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Politics: Climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer lays the smack to '2014 warmest year ever' nonsense[/h]
Image Credit: Dr. Roy Spencer via Facebook [h=3]Published by:
Dan Calabrese on Monday January 19th, 2015[/h]
Truth.
Dr. Roy Spencer is a real problem for global warmists. They can't say he's not a climate scientist, because he is. They can't accuse him of taking oil industry money, because all the funding he's ever received has come from the U.S. government - including his work with NASA, NOAA and the Department of Energy.
And they can't refute his arguments, because he knows what he's talking about and they don't. So when he comes across their latest nonsense - this time the claim that 2014 was the warmest year on record - he takes aim and
destroys the claim in beautiful fashion:
Science as a methodology for getting closer to the truth has been all but abandoned. It is now just one more tool to achieve political ends.
Reports that 2014 was the “hottest” year on record feed the insatiable appetite the public has for definitive, alarming headlines. It doesn’t matter that even in the thermometer record,
2014 wasn’t the warmest within the margin of error. Who wants to bother with “margin of error”? Journalists went into journalism so they wouldn’t have to deal with such technical mumbo-jumbo.
I said this six weeks ago, as did others, but no one cares unless a mainstream news source stumbles upon it and is objective enough to report it.
In what universe does a temperature change that is too small for anyone to feel over a 50 year period become globally significant? Where we don’t know if the global average temperature is 58 or 59 or 60 deg. F, but we are sure that if it increases by 1 or 2 deg. F, that would be a catastrophe?
Where our only truly global temperature measurements, the satellites, are ignored because they don’t show a record warm year in 2014?
In what universe do the climate models built to guide energy policy are not even adjusted to reflect reality, when they over-forecast past warming by a factor of 2 or 3?
And where people have to lie about severe weather getting worse (it hasn’t)? Or where we have totally forgotten that more CO2 is actually good for life on Earth, leading to increased agricultural productivity, and
global greening?
It’s the universe where political power and the desire to redistribute wealth have taken control of the public discourse. It’s a global society where people believe we can replace fossil fuels with unicorn farts and antigravity-based energy.
Feelings now trump facts.
At least engineers have to prove their ideas work. The widgets and cell phones and cars and jets and bridges they build either work or they don’t.
In climate science, whichever side is favored by politicians and journalism graduates is the side that wins.
And what about those 97% of scientists who agree? Well, what they all agree on is that if their government climate funding goes away, their careers will end.
Dr. Spencer really cuts to the heart of the matter here: The pushing of global warming orthodoxy is
all about money and power, which should be clear to you - even if you don't understand the science - just by watching the behavior of politicians and activists and understanding what typically motivates them.
If global warming is going to cause catastrophe that will devastate life on Earth, then we must act, and that means governments confiscating massive amounts of money and using it to fund new controls on the methods of industry and the everyday habits of people. Whether it's the amount of carbon pumped into the air by smokestacks or the kinds of cars Americans drive, they'll seek to control it using the rationale that without the controls life on Earth is in jeopardy.
Basically, it comes down to giving liberals something to do.
You have to understand that in a liberal's mind, the most terrifying thing imaginable is for government to actually be pared down to what the framers envisioned, because that would mean most of them couldn't hide behind bureaucratic day jobs protected by a public employee union, and would actually have to fend for themselves in the private sector. So they have to make up crises that justify their place on the public payroll, and the confiscation of private-sector wealth to pay their salaries.
What better gambit than one that sees the private sector threatening life itself simply by operating normally, only to have government swoop in and save the world? It matters not that their past predictions have not come true, and that even if their current predictions did come true there is no reason to believe it would cause the kinds of catastrophes they forecast. This is about justifying their existence, and bringing in some of their friends who don't want to have to go out and get real jobs either.
They'd love if they could also use it as a political wedge but that doesn't tend to work too well because the public doesn't buy their nonsense, probably because in spite of all their bluster the public actually hears on occasion from a truth-teller like Dr. Spencer. Even with the media firmly in their corner, it's hard for them to sell utter nonsense to people who don't have an inherent stake in believing it.
