Saturday, April 04, 2009
Climate propaganda quote of the week
Boy, is this ever true:
Penny mining stock press releases are not permitted to go beyond the information in their prospectuses or qualifying reports and it always surprises me to see climate scientists issue press releases that promote well beyond the four corners of what was approved for publication.
When the scientists -- who purport to describe what is -- get into the business of propaganda when they advocate what ought, it undermines their credibility, at least with smart laymen who would like to understand the public policy question.
As I have written repeatedly on this blog, I am persuaded that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are changing the climate but I am deeply skeptical of the catastrophe scenarios pushed by the advocates of aggressive global regulation of greenhouse gases. I confess that some of my skepticism may be rooted in my view that such a highly regulated world would be a very unpleasant one in which to live, but I struggle -- in my own mind, at least -- to correct for that bias. How many of the advocates of GHG regulation confess to the opposite bias -- that they actually want a "simpler," low energy world in which people are not so wealthy, peripatetic, and productive? Or do they push for these policies notwithstanding the abiding fear that they are condemning their progeny to poverty?
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Apr 04, 11:19:00 AM:
THIS JUST IN: The "climate" has been changing for the last, oh, four billion years or so. Does anyone remember hearing about the last ice age in North America, about 10,000 years ago....you could look it up.
Where was Al Bore then?
By , at
Sat Apr 04, 11:22:00 AM:
TH - being in the world of Medical Devices if my company or yours ever stretched our science like these guys do with Global Warming we would be shut down in minutes.
As you know every scientific study has to have some type of control, or a measure of what is normal state; and typically to isolate one factor it requires a tremendous amount of thought and preparation as to make sure all elements of a control are built. In a lab being able to create a control is relatively easy. It gets more difficult when you are talking medical technologies because you have to some how off-set the power of the human mind or the "placebo effect." When a scientist measures the effects of melting polar ice caps, how in the hell do you create a control? The variables are almost innumerable. How do you know whether the melting polar ice caps are just melting on one polar (which they are) and not on the other (which they are growing) and that this is just a natural phenomenon that corrects itself and or shifts over the course of 100 years? Or is this a natural shift in the gulf streams that fluctuate over a few decades? The point is unless we had really good data from hundreds of years ago on all elements that make up the environment and climate we really cannot say definitely what the root cause is.
Which brings me back to the huge leaps that many of these scientists make. I am not arguing that man cannot have an ecological impact; to that there is no doubt and unfortunately many times it is not good. However, mother earth is an amazing living and adaptable living organism. I think our scientists would be better served trying to figure out ways where our advanced technologies can lessen the impact of man on the environment; while at the same time continuing to further our own species without having to go back to living in caves and letting our populations die off to diseases we cured decades earlier.
By , at
Sat Apr 04, 12:52:00 PM:
This kinda makes me wonder just what kind of an education Tigerhawk Teeager is going to be able to get at any of those schools he's considering......
By 
Roy Lofquist, at
Sat Apr 04, 09:43:00 PM:
Best ever rift on environmentalism - the inimitable George Carlin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
NSFW
By Brian, at
Sun Apr 05, 10:35:00 AM:
I will shock TH by partially agreeing with him about the press release problem. It's a problem for all press releases about scientific papers, though, not just AGW. Many of them aren't even written by the scientists but by university PR departments eager to make the news and get attention of alumni donors.
My own solution is an independent non-profit that universities can jointly support that will issue careful releases. Universities and scientists can still issue their own releases, but this would act as a brake.
