Settled Science: The End is Nigh (Again)
Global cooling, subsequently renamed global warming, followed by the deliberately indecisive global climate change, has now, apparently, been re-re-named global warming. And old GW is bigger and better than ever! Just this week, it has caused 59,000 suicides, become 90% certain to pass “the tipping point” by 2100, and, worst of all, revived the film career of Al Gore. Is there any hope for us?
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty. One researcher — yes, one: global warming is the surest way to fame and grant money in today’s academic quagmire — has published a somehow newsworthy paper lining up suicide numbers among Indian farmers over the past three decades with the (alleged) global temperature rise during the same period, and come to the alarmingly predictable conclusion that the warming has caused the suicides. (I note that that kind of backwards reasoning could be used to show almost any correspondence between any two things as indicating causality, if one were imaginative enough.) Specifically, the researcher concludes that suicidal depression is caused by the increase in droughts as a result of GW. Amusingly, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi joins the calls for “immediate action” (i.e., global regulation), but blames the suicide rate primarily on “excessive rains.” That contradiction — two alarmists in search of a viable scare tactic — is a cute microcosm of the entire field of climate change advocacy. (And yes, advocacy is the right word. These people have a vested interest, or various vested interests, in the truth of their so-called theory.)
So what are we to make of this GW-caused crop destruction leading to increased suicides over the past thirty years? That India’s overall economy, and agricultural production in particular, has actually improved during the three decades in question is apparently one of those “inconvenient truths” we have to ignore in the name of science. I cite one paper in The Business and Management Review, Vol. 5 No. 4 (January 2015), by Indian scholar Fahim Mundhe, which begins with this sentence:
India has made impressive strides on the agricultural front during the past three decades.
Nope, we’re all supposed to believe global warming has killed agricultural production in India, which in turn has caused a massive suicide rate — in spite of the fact that the USDA released a 2014 report showing India reaching all-time highs in agricultural exports. Might the suicidal helplessness of some rural farmers have something to do with India’s socialist hyper-regulations and the oppressiveness of the traditional caste system? No, no, we mustn’t engage in such untenable wild hypotheses, but rather stick to the common sense answer, global warming.
Next, there’s this little “We’re done for, we’re done for” tidbit from an obviously unbiased climate science journal with the super-duper-objective name Nature Climate Change:
University of Washington researchers show a 90 percent chance that temperatures will have increased by 3.6 to 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.0 to 4.9 degrees Celsius) by the end of the 21st century. Using statistical projections based on 50 years’ worth of past data in countries around the world, they found just a 5 percent chance that Earth will warm by 2 degrees or less in the next eight decades. [Emphasis added.]
Right. And using statistical projections based on the past fifty years, during which I have lived continuously without dying, I predict that I will live forever. Here we come to the core of the rhetoric of “settled science.” Once the computer model-based hypothesis of global warming/cooling/climate change became theoretically indisputable — a phenomenon which happens in the scientific world during that rare cosmic event when Mars enters Jupiter’s third house, suddenly raising up tyrannical souls and Hollywood actors, rather than scientists, as judges of what is scientifically indisputable, alternative hypotheses be damned — all subsequent research into the area became immune to cross-checking against actual scientific evidence. Therefore, the computer models, based on an underlying assumption so malleable (i.e., flimsy) it has literally been used alternately to causally explain global cooling, global warming, and absolutely everything in between, including the absence of change (which of course indicates abnormal climate behavior, aka climate change), uniformly predict that the future will unfold exactly as the people who programmed the computer believed it would when they programmed it.
What evidence do we have for this (90%) indisputable future? Merely that something has happened during the past fifty years that, as long as our hypothesized cause remains present, may be predicted to continue happening in perpetuity, and at just about any rate of catastrophic progress we wish to program into the computer, since there is no hard evidence to support any particular correspondence between the alleged cause and any specific rate of change. (If there were any such hard evidence, Al Gore’s and the IPCC’s predictions would have come true by the dates previously postulated, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.)
Finally, we have Al Gore himself, one of the most self-important blowhards in the history of fake scientists, a poster boy for hypocrisy and applying one standard of truth for the gullible masses and another for himself and his elite friends, who, by their very lifestyles, prove that they don’t believe one word they are saying.
So why say it? If you still have to wonder about that, you have a purer heart than I, I’m afraid. I will not spoil your dinner or your precious naivety by explaining the reason. You’ll find out soon enough, probably even before your country is swallowed up by the oceans — assuming that hasn’t already happened.