House of Eratosthenes

I’m completely confused about how to answer my grandchildren if the day arrives that they ask “Grandpa, what was ‘global warming’ all about?” And I’m not one of the people who fell for it. Ever. Back to day one.

I can only imagine what the suckers are thinking about it. Scale by scale, it’s all falling from our eyes.

Guardian.

In a statement the authors of the paper said: “Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

“One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.”

It’s a pretty simple problem, really. Science tends to be funded by grants from national governments, and most national governments don’t spend a whole lot of money on science that says the world is not going to end. And so science becomes an industry dedicated to creating doomsday scenarios, whether it wants to be in that business or not. Kind of like an aging Hollywood celebrity selling life insurance on late-night teevee.

They don’t have to be socialists in order to get suckered into it. Quite the opposite. It becomes what pays the bills.

Now global warming isn’t “cool” anymore, and these studies are getting yanked.

Last week, three large companies walked away from the carbon cap-and-trade talks:

ConocoPhillips (COP), BP (BP) and Caterpillar (CAT) have decided not to renew their membership in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a broad alliance of corporations and environmentalists supporting cap-and-trade legislation.

“House climate legislation and Senate proposals to date have disadvantaged the transportation sector and its consumers, left domestic refineries unfairly penalized versus international competition, and ignored the critical role that natural gas can play in reducing GHG emissions,” Conoco CEO Jim Mulva said in a statement.

When President Obama swept into office with huge Democratic majorities in Congress, many corporations felt they needed to get on board to try to influence the legislation. But cap-and-trade has stalled in the Senate, the Copenhagen climate treaty talks failed and there has been a slew of embarrassing revelations regarding global warming data and forecasts. So sweeping emissions curbs no longer seem inevitable.

James Taranto pointed out that the global warming advocates are the real “deniers”. He’s right.

There are, no doubt, lots of true believers in global warming–not scientists, but people, including many journalists, who have embraced global warmism as a political and quasireligious doctrine based, they have been led to believe, on the authority of science.

Even Phil Jones acknowledges climate science is rife with uncertainty, but global warmism’s popularizers refuse to brook any doubt or acknowledge that the “consensus” they have touted is a sham.

And they used to call us deniers.

So I think what I’ll tell my grandchildren is this: People tend to like to do what they see lots of other people doing at any given time, and then call it “science.” Make it a “teachable moment” with them…maybe have a beer with them and talk to them for part of an afternoon about people “acting stupidly.”

The documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (which you can probably find online) is probably the best primer on how it started and how it got out of hand.

I mean, it is a valid theory. But they forgot the part about the scientific method you’re supposed to use to test your theory before you can say, “yup, we’re right about this.”

They skipped that part, and started generating scary scenarios based on theory, and then kept trying to underscore it all by trying again and again to come up with a “smoking gun” (which the hockey stick graph was hailed as).

Goes back to Things I (Phil) Know(s) #16. When people look too hard for evidence of something, they usually find it whether it’s there or not.
- philmon | 02/22/2010 @ 08:19
Yeah, and to be fair about it my “pre-bunking” of it wasn’t that scientific either. The beginning of Taranto’s column describes my initial reaction pretty well. Sorta…looks like a scam, walks like a scam, quacks like one…we-ell…
- mkfreeberg | 02/22/2010 @ 08:25
Don’t worry–it will be like Milli Vanilli. So embarrassing in hindsight that nobody will admit to having believed in it.
- Jason | 02/22/2010 @ 08:26
It’s okay to throw out the “bullshit” flag when you smell it.

We have peer review available in the science booth. At least we were supposed to. Looks like it’s back! And not a moment too soon.
- philmon | 02/22/2010 @ 08:35
The name Trofim Lysenko rings a bell….
- vvp39 | 02/22/2010 @ 16:29
Excellent reference, and a good one for me to remember, vvp39. (dang, I feel like I’m talking to a droid. “Vvp39, do you read me? Vvp39!!! Do you READ me???? Hellllllp!!!!” 😉
- philmon | 02/22/2010 @ 19:59
And yet, something tells me Al Gore will get to keep his Nobel Prize for Widespread Wolf-Crying and Fraud Perpetration.
- TPK | 02/22/2010 @ 23:28
With the intellectual elite progressives, it’s never about results, it’s about intentions. Nobody is ever held to task for being wrong in that world.

Quite convenient. The ManBearPig analogy has always been a great one. Make up a boogeyman to save the world from, tell the world it can be saved by doing as you say, everyone hails you as a hero… and when it turns out that there was no ManBearPig, or that it was just a grainy photograph of someone’s uncle Ralph in a deep woods camofulage suit, everybody just breathes a sigh of releif and you’re … um … still a … hero.
- philmon | 02/23/2010 @ 06:40

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Scientists Withdraw Sea Level ClaimsMonday, February 22nd, 2010

Scientists Withdraw Sea Level Claims
Monday, February 22nd, 2010