Will The Overselling Of Global Warming Lead To A New Scientific Dark Age?

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Will the over­selling of cli­mate change lead to a new sci­en­tif­ic dark age? That’s the ques­tion being posed in the lat­est issue of an Aus­tralian lit­er­ary jour­nal, Quad­rant, by Garth Pal­tridge, one of the world’s most respect­ed atmos­pher­ic scientists.

Pal­tridge was a Chief Research Sci­en­tist with the Com­mon­wealth Sci­en­tif­ic and Indus­tri­al Research Orga­ni­za­tion (CSIRO).  The lat­ter is Australia’s equiv­a­lent of the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, our mas­sive Fed­er­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry net­work, and all the gov­ern­men­tal agency sci­ence branch­es rolled into one.

Pal­tridge lays out the well-known uncer­tain­ties in cli­mate fore­cast­ing. These include our inabil­i­ty to prop­er­ly sim­u­late clouds that are any­thing like what we see in the real world, the embar­rass­ing lack of aver­age sur­face warm­ing now in its 17th year, and the fum­bling (and con­tra­dic­to­ry) attempts to explain it away.

While the polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect name for the last 17 years is “the pause,” it’s much more like the P‑wave, which reflects the crustal slip­page that occurs before the shak­ing (and tsuna­mi, if beneath the sea) of a cat­a­stroph­ic earth­quake. Humans can’t feel them, but many ani­mals can, which is why birds alight short­ly before all hell breaks loose.

Cli­mate sci­en­tists have been pro­found­ly defen­sive about the known prob­lems. Pal­tridge ele­gant­ly explains that this has to be the case, and describes the like­ly hor­rif­ic con­se­quences when the day of reck­on­ing final­ly arrives.

That day is com­ing clos­er, because, as Pal­tridge notes, peo­ple are catch­ing on:

…the aver­age man in the street, a sen­si­ble chap who by now can smell the signs of an over­sold envi­ron­men­tal cam­paign from miles away, is begin­ning to sus­pect that it is pol­i­tics rather than sci­ence which is dri­ving the issue.”

The sci­en­tif­ic estab­lish­ment has paint­ed itself into a cor­ner over glob­al warm­ing. Paltridge’s expla­na­tions for this are depress­ing­ly famil­iar to those who read these columns.

 

670px-Ragendra_Pachauri_1

 

 

 

Rajen­dra K. Pachau­ri, the chair of the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Prize togeth­er with Al Gore, at a con­fer­ence in Vien­na, 22 June 2009.
Pho­to by Mikhail Evstafiev (Pho­to cred­it: Wikipedia)

 

Con­tin­ue arti­cle here:  http://forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2014/02/03/will-the-overselling-of-global-warming-lead-to-a-new-scientific-dark-age/