January 25, 2010

The Rear Ends Justify Their Meanness

Fake but accurate

This is too rich for my carburetor:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Woo hoo. Now can we have a real national media debate about anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC)? Or is even admittedly bogus science nevertheless still "settled?"

We discussed this a while ago, in Slicing the Globaloney: a Case Study!, when the mendacity of the melting-glacier claim first came to light.

You may think everybody already knew the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) document was nothing but a political talking-points memo; but I think fair-minded readers of the Big Lizards blog may yet overestimate how much the average person studies AGCC or pores over reports from the IPCC -- and underestimate how much ordinary folks are influenced by authoritative-sounding "scientific" pronunciamentos. In a sense, the entire "green" movement was kick-started by the increasingly dire and sepulchral warnings about a melting Earth, evaporating artic and glacial regions, global Noachian flooding, and poor, little polar bears helplessly adrift, clinging to icebergs, like 1920s "pole sitters" in dirty white fur coats.

The melting Earth!

Unquestionably, scientists practiced deep, deliberate deception, prostituting their scientific, academic, and government credentials for leftist politics... as well as for money; remember, climate scientists who report results in line with the IPCC and globaloney are rewarded with lucrative research grants; while those who report results at odds with the "storyboard" pushed by the AGCC agitators are frequently cut off from funding, often by deliberate sabotage from their own supposed colleagues.

The anointed must have their vision.

But will you still respect me in the morning?

By their scandalous dumping of science in favor of AGCC boosterism, the globaloney slicers not only shredded their own reputations, they squandered many decades of increasing public respect for and reliance on science as an independent arbiter of material truth. Today, the mission statement of the IPCC simply drips with hot irony:

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information -- IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

Or to put it another way:

We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

Worse, Dr. Lal, who started the whole "melting glaciers" canard, casually lets slip that the entire peer-review system shivered like a cheap make-up mirror in the case of AGCC. It doesn't even seem to bother him; does he not comprehend the enormity of his confession?

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

Thus brake science.

Activists are baiters; and at that task, these chaps as masters

It's important to understand that anthropogenic ("Man-caused") global climate change -- globaloney, we call it here -- is a creature of the New Left; and its partisans follow the same strategies and tactics of that thuggish politics. Judge Robert Bork writes that the New Left began with the 1962 Port Huron Statement, written for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) principally by Tom Hayden, later of the 1968 Chicago DNC riots fame.

While the old (Soviet Marxist) Left loved industrialization, the New Left lashes together old radical organizing and power-mongering, Marxian rhetoric about the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie, and anti-technology, Luddite "green" boondoggling. Globaloney is one of the New Left's most successful projects; AGCC uses false science to raise hysterical claims of apocalypse that can only be averted by...

1. Slashing worldwide technological advancement and industrialization to the level of some mythical, bucolic age of ancient shepherds and aboriginal tribes who "lived in harmony with Gaia;"
2. And incidentally, redistributing hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars from the rich, capitalist North and West to the impoverished, dessicated, socialist East and South, typically under a regime of mandatory "carbon credits."

(Not coincidentally, some of this deluge of dollars is siphoned into the pockets of the leaders of the AGCC movement, such as former Vice President, now Green Guru Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!")

One traditional strategy of the Left, Old and New, is to infiltrate some highly respected neutral body or movement and subvert it to radical agitation; leftists have successfully played this hand from the civil-rights movement (see the Civil Rights Congress) in the 1940s, to the anti-nuclear movement (see Physicians for Social Responsibility) in the 1970s and 80s, to the "antiwar" movement of the post-9/11 period (see International ANSWER), to the IPCC the last couple of decades.

Whenever they produce this passion play, they achieve short-term political gains; but always at the cost of long-term or permanent degradation of public support and respectability for what used to be fine institutions, as everything apolitical is turned into a de facto advocate for radical leftism.

Look what has happened to the scientific field of climatology. After reciting a littany of peer-review comments that were ignored or scorned by the seven faces of Dr. Lal, the Daily Mail piece concludes on a sad and defeated note:

The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal [we call it "Climategate" -- DaH], is likely to be considerable.

Benny Peiser, the [Global Warming Policy Foundation’s] director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.

Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’

Last night, [IPCC Chairman Dr. Raj Pachauri] defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.

Or to put it another way...

In the movie Dr. Strangelove, Gen. "Buck" Turgidson learns that Gen. Jack D. Ripper ordered his planes to drop atomic bombs on the USSR -- precipitating a nuclear Armageddon in order to defend Americans' "purity of essence" and "precious bodily fluids". When Turgidson tells the president, the latter suggests that Gen. Ripper is a psychotic.

Turgidson responds, "Well I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir."

I wonder how long it will take the field of climatology to cleanse its own precious bodily fluids.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 25, 2010, at the time of 11:04 PM

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The following hissed in response by: Ken Hahn

The above hissed in response by: Ken Hahn at January 25, 2010 11:53 PM

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