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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on November 26, 2009, 08:14:41 AM
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November 25, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
The New War against Reason
Medieval heretic-hunters had nothing on Obama when it comes to closed-mindedness.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Barack Obama promised us not only transparency, but also a new respect for science. In soothing tones, he asserted that his administration was “restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making.”
In our new Enlightenment of Ivy League Guardians, we were to return to the rule of reason and logic. Obama would lead us away from the superstitious world of Bush’s evangelical Christianity, “intelligent design,” and Neanderthal moral opposition to human-embryo stem-cell research.
Instead, we are seeing an unprecedented distortion of science — indeed, an attack on the inductive method itself. Facts and reason are trumped by Chicago-style politics, politically correct dogma, and postmodern relativism.
MYTHICAL JOBS
For decades, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has maintained a rational, scientifically based, and nonpartisan system of reporting the nation’s “seasonally adjusted unemployment rate.” Presidents of both parties respected its metrics. Their own popularity sunk or soared on the basis of officially released jobless numbers, as tabulated and computed by the nonpartisan Bureau. The public trusted in a common standard of assessing presidential job performance.
The BLS is still releasing its monthly report, but alongside it the Obama administration has created a new postmodern barometer called jobs “created or saved.”
Over the last nine months, the official government website Recovery.gov has informed us how the stimulus has saved jobs — even as hard data reflected the unpleasant truth of massive and spiraling job losses.
In other words, not the real number of jobs lost, but rather the supposed number of jobs saved by Barack Obama’s vast dispersion of borrowed money, was to be the correct indicator of employment.
The message? In superstitious fashion, the public is to ignore what statistics say, and trust instead in the Obama administration’s hypotheses.
And if pesky doubters still want “facts,” and if there are not enough supporting data for such speculation, then why not simply fabricate them out of thin air? Thus mythical congressional districts were posted on an official government website with more fanciful data of “jobs saved.” Just as creationists insist that the world was made 6,000 years ago, so too the Obamians believe that joblessness must show a decline because their messianic leader says it’s so — bothersome facts be damned. In this current Orwellian climate, a scientific document listing the latest unemployment figures is the equivalent of a stegosaurus footprint — an inconvenient truth for the upbeat employment gospel according to St. Barack.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL INQUISITION
Obama also campaigned on the “fact” that the planet was heating up, and that it was because of man-made carbon emissions. In fact, in messianic fashion he promised that his ascension would mark the moment when the rising seas receded and the warming planet cooled.
In response, we would have to do our own part to cool down civilization’s imprint, by turning to wind and solar energy, and taxing oil and gas so as to vastly reduce their usage.
The fact that nuclear power could give us plentiful electrical energy and autonomy from foreign imports — and without the release of hot carbon gases — was ignored. Instead, by fiat, nuclear power was deemed a politically incorrect fuel source, somehow tainted by memories of everything from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island.
That nuclear plants are now safe, as we see from long experience in Europe and from their operation here at home; that we have spent billions to find a solution to the problem of their wastes; that they do not heat or pollute the atmosphere, or add to our quarterly trade deficit — all this is simultaneously substantiated by facts, and yet refuted by superstition and hysteria.
In contrast, government-subsidized windmills and solar panels, which give us little energy — and only on breezy or sunny days — are “rational” sources of power for 300 million consumers.
There are other problems of logic with the global-warming industry.
First, the public does not, by and large, see a heating planet. Average global temperatures over the last decade have, in fact, cooled. Some of us recall the media-driven worry in the 1970s over a new ice age — a dubious conclusion based on data from many of the same supposedly cool past decades that are now reinvented as warm to provide a case for decades-long patterns of dangerous planet heating.
These controversies could be adjudicated through substantive debate, but instead politically correct hysteria again has followed. “Good” informed people — like those who adhered to every doctrine of the medieval church — “know” the planet is heating up, thanks to the greed of carbon-based industry. “Bad” heretics challenge official environmental dogma and exegesis. In such an anti-empirical age, if the “truther” Van Jones had not been there, ready for Obama to tap as green czar, he would have had to be invented.
Even skeptics are surprised at just how cynical some global-warming “scientists” have been in their efforts to stifle dissent and fudge unwelcome data. Recently, for example, computer hackers released confidential communications from a leading global-warming research institute in the United Kingdom — the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit — that gave the game away.
