The Political Science Behind Global Warming

Is the Law of Gravity settled science? One might think so, but, annually, significant investments of scientific resources are made to discover anti-gravity.

In particle physics, quark modeling has been a contentious topic.
Mathematicians still dispute infinity.

Even scientists conducting experiments on the Five Second Rule of food contamination have produced conflicting results.

But the disciples of the "settled science" of "global warming," are indifferent to those seeking to reverse the settled Law of Gravity, and haven’t uttered a syllable about the disputes over quark modeling, infinity or the Five Second Rule.

Galileo and Pope Urban VIII disagreed about the nature of the cosmos. Eventually, Galileo’s scientific observations prevailed. However, on global warming, the roles of Galileo’s and Urban’s modern counterparts are reversed.
Although its acolytes claim their firmly-held beliefs are scientific, global warming has clearly become an evangelical theological movement outside normally-accepted skeptical approaches to the rest of science.

Like the intolerant Renaissance church, today’s climate clerisy punishes heresy.
In April, Lennart Bengtsson, a leading Swedish meteorologist, joined the climate skeptics at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. In an interview with Speigel Online, Bengtsson spoke about validating climate-model predictions against empirical observations: "Since the end of the 20th century, the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show."

Only three weeks later, Bengtsson resigned from GWPF because, according to his resignation letter: "I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. . . . Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy."

In response, Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute, tweeted: "Groups perceived to be acting in bad faith should not be surprised that they are toxic within the science community. Changing that requires that they not act in bad faith and not be seen to be acting in bad faith."

It’s astonishing that the right to professionally research and interpret climate science must be subject to a faith test. The climate clerisy’s fear of doubters exposes their weakness. Schmidt demonstrated how completely climate science has devolved into "scientific" theology.

Dan Kahan, professor of law and psychology at Yale wrote: "Positions on climate change have come to signify the kind of person one is. People whose beliefs are at odds with those of the people with whom they share their basic cultural commitments risk being labelled as weird and obnoxious in the eyes of those on whom they depend for social and financial support."

Especially financial support: market and grant-driven costs burdening taxpayers and consumers who are repaid with the climate community’s only currency: apocalyptic alarmism.

Chicken Little is always among us. If the sky isn’t falling and the last ice age didn’t destroy us, then another, alar or an ozone hole will.

Facing a lack of or conflicting empirical evidence , discredited climate models and a garmentless climate hierocracy, over two decades, "global warming" evolved into "climate change," more recently "weather disruption." The latest term is "global weirding."

The environmental left’s solutions to all these frequently contradictory "crises" are to raise taxes, grow government, hamstring capitalism and relinquish national sovereignty.

Not coincidentally, those are the same policies the left always pursues, "urgent, time-critical" global environmental "catastrophes" aside.

Perceptive skeptics believe that, for many left-wingers, climate alarmism is just agitprop, another temporary pretense to achieve other liberal policy goals.
Climate changes — there is no dispute — but, practical people would address climate change differently. Practical people would examine observable evidence and, if persuaded, first, they would adapt — as prehistoric Homo sapiens did entering and exiting the last ice age.

Practical Americans believe that climate change is normal, manageable and that human efforts to combat it are meaningless.

But, then, practical people are neither self-absorbed enough to believe they caused climate change nor sufficiently arrogant to assume they can "fix" it.
That’s a job for the faithful – and the climate evangelists who mislead and exploit them.

http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2014/06/the_political_science_behind_g.html#incart_river