Climate Scientist quitting because of political activism of her profession

Emperor penguins threatened by climate scientists

The judgment of climate scientists is apparently suffering from the fact that they are drowning in grant money to promote the idea of a global crisis. Try to make sense of these two headlines in recent days:

July 6 NPR Headline: "Study Shows Penguins Endangered By Waning Antarctic Ice." This is priceless. If you look at the interview of Hal Caswell, the author of this "study," what you notice is he never says that the penguins are actually endangered now (nor does the abstract of the study itself). It's all his "anticipation." This is all, he says, in the interest of getting Emperor penguins on the endangered species list which "would provide more impetus to take action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing or halting climate change." The very impetus of the study is political.

But what is all this about "waning Antarctic Ice"? which brings us to the second headline:

July 5 Daily Mail: "Global warming computer models confounded as Antarctic sea ice hits new record high with 2.1 million square miles more than is usual for time of year." What was that about "waning ? Yup: An area the size of Greenland, which is normally open water, is frozen. And this isn't just an anomaly. This has apparently been the trend in recent years--not only in Antarctica, but the entire southern hemisphere.

And as we know, climate scientists always have an escape hatch. Here is Caswell talking about the poor penguins, who lose no matter what happens:

So this species breeds in colonies on sea ice. They make this long march from the edge of the ocean to breed in the middle of the winter. So if there's too much sea ice, that trudge to bring food to the chicks gets longer and more energetically expensive for the penguins, and this cuts down on their breeding success. On the other hand, if there's too little sea ice, then the basis of the Antarctic food web is not as productive.

They can't win! The climatologists have them coming and going. They don't stand a chance. But it saves climate scientists in the end because (just as both cold and warm weather confirm their theory) it keeps their theory unfalsifiable.

Climate Change in 12 Minutes

More indication that there may be as much Global Warming (to steal a phrase from David Berlinski) as there is funding available to find it:

 

The Psychology of Apocalypse: How poetry saved the world

Last weekend's abortive Judgment Day just goes to show what happens when you ignore the poets.

I didn't know anything about Harold Camping's theology, but I didn't need to know much to conclude that he was a dispensationalist. The theology of the man who garnered worldwide media attention for what turned out to be a failed prediction about the end of the world comes from a movement that began in the 19th century and has produced what we might charitably call the "Rapture industry."

Dispensationalism is a modernist school of theology within Protestantism that holds that God has ordained different and successive "ages" in the life of the church in each of which God relates to the church in some different way. God uses these dispensations to progressively unfold His revelation to the church. The exact number of these ages or dispensations depends on which dispensationalist you talk to, but they generally number from three to seven. What they agree upon, however, is that we are in the second-to-the-last age--the age that precedes the "Rapture."

The "Rapture" is the label affixed to the event whereby Jesus returns (sort of) and takes the church out of the world before the seven year tribulation because, you know, God would not allow Christians to be persecuted (despite the fact that He has allowed it repeatedly throughout history). It's the First Second Coming as opposed to the Second Second Coming, when He comes for real and kicks butt and takes names. This school of thought was initially popularized by the Schofield Reference Bible.

The dispensationalist view of the end times (what is called "premillenial pretribulationism," meaning that Jesus will return before a thousand year earthly reign after he has first sort of returned to take the church out of the world to spare it from a seven year tribulation period) overflowed its dispensationalist banks first in a book published in the 1970s called The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey. The book was not only a bestseller; it was the biggest selling book of the decade (even though the New York Times somehow managed to prevent it from ever appearing on a bestseller list because it was a religious book), making Lindsey a multi-millionaire.

The view later spilled out into into non-evangelical world with onset of the Left Behind books, authored by Tim LaHaye and ghostwritten by Jerry Jenkins--books which also sold in the millions and were actually allowed to appear on the bestseller lists by the secular literary authorities.

The penchant for setting dates for the end of the world is a peculiarly dispensationalist habit. If you go back, you can find Lindsey doing it, although he did a better job of rhetorically hedging his bets than the more reckless Camping. For Lindsey, the date was 1988, which passed with a similar lack of apocalyptic action and a much smoother exit strategy by the author.

I call dispensationalism "modernist" because, like modernism in general, it is marked by the tendency to quantify the unquantifiable. This is the largest part of its appeal: it gives you definite answers, neat timelines, and simple, literal explanations. In fact, you've got to hand it to them: the dispensationalists produce the best charts. They have charts for the ages of the church, charts for the Rapture, charts for the millenium, charts for the tribulation.