In their private e-mail correspondence, these “scientists,” like clerics squabbling over religious schisms, scheme to explain away and cover up unpleasant evidence. They dream of injuring heretics; they connive to get more money for their own pet projects; and they are terrified that increasingly the data seem to support public doubts — and therefore must be subjected to unscientific, but morally superior, efforts to undo unsettling results.
The second problem with the global-warming movement is the age-old problem of human greed. If the billions of people on planet earth can be convinced that they are doomed without new paradigms of energy use, then those who are ready to provide us with green elixirs can become fabulously wealthy.
Such a one is Al Gore, who left the vice presidency in 2001 worth under $5 million and is now said to be a magnate with a net fortune of over $100 million.
Gore, the green populist, has mastered a scam worthy of Bernie Madoff — based on a brilliant three-step business strategy:
1) Write, speak, and produce movies as a disinterested public intellectual to bring “research” to the public’s attention. Demonize skeptics through suggestions that they are either stupid, cold-hearted, or greedy.
2) Meanwhile, create all sorts of green companies designed to offer wind and solar technologies — and even stranger services like “carbon offsets.” The latter is a medieval concept in which rich carbon sinners can continue to satisfy their lust for cars, big homes, and airplanes. The trick is to hire out green priests who take carbon confession, and then offer the sinner a way back into earth-first heaven — through the commensurate penance of planting trees or building windmills somewhere else as divine compensation.
3) When the rationally minded complain of this scam, Gore’s lieutenants proclaim that he is not a hypocrite, much less a scheming businessman, because he invests in “what he believes in.”
Ponder that twisted logic: You circle the globe proselytizing that Earth will soon resemble the planet Mercury. But that’s okay, because you make your millions by offering products to alleviate the subsequent induced fears. The rationalization is akin to the financial manipulator who claims that he has done nothing wrong, because he reinvests his insider profits back into the Wall Street he helped to panic.
POLITICALLY CORRECT BLINDNESS
Then we come to radical Islam and a series of both formal and ad hoc Islamist terrorist attacks on American civilians. There have been over 40 such incidents since the mass murdering of 9/11.
Western inductive thinking used to teach us to look at facts and collate symptoms. (E.g., we have observed a number of killers evoking Islam, yelling out “Allahu Akbar!” at the moment of their murdering, or post facto, bragging unrepentantly of murdering Jews and infidels.)
Then one makes a diagnosis based on such empirical findings. (E.g., unlike the case with radical anti-abortionists or violent environmentalists, in the last eight years we have witnessed a series of unhinged Muslim males who have justified their violent actions through affinities with, or promotion of, radical Islam.)
All those data lead to a scientific conclusion and prognosis. (E.g., while only a small proportion of Muslims have committed violent attacks, over the past eight years there have been dozens of cases in which angry Muslim males have attacked Jewish centers or U.S. military personnel, and have shot or deliberately run over individual Americans. Therefore, there is a danger that a subset of young Muslims is disproportionately committing terrorist acts. Furthermore, the combination of disaffected Muslim males and ubiquitous jihadist propaganda, together with Western denial, will logically lead both to more formal plots and to more lone-wolf attacks.)
But not so fast: Remember, we are now in an age of superstition, not rationalism, in which utopian ends justify unscientific means.
And so, quite logically, we got the Fort Hood massacre. Major Hasan, the perpetrator, gave ample indication that he favored the tactics of suicide bombing and empathized with radical Muslim enemies of the United States. He went so far as to print business cards proclaiming himself a “soldier of Allah” — while he tried to convert his trauma patients to Islam and sought guidance from a radical imam in Yemen.
No matter. For an Army officer to have preempted Hasan’s jihadism would have meant incurring a charge of politically incorrect anti-Muslim bias. Inductive reasoning was thus abrogated, and the world of touchy-feely make-believe took over.
Even as Hasan shot the innocent and yelled out to Allah in adoration, media talking heads were still insisting that Islam had nothing to do with either his anger or its dénouement in murder. Such an unscientific belief system was best illustrated by the FBI agent who announced that Hasan’s intercepted e-mails sent to radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki — detailing his jihadist sympathies and desire to join Awlaki “in the afterlife” — were “benign.”
In short, we are witnessing the rise of a new deductive, anti-scientific age.
Instead of Christian, southern-twanged fundamentalists, we see instead kinder, gentler federal bureaucrats, globetrotting Ph.D.s, liberal hucksters, and politically correct diversity officers.
All are committed to the medieval fallacy that exalted theoretical ends justify very real tawdry means.
The result is the triumph of superstition, and the dethronement of science.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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Brilliant analysis as always from VDH
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Brilliant article-- hard to argue with anything the man says.
