Sandwich Board Science

The UN is good at very, very little. But that doesn't stop this corrupt and ineffective organization from demanding that the world comply with its hysterical vision of climate disaster.

After discussing how the political class 'never lets a real crisis go to waste,' Daniel Payne presents a devastating commentary on climate alarmists, who have manufactured a fantasy crisis in an effort to control wealth distribution across the globe:

Occasionally, if there’s no crisis to be found, a certain class of political actors will feel the need to make one up. When it comes to manufacturing catastrophes, there is no better practitioner of the art than Big Climate, which for several decades has been lazily issuing a new Extinction Event warning a couple of times a year, breathlessly informing the human race that our own self-inflicted destruction is just a few vapors of greenhouse gas away. Collectively, the die-hard climate change crowd plays the role of the long-bearded, wild-eyed sandwich-board-wearing doomcrier on the street corner, constantly warning us “THE END IS NEAR”—with the notable exception, of course, that nobody demands we take the doomcrier seriously by enacting an economically-devastating set of political policies. Most people just ignore him.

Climate science is the only field in which you’re derisively considered a ‘skeptic’ or a ‘denier’ by forming your judgment based upon the facts.

If you want a perfect encapsulation of the neurotic fearmongering that informs virtually all of popular climate science today, look no further than the United Nation’s latest pronouncement on the matter: the UN World Meteorological Organization recently came out with a series of “imagined weather forecasts” predicting the state of climate in the year 2050. “Miami South Beach is underwater,” announced one forecast; another predicted a mega-fatal “mega-drought in Arizona.” Never mind that the average weatherman can barely predict whether or not it’s going to rain tomorrow: instead, think about the fact that the United Nations is so hard-up for climate-change material that they’ve looked 36 years into the future to create fictional accounts of what the weather may be like. The tsunamis, the blistering drought, the Beginning of the End—all this stuff was supposed to be here years ago. The global climate chaos has never materialized, so the “experts” have set their sights on the future, doing some educated guessing on what the weather’s going to be like four decades hence.

Maybe we should just ignore them.

In fact, when it comes to the hyperbolic predictions of climate change alarmists, ignoring them isn't enough. The reason is that an uncritical media promotes their hysteria, without an examination of the broad array of evidence that refutes what they claim. The media presents the climate change meme without the critical analysis that would be applied if, say, a creationist claimed that evolution is not supported by hard science. In effect, climate change alarmists are no better than creationists, using quasi-religious doctrine to propose scientifically unsupportable claims and then trying to force the doctrine that is precipitated by those bogus claims on those who rightly oppose it. For that reason, many members of the public believe climate change fearmongering. The claims of "Big Climate" alarmists must be refuted. It's not hard to do, as many of my previous posts on the subject have demonstrated.

As Daniel Payne correctly notes, the hysteria promulgated by climate change alarmists is a classic example of sandwich board science. Those who promote it begin with a predetermined result and then message the data and build models that will ensure the result is "proven." The media always loves a story that promotes irrational fear unsupported by hard data and unsubstantiated by context. For that reason, they're all too happy to run with the sandwich board politicians (Miami will be under water in 35 years!). The result is an misinformed public that acquiesces to destructive policies that will do nothing to "save the planet" but everything to support the agenda of the those carrying the sandwich board.