Global Warming, R. I. P.

by Paul A. Rahe

What is the most important issue facing the American people today? Until late last Fall, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Henry Waxman, the presidents of our major universities, and the editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, The New Yorker, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, WNBC, and the like –  not to mention the scientific establishment in the United States – were as one in telling us that global warming was a profound threat to our well-being and that of the rest of mankind. And John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and sadly, in the end, a hapless George W. Bush were willing to lend the hysterics a measure of aid and comfort.

Goracle

In the United States Senate, the indomitable James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma was very nearly alone in standing up to denounce the whole enterprise as a hoax, and in turn he was himself denounced by all right-thinking people as a scoundrel and a fool. There were, of course, scientists proficient in meteorology who entertained grave doubts, and some of them made a great fuss, but they were soon denied federal funding for further research, and young entrants into the profession quickly learned that if they wished to have successful careers it was incumbent on them to join the chorus who denounced global-warming skeptics as lackeys of the fossil fuels industry. The global-warming cabal was to the liberal democracies of our time what  Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his disciples were to biology in the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin.

When he became President, Barack Obama pledged to “roll back the specter of a warming planet” and “restore science to its rightful place,” implying – graceless as always – that the administration of George W. Bush had suppressed inconvenient scientific truths in the interests of ideology. In fact, Obama seems not to have understood what he was saying, for a specter is “an apparition inspiring dread,” and it is one of the principal functions of science to dispel illusions of this very sort; and, instead of debunking “the specter of a warming planet” and restoring “science to its rightful place” thereby, he embraced that specter and sought by way of inspiring dread in the American people to railroad his compatriots into subjecting the entire economy to the supervision of the administrative state.

One could, of course, argue that President Obama did not know any better – that, like Senators McCain and Graham, he believed the propaganda spread by the global-warming cabal. Such a presumption cannot, however, be sustained. By the time that our President left the United States for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen this past December, it had become clear that that the work done by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which formed the basis for the four reports issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was a sham – that the data was doctored, that the computer simulation was a fraud, and that systematic efforts were made by the most prominent climate scientists to corrupt the peer-review process and suppress legitimate criticism: all for the purpose of imposing a strait jacket on the world economy. In Copenhagen, President Obama could have acknowledged the truth: that some of the most prominent climate scientists had betrayed their calling, that the global-warming hypothesis remained, in fact, unproven, and that the reports issued by the IPCC provide no basis for the making of public policy. He could have recommended that there be further study, that the raw data collected and the computer code written be made available for inspection by all, and that research funds be apportioned equally between those who assert and those who deny that we are threatened by anthropogenic global warming. He did nothing of the sort, of course, and it was only thanks to the stubbornness of the Chinese that we have been spared the submission to the Senate of a treaty designed to hamstring the American economy. Even now our President remains committed to the passage of a cap-and-trade bill designed to achieve that end and to the use of the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to a similar end.

In the meantime, the scandal has deepened, as claim after claim included in the putatively authoritative reports issued by the IPCC have been proven groundless. The posture of the mainstream press within the United States in the face of all of this is arguably the scandal’s most shocking aspect. We are used to being lied to by politicians: Barack Obama is a recognizable type. We have encountered his like before. But the press, however partisan any given newspaper or television station may be, is supposed to be vigilant, and it is in its interest to be vigilant.

We buy newspapers and magazines, we watch television news and listen to radio programs because we want to know what is going on. Very few of us are apt to be satisfied with a press no more informative than was Pravda in the heyday of the Soviet Union. This scandal, worldwide in its proportions and profound in its import, was ready-made for enterprising reporters, and, to be fair, they have made their mark . . . in foreign countries such as Great Britain – where The Guardian, a left-wing daily firmly committed to the global warming hypothesis, has nonetheless distinguished itself by the vigor it has displayed in pursuing evidence of scientific fraud in this regard. None of the news outlets mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay has pursued the story. At best, long after the facts have come out, they have noted their deployment by the global-warming skeptics. Were it not for the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, Americans who limited their purview to the mainstream media would have hardly a clue as to what is happening.

This is, of course, part of a larger trend. The mainstream press has largely forgotten its function, and these days it flacks where it used to report. It is this that explains why fewer and fewer Americans subscribe to newspapers and magazines and watch the television networks listed above. And this explains why the internet has been such a boon. But, this fact notwithstanding, we are in a pickle – for, to date anyway, none of the operations on the internet that report the news have the resources requisite for pursuing such a story. We are, in fact, dependent on the foreign press.

Witness Der Spiegel – a German imitator of what Time was like when we still had newsmagazines in the United States. In its current issue, one can find a lengthy and devastating survey of the state of climate science entitled Climate Catastrophe: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research. It is a must-read: meticulous, cautious, and intelligently skeptical. Its authors do not claim that there is no such thing as global warming. They suspect that something of the sort may be taking place. What they insist on, however, are the limits of our current knowledge, the attempt by a politicized profession to pull a con, and the economic and social dangers associated with making radical shifts in public policy on the basis of unfounded speculation. We can now be confident that the global-warming hoax is history – for, if the pious purveyors of environmentalism in Germany have lost faith, the game is up. I doubt, however, that any of the politicians, press outlets, universities, or scientific journals associated with this scam will backtrack. My bet is that they quietly change the subject and that the perpetrators of the hoax get off scot free.

But this leaves one question unanswered. Why do we have to go abroad if we are to be well-informed concerning matters of public policy pertinent to our own well-being? Someone should put that question to those responsible for news content in the mainstream media. If they want to survive, they had better wake up.


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Posted Apr 5th 2010 at 7:53 am in Economics, Education, Environment, Obama, Politics, Regulation | 143 Comments