In the early 1980s, the wags at a Christian satire magazine Wittenburg Door published a detailed End Times chart that showed the rapture of the newly rich Hal Lindsey's Porsche. Had it not been published so relatively early in his life, it might also have included the eschatological trajectory of all four of his successive wives.

The failure of dispensationalist End Times claims are due largely to a simple lack of poetic sense among its adherents. Apocalyptic literature is a literary mixture of the real and the visionary, the mundane and the fantasic, and the literal and the metaphorical that has a sort of surreal quality. It presents persons, places, and events that may have both a figurative and a concrete application, and that can have multiple referents. Time plays tricks and even numbers cannot be quantified.

What does the Beast represent? What is the meaning of his seven heads and ten horns? Who is the Anti-Christ? Who or what is Babylon? Under the gaze of a non-literary mind, each of these must have a definite one-on-one allegorical referent. The figurative must be pursued and rendered literal, and no metaphor can escape without being captured, tagged, and totaled.

There is little tolerance for poetic latitude, and there is no patience for the inexact.

To listen to people like Pat Robertson (another famous dispensationalist) try to explain the meaning of the Book of Revelation is a painful exercise because he is dealing with a form of expression that he simply does not understand. Poetry is a language with its own rules and its own methods of interpretation. It is a language with which these people are simply unfamiliar.

This is why Bob Dylan is a better theologian than Tim LaHaye. He at least understands the poetic. In fact, I've got a test that all interpreters of Revelation should have to pass before they are allowed to make public statements on the Book of Revelation. Here's how it works:

Test #1: The aspiring eschatologist should first be asked to interpret and explain Dante's Divine Comedy. If he cannot, then his prophet's license should be temporarily suspended.

Test #2: Next, he should be asked to explain the following poems: "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats; "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," by William Blake; and "The Hollow Men," by T. S. Eliot. If the candidate cannot perform this procedure either, he should be required to refrain from making public statements on the End Times altogether.

Test #3: If the aspiring prophet has failed the first two tests, he should be asked to make sense of the lyrics to the following songs: "The Earth Died Screaming," by Tom Waits; "When the Ship Comes In," by Bob Dylan; and "When the Man Comes Around," by Johnny Cash. If he stumbles here too, he should simply be put out of the city with a week's worth of provisions and told not to come back.

He's hopeless.

Why did BBC take down "Coldest December day on record" headline

Now you see it, now you don't.

It's still available on a screen capture, but the BBC's story on the "Coldest December day on record" suddenly got turned into "Record cold continues." Strange how that works.

If we said the former, of course, it would not adequately communicate the Global Warming idea that The End Is Near. The knowledge that The Sky Is Falling might not be entirely clear.

Personally, I am comforted to know that there are attentive monitors on hand to make sure that we do not deviate from the party line on these things.

HT: Anthony Watts

Global Warming alarmists spin like a top on embarrassing revelations

If you ever wanted to see spinning at its finest, get a load of the response from Real Climate on the embarrassing revelations now coming out on the web from private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the School of Environmental Sciences of the University of East Anglia, an allegedly reputable center for climate research and one of the bastions of Global Warming alarmism. The e-mails were made public after the files were allegedly hacked from a Russian web server, although it is apparently not clear whether they were hacked or released from someone within the community. In any case, the authenticity of the e-mails has apparently been acknowledged.

Here is one assessment from Investigate Magazine:

As the fallout from CRUHACK grows, the biggest story is not actually whether data was manipulated in individual cases, although in my view that's bad. And it's not that global warming scientists were so arrogant in 2004 as to mock the death of an opponent, although that too is bad.

It's not that some of these scientists were sitting on taxpayer-sourced slush funds worth tens of millions of dollars each, for an industry total of somewhere close to US$100 billion, whilst their supporters raised merry-hell about Exxon sponsoring skeptic research to the tune of a few million, although this too is massively hypocritical.

It's not that the scientists show signs of being political activists, and even helping promote a global governance agenda.

No, in my view the biggest scandal to erupt from CRUHACK is the death of peer-reviewed climate science.

We now all know – the entire industrialized world – that while global warming scientists and their supporters were publicly ridiculing skeptic's arguments as "not peer reviewed" because – by implication – the arguments were not good enough, that in fact some of the top scientific advisors to the UN IPCC were conspiring (and that is the right word) to sabotage any attempt by other scientists to publish peer reviewed papers challenging global warming.

And what these e-mails reveal? Well, according the Real Climate, some of whose participants apparently wrote some of the revealing e-mails, nothing important. That is, unless you consider comments that seem to indicate intentions to mislead the public on Global Warming, doctoring data to help their cause, and support for suppressing article submissions to peer-reviewed journals that disagree with politically correct positions on the issue.

