Climate Change

Barack Obama, following in the footsteps of another great progressive scientist, Al Gore, made the following anti-scientific statement a few days ago:

“We have to be clear, a changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms, floods are potentially going to be costlier and they’re going to be harsher."

Of course, this president regularly plays fast and loose with the truth, so I'm certain that he and his trained hamsters in the median never considered that virtually every shred of factual evidence indicates that (1) global warming has abated and no significant warming has occurred for the past 17 years, (2) that the vaunted ice sheets in both the arctic and the antarctic regions are growing and thickening, counter to claims made by eminent progressive scientists like Gore, (3) that the science is far from settled, but that opinions and facts that run counter to the prevailing leftist wisdom are quashed rather than fully explored, (4) that the term "climate change" is clearly a dishonest catch-all that allows global warming proponents to survive and prosper in spite of points 1 - 3, (5) that climate change has become a pseudo-religion in which belief trumps facts and politics trumps common sense.

Oh, by the way, Obama was in California to lament the on-going drought in that region (and to play golf on courses that demand 1 million gallons of water each day). At least in part the lack of water in the region is due to government actions, not "climate change." The EPA and CA have stopped the transfer of water to regions that need it to save an endangered fish. Okaaaay. That makes sense in the through-the-looking-glass world of the left.

But back to "climate change."

Joseph Curl writes:

[In the 1970s] it was so cold across the world, and had been for so long, the mainstream media began writing stories about a Doomsday scenario — “global cooling.” “U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming,” said a Washington Post headline in 1971. “The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts.” The New York Times went one further, saying: “Climate Changes Called Ominous.” But it wasn’t just theory. “There is a finite probability that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the Earth within the next hundred years.” All that changed in the 1990s, when — gasp! — it got warmer. Winters were milder, summers were hotter. And the mainstream media flip-flopped. Now, “global warming” was a matter of life and death and, worse, Mankind made it happen! They lined up scientists and climatologists to say it over and over: Armageddon!

“U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming,” said a Washington Post headline in 1971. “The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts.” The New York Times went one further, saying: “Climate Changes Called Ominous.” But it wasn’t just theory. “There is a finite probability that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the Earth within the next hundred years.”

All that changed in the 1990s, when — gasp! — it got warmer. Winters were milder, summers were hotter. And the mainstream media flip-flopped. Now, “global warming” was a matter of life and death and, worse, Mankind made it happen! They lined up scientists and climatologists to say it over and over: Armageddon!

Climate does change—regularly. There is little repeatable scientific evidence to prove that on-going changes in climate have anything to do with the causative factors that climate alarmists preach. In fact, most evidence indicates that sun cycles, along with normal variation in ocean temperatures are dominant causes.

But no worries, this is religion, so ya gotta believe.

Update:
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Roger Simon comments:

The great thing about “climate change” armageddon talk is that no one can prove you wrong, unless you’re like Al Gore and start to make short run predictions. But no one’s likely to make that mistake again.

No, “climate change” makes, or should make, a perfect distraction. And right now liberalism needs a distraction, preferably one that gets people and nations to cough up money.

Unfortunately (or really fortunately), the money-collecting part won’t be so easy. Even a few liberal audiences, religious fanatics though they may be, are beginning to smell a rat, not that you will hear too many say it out loud. That would be an admission that could start some serious and dangerous unraveling.

I don't think this will unravel in the near term. The horrors of climate change and humankind's nefarious role in it are taught as hard science in every 6th grade "science" class. It's a dominant funding source for climatology research—in fact, if you posit that climate change may not be anything but a natural phenomenon, you simply don't get research dollars from the feds (that's science at it's best, isn't it?). It's a counter-factual, junk science religion, and religion dies hard.

Update II:
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On the outrageous ad hominem charge that those who question "climate change" are "deniers," members of "the flat earth society" (that from another eminent progressive scientitist, John Kerry) or otherwise immoral, this from Glen Reynolds:

Regardless, while one should trust science as a method — honestly done, science remains the best way at getting to the truth on a wide range of factual matters — there’s no particular reason why one should trust scientists and especially no particular reason why one should trust the people running scientific institutions, who often aren’t scientists themselves.

In fact, the very core of the scientific method is supposed to be skepticism. We accept arguments not because they come from people in authority but because they can be proven correct — in independent experiments by independent experimenters. If you make a claim that can’t be proven false in an independent experiment, you’re not really making a scientific claim at all.

And saying, “trust us,” while denouncing skeptics as — horror of horrors — “skeptics” doesn’t count as science, either, even if it comes from someone with a doctorate and a lab coat.

And it counts even less if it comes from a venal politician who wouldn't know a predictive computer model form a unpredictable runway model.

Update III
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The inimitable conservative commentator, George Will, when asked to respond to Barack Obama's contention (paraphrased by Chris Wallace) that "climate change accounts for everything from drought to floods. George? Do you buy it?" commented:

No. And neither does science. But I'm one of those who are called "deniers." And the imputation is that I deny climate change. It would be impossible to state with greater precision the opposite of my view, which is that, of course the climate is changing. It's always changing. That's what gave us the Medieval Warm Period. That's what gave us subsequent to that for centuries the Little Ice Age. Of course it's changing.

When a politician on a subject implicating science, hard science, economic science, social science says "the debate is over," you may be sure of two things. The debate is raging and he's losing it. So I think frankly as a policy question, Chris, Holman Jenkins, Kim's colleague at the Wall Street Journal put it perfectly. The only questions is, how much money are we going to spend? How much wealth are we going to forego creating in order to have zero or discernible effect on the environment?