In Denial: The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign

www.weeklystandard.com...

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/7ffc33ce3a7d.jpg[/atsimg]

Quote from source:
It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago - changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign's fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media - even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC - are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying "It is too so!" In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

The body blows to the climate campaign did not end with the Climategate emails. The IPCC - which has produced four omnibus assessments of climate science since 1992 - has issued several embarrassing retractions from its most recent 2007 report, starting with the claim that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of melting as soon as 2035. That such an outlandish claim would be so readily accepted is a sign of the credulity of the climate campaign and the media: Even if extreme global warming occurred over the next century, the one genuine scientific study available estimated that the huge ice fields of the Himalayas would take more than 300 years to melt - a prediction any beginning chemistry student could confirm with a calculator. (The actual evidence is mixed: Some Himalayan glaciers are currently expanding.) The source for the melt-by-2035 claim turned out to be not a peer-reviewed scientific assessment, but a report from an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which in turn lifted the figure from a popular magazine article in India whose author later disavowed his offhand speculation.

I do not understand how people still believe in anthropogenic global warming. Yes, we pollute, but we are not the main cause of climate change. I agree we should stop the things we are doing, like poisoning all the rivers and oceans and killing off every species we see, but do not tax us to death for something that we are not causing or can prevent for that matter. We can barely control our society let alone the sun.

And for all the bad we do to our environment, it is corporations mostly. They are so worried about their bottom line and profit that they do not care who or what gets effected in the process.

Sometimes I am embarrassed to be a human.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

P.S. I had to add that little comic because I couldn't stop laughing when I saw it.

reply to post by predator0187


Well, I think that it is important that people know the truth about global warming, and not buy into government carbon taxes. I too believe that we should change the way we use up energy, and how we dispose of our waste. Going green IS smart if your informed. I can't wait to see what the future holds for us. I wonder if we will be forced to go green, or if everyone just decides that it is best for us.

Oh yeah, by the way the picture is funny.

[edit on 085America/Chicagof2010Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:03:15 -0600America/Chicago 3107America/Chicago by Trams]

The saddest part of all is that there are a plethora of areas where real environmental degradation is taking a huge toll and are as big a threat to the continued long-term survival of not just our species but a large chunk of the entire eco-system as well. You already mentioned a few. There are others. The trouble is that these other problems have gotten like, zero press. The media has consistantly focused it's coverage of how mankind is destroying the planet on Global Warming! Now that Climategate has reared its ugly head the tendency is to act like everything's going to be just swell after all! And the worst part of all about the scanfal is that some of these less-than-honorable scientists howled long and loud over how Bush's climagate guys were cooking the numbers! They really ought to be ashamed!

reply to post by godless

And the worst part of all about the scanfal is that some of these less-than-honorable scientists howled long and loud over how Bush's climagate guys were cooking the numbers! They really ought to be ashamed!

I agree but then this from 3-5-10:

Climate scientists to fight back at skeptics

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics. In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of "being treated like political pawns" and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times

"Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules," Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.
Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work.
"This was an outpouring of angry frustration on the part of normally very staid scientists who said, 'God, can't we have a civil dialogue here and discuss the truth without spinning everything,'" said Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment who was part of the e-mail discussion but wants the scientists to take a slightly different approach

Bottom line is the scientists, Obama leftists, and sympathetic news media will be back with vengeance soon defending their sacred cow AGW!

Originally posted by plumranch
Bottom line is the scientists, Obama leftists, and sympathetic news media will be back with vengeance soon defending their sacred cow AGW!

Hayward, the author of the OP article says exactly this in closing:

The death rattle of the climate campaign will be deafening. It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly. The climate campaigners have been fond of warning of catastrophic “tipping points” for years. Well, a tipping point has indeed arrived—just not the one the climate campaigners expected.
The lingering question is whether the collapse of the climate campaign is also a sign of a broader collapse in public enthusiasm for environmentalism in general. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two of the more thoughtful and independent-minded figures in the environmental movement, have been warning their green friends that the public has reached the point of “apocalypse fatigue.” They’ve been met with denunciations from the climate campaign enforcers for their heresy. The climate campaign has no idea that it is on the cusp of becoming as ludicrous and forlorn as the World -Esperanto Association.

In Denial: The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign
s&f for the artwork

The Weekly Standard has always had fantastic covers. This one, featuring "the emperor's new clothes," is priceless. Reminds me of Bragg.

jw