Here is a comment from one of the e-mails, referring to several papers from people who have the nerve to disagree with the Approved Opinions:

K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

So, how do we explain that? Here is "Gavin" at Real Climate giving it the ol' college try:

Bad papers clutter up assessment reports and if they don't stand up as science, they shouldn't be included. No-one can 'redefine' what the peer-reviewed literature is.

If the papers are really "bad" (likely translation: "disagree with us"), then why would a "redefinition" of the peer-review process be necessary? And even if they can't actually do it, are we supposed to be comfortable with the fact that Global Warming scientists would like to?

As Investigate Magazine further points out:

The next global warming believer who raises "peer review" as a defence of global warming deserves to be metaphorically tarred and feathered and laughed at for the rest of his or her natural life.

The Wegman report to the US Congress found unhealthy links between the IPCC's scientific advisors. The CRUHACK emails now prove that festering scientific corruption beyond reasonable doubt.

The integrity of climate science died this weekend. It will never be the same.

Looks like some people have some splainin' to do.

The silence is deafening on record low ice melt in Antarctica

Just as the best way to rob a bank is to own one, the best way to censor the news is to be the one selecting it. According to Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a "30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009."

Translation? A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008-2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980-2009.

But the fact that a 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008-2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980-2009 apparently hasn't made its way into the news stories that like to cover the fact that the End is Near.

"Where are the headlines?" asks World Climate Report. "Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?"

The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.

It would seem that with oft-stoked fears of a disastrous sea level rise coming this century any news that perhaps some signs may not be pointing to its imminent arrival would be greeted by a huge sigh of relief from all inhabitants of earth (not only the low-lying ones, but also the high-living ones, respectively under threat from rising seas or rising energy costs).

But not a peep.

Oh, and did we mention that a 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008-2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980-2009?

HT: Watt's Up with That?

Buy the Beach House Back: Antarctica may not be melting after all

There are many reasons to think that We're All Going to Die, but there could be one less reason to think so, now that Antarctic ice seems to be up over this time last year. Not only are media claims that Antarctica is melting based on upside-down thermometers, says Anthony Watts, but they are apparently also based on upside down ice sensors.

Here is The Snow and Ice Data Center chart on Antarctic ice extent:

But don't worry. Someone is bound to come up with at least two other reasons We're All Going to Die to replace this one.

Trust me.

The End (of California) is Near. Or maybe not.

As we know, every unusual weather event is ipso facto evidence of Global Warming. Now Climate Progress's Joe Romm tries to pin the California fires on global warming. Maybe we could just go back historically and take all the natural disasters in California--fires, mudslides, earthquakes, volcanic activity, Jerry Brown--and attribute them to global warming too. I grew up there. Looking back, it's a wonder I survived at all.

That probably also explains why it strikes such fear in my heart when I hear that ...

THE END IS NEAR.

But, anyway, it turns out Romm just doesn't know what he's talking about.

We're all going to die! We're all going to die! Nevermind.

If you were worried you were going to get hit by flying ice shards as glaciers collapsed in Greenland and Antartica because the Earth's thermostat has been set on "Hi" and we're all going to die because global warming is going to kill us all, there is good news: Glaciers don't collapse.

Just thought you'd like to know.

The EPA's new target: Cattle flatulence

Okay, we have officially entered the Environmental Twilight Zone. The federal government is trying regulation cattle flatulence:

The Environmental Protection Agency said April 17 that it is closer to declaring greenhouse-gas emissions a threat to public health. The announcement heated the debate over what types of emissions should be regulated, including large cattle-feeding operations. " EPA estimates that U.S. cattle emit about 5.5 million metric tons of methane per year into the atmosphere, accounting for 20 percent of U.S. methane emissions," reports Lisa Hare of the Yankton Press & Dakotan.

One of the many ramifications of the Obama administration's policy of Government Control of Everything.

Is there a debate over whether the end is near for the theory that the End is Near?

Al Gore, arguing that there's no more debate over whether the End Is Near:

“I want to be polite to you,” Mr. Gore responded [to a Danish environmentalist who disputes his global warming alarmism]. But, no. “The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ issue,” he said. “It’s not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake,” he added.

There should be no more debate over global warming. That undoubtedly means that there is no more debate about whether there is no more debate about global warming.

This is typical of the ruling Liberal Authoritarianism: liberal views simply must be accepted. We're just supposed to take our medicine and not complain. This is what James Kalb, in his book The Tyranny of Liberalism, calls "forced consent."

And by the way, where are the Darwinists to give Gore a long, boring, preachy lecture on how one should use the word "theory"?