COMMENTARY

How to Cope

I recently got a note from a subscriber who expressed what a lot of my readers are probably feeling. While he found the commentary in TIA Daily to be "spot-on," he also admitted that "I find it very upsetting to read day in and day out how the world is choosing to commit suicide, with very little evidence to the contrary…. I just don't want to open up my email every morning to the doom and gloom that is becoming our world."

 ... I have been hitting my readers hard with bad news recently, because the bad news has been coming thick and fast, as President Obama reveals his full agenda. … I am not done yet … [but] I can assure you that things will eventually get better. We are in the first weeks of the administration of a newly elected and still-popular president, who is using those advantages to push his leftist agenda. But he will have problems of his own, he will encounter significant opposition, and his momentum will fade.

And that leads me to the second grounds for reassurance: things will get better because the good guys will keep fighting, and they will win some important battles.

In that spirit, I'll devote the rest of today's TIA Daily to a few examples of the kind of "legitimate and real-world sunshine" Jack is talking about. And these examples are taken from an issue that may seem to be hopelessly lost: global warming.

Al Gore may be presenting his global-warming pageant to a receptive Congress, but that is yesterday's news. It's the same show Gore has been taking around the country for years—though I should note that a tinge of ridicule at the messianic pretensions of "the Goracle" is beginning to come even from conventional left-of-center Washington Post types like Dana Milbank.

But what is actually news is that the data is increasingly clashing with predictions of global warming, as the earth continues a decade-long cooling trend, with snow falling in the United Arab Emirates "for only the second time in recorded history." "So rare was the event that one lifelong resident said the local dialect had no word for it."

And the closer we get to the imposition of draconian energy rationing in response to the global warming hysteria, the more scientists seem to be willing to stand up and be counted in opposition—and the more willing those scientists are to declare global warming a fraud.

John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, has been speaking up for years and posted a response to Gore's recent Senate testimony on his website. After presenting a long history of the politicized science behind the global warming hysteria, he concludes: "I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it. Global Warming. It is the hoax. It is bad science. It is a hijacking of public policy…. It is the greatest scam in history."

More interesting is a letter posted on the website of Senator James Inhofe—the man who kept global warming legislation at bay for most of the past decade, until he lost his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The letter is from former NASA atmospheric scientist John Theon, who used to be the supervisor of James Hansen, whose 1988 Senate testimony helped Al Gore to launch his global warming crusade. Theon declares that Hansen "embarrassed NASA" and goes on to give his own view on global warming.

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

Another distinguished scientist has also spoken out recently. According to an article in the Princeton University student newspaper, Princeton physics professor William Happer "requested to be named a skeptic in light of the inauguration of…Barack Obama, whose administration has, as Happer notes, 'stated that carbon dioxide is a pollutant' and that humans are 'poisoning the atmosphere.'" Happer responds: "I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect, for example, absorption and emission of visible and infrared radiation, and fluid flow. Based on my experience, I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken."

But what is most interesting is Happer's description of his experience with global warming scientists when he was a research director for the Department of Energy:

"I would have [researchers] come in, and they would brief me on their topics," Happer explained. "They would show up. Shiny faces, presentation ready to go. I would ask them questions, and they would be just delighted when you asked. That was true of almost every group that came in."

The exceptions were climate change scientists, he said.

"They would give me a briefing. It was a completely different experience. I remember one speaker who asked why I wanted to know, why I asked that question. So I said, you know I always ask questions at these briefings.… I often get a much better view of [things] in the interchange with the speaker," Happer said. "This guy looked at me and said, 'What answer would you like?' I knew I was in trouble then. This was a community even in the early 1990s that was being turned political. [The attitude was] 'Give me all this money, and I'll get the answer you like.'"

Happer goes on to describe global warming as a "religious cult": "I think science is one of the great triumphs of humankind, and I hate to see it dragged through the mud in an episode like this."

This is precisely the kind of example I am talking about. The very fact that things are getting worse will prompt more men like Theon and Happer to speak up and to defend genuine science against this political hysteria.

That will be the sort of thing that saves us, in the long run, and it will be the most important story of the next few years.—RWT