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data.” Dr. Hans von Storch, a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called it “rubbish” methodologically, and Dr. Rob van Dorland, an IPCC lead author, said the IPCC “made a mistake by only including Mann’s reconstruction and not those of other researchers.”
The “science” behind Kyoto is distorted at best, the “consensus” is hardly a consensus at all, and even if implemented, the Kyoto Protocols would have a negligable effect while adding significant burdens to the national economies of signatories.
The Kyoto Protocols died and ignominious death in the Senate already, and the chances of the US ever ratifying them are slim to none. If Europe wants to engage in a foolish and Quixotic endeavor to further weaken their already flagging economies, they’re more than welcome to do so. However, the US will kindly continue voluntarily reducing emissions without engaging in pointless bureaucratic games.
The question is, are politicians and their ilk educated enough to recognize the difference between good and bad science? In their fields they may very well be the best and the brightest, but that doesn’t mean they know the first thing about the hard sciences. Scientists in fields like evolutionary biology, which are not controversial to those in the field, are afraid to voice disagreements about data or methodology, or even discuss theories because of idiots on the outside who will say things like “These well-known biologists disagree about evolution, therefore it must be false”. Because two biologists disagree about a data set or about how much influence punctuated equillibrium had doesn’t mean that they think evolution was not the means by which life arose to its present state. I’m sure climatology has similar problems.
Regardless of whether or not the science is good, the Kyoto protocols, as policy, aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.