Pursuing praxis

TIA Daily Feature Article

The Truth Is Inconvenient

Who Is Really Speaking Up for Science Against an Entrenched Establishment?

by Robert Tracinski

Al Gore is trying to resurrect his environmentalist crusade-and, perhaps, his political career-with a new film An Inconvenient Truth, which seeks to depict him as a courageous voice in the wilderness, speaking up for important scientific truths that challenge the status quo of an entrenched political establishment.

This is, of course, laughable. Everyone knows that the global warming theory is the dogma of the entrenched establishment. We know this because we are relentlessly barraged with global warming hysteria from political leaders, the mainstream media, and the government-scientific complex. We are constantly told that we are in imminent danger of dying from everything as catastrophic as massive flooding or as trivial as runaway poison ivy (fueled-like all plants-by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and hotter temperatures).

What the general public may not have heard about is the courageous band of researchers who are the ones actually speaking up for science in the face of this global warming juggernaut. Ironically, some of the reporting prompted by Gore’s film has allowed some of these scientists to be heard.

Let us look at just one scientific issue: Gore’s claim that global warming is causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, with Hurricane Katrina as his prime example. It’s fair to single out this claim, because that is what the filmmakers have done. Posters for An Inconvenient Truth feature an arresting image of the swirling storm-clouds of a hurricane emerging from an industrial smokestack.

But the truth about this claim is very inconvenient for Al Gore and the environmentalists. The May 29 Washington Times published an article (this link may require registration) surveying a number of top hurricane scientists, whom it found to be “divided” on the merits of Gore’s claim. The fortuitously named Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center even doubts that hurricane intensity has increased as much as claimed over the past thirty years, pointing out that scientists couldn’t accurately measure hurricane wind speeds until 1984. Data before then is incomplete: we don’t know how much of the increase in Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes recorded in recent years is due to an actual increase or whether it is, as he puts it, an “artificial increase,” an illusion produced by our improved ability to measure hurricanes.

Landsea further points out to the Washington Times that even the computer models that predict an increase in the intensity of hurricanes due to global warming show that it would only have increased the intensity of Hurricane Katrina by a mere two percent-an insignificant amount.

Meanwhile, Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane forecaster at Colorado State University, points out that increased hurricane activity in the Atlantic has been balanced out by a decrease in the number of tropical storms in the Pacific. “With regards to the number of Category 4-5 hurricanes, there has been a large increase in North Atlantic storms and a large decrease in Northeast Pacific storms. When these two regions are summed together, there has been virtually no increase in Category 4-5 hurricanes.”

The May 30 Los Angeles Times carries a profile of Klotzbach’s mentor, Colorado State University professor emeritus William M. Gray, whom the Times describes as an “eminence grise” of climatology who pioneered the science of forecasting hurricane activity. The article notes: “Like many hurricane forecasters, Gray rejects the theory that the recent uptick in storms is due to climate change. He points out that the US had an unusually low number of storms from the 1970s to the end of the century and says the law of averages is simply catching up.” But Gray goes even farther: at age 76, this distinguished scientist is devoting his retirement to refuting the entire notion of that global warming is caused by human activity, an idea he dismisses as “one of the greatest hoaxes ever.” Gray is “not one to just go along with the crowd,” Klotzbach concludes.

Now isn’t that interesting? It turns out that the man taking an independent stand and refusing to “just go along with the crowd” on global warming is not a lifelong politician rewarded with a fawning documentary and inside-the-beltway adulation-but rather a distinguished scientists who is a global warming skeptic.

If you really want to get a glimpse of the global warming groupthink in action, however, you might check out a long report on the global warming skeptics by Joel Achenbach in the May 28 Washington Post Magazine. It is remarkable partly because Achenbach interviews a number of scientists who oppose the global warming consensus, starting with William Gray (who, Achenbach reports, has actually paid a price for his outspokenness, being disinvited from scientific conferences and having his federal funding cut off). But what is more interesting about this report is the snide, flippant tone in which it is written. Scientific dissent on global warming inhabits what Achenbach dismisses as a “parallel earth,” where everything we know to be true is the exact opposite, while conservative think-tanks who disseminate these findings speak in “mysterious words that seem to come from a s! ecret conservatives-only code book.”

This “mysterious code” turns out to be run-of-the-mill pro-free-market theory, familiar to anyone who has spent time studying the right. But it is clear that Achenbach hasn’t done so. The whole article conveys the wonderment of a journalist who has apparently advanced to the top of his profession without being required to acknowledge that the national political debate has two sides-and he is suddenly dumbstruck to discover that there are lobbyists who don’t regard government control as the solution to everything, and that there are scientists who challenge the global-warming orthodoxy. He is so dumbstruck by this revelation that he can’t be bothered to spend more than two seconds contemplating any of the scientific facts the global warming skeptics keep pelting him with. Facts, schmacts-his attitude conveys-can you believe that there are actually people who don’t believe in the global warming goblin?

This sums up the actual intellectual climate of the global warming issue. Global warming is the entrenched dogma that serves a political convenient aim-the left’s vilification of capitalism and private enterprise-and those who challenge it are the courageous dissenters struggling to get a hearing from a hostile media establishment.

So if the splashy movie-poster claim of An Inconvenient Truth turns out to be dubious and hotly contested-very far from an established “truth”-where does that leave Al Gore’s status as the brave truth-teller? A fawning New York Times profile on Gore admits that he avoids “making direct causal links that most scientists say are impossible to substantiate” but instead “uses imagery and implication” to make his case. That’s about the most tasteful description of the methods of a flim-flam artist I have ever read.

But not to worry, another New York Times report tells us, because two new studies have confirmed the link between global warming and hurricanes. Have you ever noticed this little trick used by global warming scaremongers? They will insistently repeat a claim for five years-then tell you that it is justified by a study released last Tuesday. Maybe so, but how does that justify their making that claim five years before it was “proven”? And as for the new “proof,” even the New York Times reporter admits that the hurricane hysteria “is the subject of a long-running scientific dispute. And while the new research supports one side, neither the authors nor other climate experts say it is conclusive.” The reporter even gives the last word to a skeptic-Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-who dismisses the new ! papers: “There’s going to be an endless series of articles from this circle that is embracing this new theology built on very flimsy interpretation” of hurricane data.

I guess some of the truth is starting to get a hearing-no matter how inconvenient that might be for Gore and company.

For the man who lives in a teeming stream as if in a barren desert, who labors so often alone that lonliness is as pervasive, and as forgettable, as the midday sun: there exists an oasis.

Mutual understanding in the face of no possible help - of knowledge, evaluation, integration and acceptance. To look at each other from respective mountain peaks, unable to reach, assist, or physically influence the situation of another, but to transmit in that look, a totality of understanding and approval, that it becomes an injection of spiritual fuel that turns a lonely, toiling trudge of self-chosen, un-thanked work, into the lightest of burdens and greatest possible of endeavors.

To touch Atlas on the shoulder and whisper in his ear, "Yes. I know it. And you’re beautiful," and watch a trembling, bleeding giant lift up the world in a single breath, and stand in glorious ease and radiance.

That is the nature of man’s potential, and the value of friendship.

Sanction: I finally understand it.