The Global Warming Hypothesis continues to unravel....The best bet for the future is global cooling, not warming. It is, however, one of the curiosities of our time that a vast pile of intellectual deadwood, held together by money and social consensus, has created an intellectual orthodoxy that we are in a period of global warming and polar melting.
The hard evidence for this is sparse and diminishing. The real evidence of temperature anomalies, and satellite data, and a growing number of serious scientists, goes against it. Despite this, governments everywhere are using global warming, which cannot be caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions on the scale proposed, as an excuse to invade lives, regulate households, raise taxes, and coddle the thaumaturgic fetishes of anti-christian but not post-religious secularists.
The problem is multifaceted. To a large extent, there are far too many computer models which are crude, apt to go wrong, and upon which too much weight is placed. The same troubles hit the global markets a few years ago, with the same sort of deafened ignorance and self interest in response to criticism.
I keep going on about this because I would urge people to think. Have a look at this article about an eminent scientist in Australia, who is a master of his field and who has laid out the arguments against global warming. We are in the grip of pseudoscience, which has generated one of history's great hysterias.
This is one of the many reasons that the Left has turned into a strange mix of intolerance, neurosis, regulation, and hyper-individualism. But once you know the truth, how could you go back to lies?
Here are some alternative historians living in the moment. At least they make more sense than most mainstream muppets.
Comments
Mary
I am open to an hypothesis of global warming; it has clearly happened many times in the past and will presumably many times in the future. But, and I have to emphasise this, people 'believe' in it, and can't show clear evidence of it. In addition, there is much evidence of no real variation in temperature; of a connection of warming in the nineties of all the inner solar system planets with solar activity; no explanation of the role of the oceans or clouds in global warming theory; and an obvious tax-raising agenda.
I think in general that conservation, limits to consumption, sensible energy use, and a use of progressively less wasteful energy--from wood to coal to gas and oil and then nuclear--is a good thing.
Scientists are prone to false consensus. A hundred years ago, race was an proven reality associated with specific psychological or moral characteristics, even though that proposition is obvious nonsense now. Polygenesis was a serious hypothesis, and the idea of a mechanical ether was orthodoxy. These things are now seen as silly.
Science should be falsifiable and verifiable; can anyone prove global warming is actually happening? Lots of evidence exists that it is not.
Global warming seems to me much more about the combination of a modern intolerance of risk--see past articles on the Large Hadron Collider, and the comments--and a media which is capable of being manipulated by people who need grants and who tend to think of themselves as right. I also think we are used to very conservative views of how the world shouldn't change because of the comforts of urbanisation.
I have to run to lunch--then I'm off to the Baroque exhibition at the V & A--but will return later. Many thanks for your comment!
M