Global Warming

Global Warming: Have an Honest Debate

I cringe every time I hear someone invoke “settled science.” And when a scientist does it, I smell a rat. Gravity is settled science. But how gravity works is not. Not much of science is all that settled. Especially assertions that global warming is man-made. Claims of settled science have such a tattered history of [...]

I cringe every time I hear someone invoke “settled science.” And when a scientist does it, I smell a rat.

Gravity is settled science. But how gravity works is not. Not much of science is all that settled. Especially assertions that global warming is man-made. Claims of settled science have such a tattered history of being wrong, you’d think global warming partisans would be afraid to trot out that old canard.

Yet, they do. We got another dose of settled-science baloney a couple of weeks ago when the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said the science underlying the assertions of man-made global warming is “sound,” despite “Climategate” discoveries that called into question global warming’s basic conclusions. Even worse, the council’s panel went well beyond the reach of cautious science by stepping into the political arena and calling for a carbon tax or cap-and-trade legislation.

The panel reeks with politics. Global warming activists from the World Wildlife Fund, the John Heinz III Center, Carnegie Institution and Susanne Moser Research and Consulting form the core of the panel, said James M. Taylor,?senior fellow at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute.

Well, you’ll say, “Isn’t the conservative Heartland Institute just as bad, doing exactly what it accuses global warming activists of doing: politicizing what should be a purely technical and scientific issue?”
Well, I’d respond, if you had attended the institute’s fourth International Conference on Climate Change two weeks ago in Chicago, you would have heard climate scientists describe in detail the unraveling of the case for man-made global warming. In addition to the science discussed there, Joseph Bast, Heartland president, described other developments that have been eating away at the settled science:

In February, Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, admitted to the absence of evidence of statistically significant global warming since 1995. He said the “vast majority of climate scientists” don’t agree that the issue is settled. His climate unit was the source of the Climate gate e-mails last year that disclosed serious data manipulation. And, in January, the torchbearer of global warming — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — acknowledged major errors of fact and forecasts.