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Brilliant article-- hard to argue with anything the man says.
This article is far too complicated for many on this board to comprehend.
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I comprehend it and agree with it entirely. But I certainly won't waste one second of my life arguing with the board liberals about it.
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I comprehend it and agree with it entirely. But I certainly won't waste one second of my life arguing with the board liberals about it.
You are not the "many" obviously. I think you know who I was referencing. ;D ;D ;D
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You are not the "many" obviously. I think you know who I was referencing. ;D ;D ;D
Hmmm. Blacken , Strawman, 240(although he's reasonable at times), Hugo...and the rest of the gang, maybe?
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That is an awsome post, couldnt be more right on.
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That is an awsome post, couldnt be more right on.
The lemmings cant even begin to understand the brilliance of this written beat down.
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I guess the liberal goof troop missed this post huh?
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I guess the liberal goof troop missed this post huh?
its far too complicated for their comprehension.
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Nobody unbiased could possibly believe McCain would win 520 electoral votes. Yet Hanson did and stated repeatedly in his pre-election columns in National Review. a serious scholar is someone who weighs the facts impartially, Hanson is far removed from a scholar. This is not an opnion of a serious scholar but a crazy ideologue. Hanson is just a butt boy for the Republican party :D
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Nobody unbiased could possibly believe McCain would win 520 electoral votes. Yet Hanson did and stated repeatedly in his pre-election columns in National Review. a serious scholar is someone who weighs the facts impartially, Hanson is far removed from a scholar. This is not an opnion of a serious scholar but a crazy ideologue. Hanson is just a butt boy for the Republican party :D
What part of this article do you disagree with?
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Bumpity bump bump.
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Didn't George W. Bush say that the jury was out on evolution?
I thought this thread was going to be about that.
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Didn't George W. Bush say that the jury was out on evolution?
I thought this thread was going to be about that.
Actually, its a very good article in that respect because it exposes both sides as being hypocritical.
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global-warming
what part of this don't you agree with?
Nobody unbiased could possibly believe McCain would win 520 electoral votes. Yet Hanson did and stated repeatedly in his pre-election columns in National Review. a serious scholar is someone who weighs the facts impartially, Hanson is far removed from a scholar. This is not an opnion of a serious scholar but a crazy ideologue. Hanson is just a butt boy for the Republican party
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global-warming
what part of this don't you agree with?
Nobody unbiased could possibly believe McCain would win 520 electoral votes. Yet Hanson did and stated repeatedly in his pre-election columns in National Review. a serious scholar is someone who weighs the facts impartially, Hanson is far removed from a scholar. This is not an opnion of a serious scholar but a crazy ideologue. Hanson is just a butt boy for the Republican party
So despite all of the evidence that came out this week that the scientists were skewing the data, you still believe in it as a matter of fact?
If that is the case, this article was written exactly with you in mind.
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::) ::)
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Like that is proof of "global warming"? That guy has a vested interest in seeing that this scam be continued.
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Hacked climate emails called a "smear campaign"
Wed Nov 25, 2009 4:54pm EST Email | Print | Share| Reprints | Single Page[-] Text
by Stacy Feldman, SolveClimate solveclimate.com/
(SolveClimate) Three leading scientists who on Tuesday released a report documenting the accelerating pace of climate change said the scandal that erupted last week over hacked emails from climate scientists is nothing more than a "smear campaign" aimed at sabotaging December climate talks in Copenhagen.
"We're facing an effort by special interests who are trying to confuse the public," said Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a lead author of the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
Dissenters see action to slow global warming as "a threat," he said.
The comments were made in a conference call for reporters.
The scientists—Somerville, Michael Mann of Penn State and Eric Steig of University of Washington—were supposed to be discussing their new report, the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a dismal update of the UN IPCC's 2007 climate data by 26 scientists from eight nations.
Instead they spent much of the time diffusing the hacker controversy, known in the media as "Climate Gate."
The scandal began on November 20, when an unknown hacker stole at least 169 megabytes of emails from computers at the prominent Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia and put them online for the world to see.
CRU is considered one of the world's leading institutions concerned with human-caused global warming. The leaked emails contain private correspondence on climate science dating back to 1996.
Skeptics of global warming say these messages are filled with evidence of manipulated data from lead authors of the UN's highly influential IPCC reports.
U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma, pictured here), a climate skeptic, said he would launch an inquiry into UN climate change research in response.
In an interview with the Washington Times radio show, Inhofe explained the investigation would look into "the way cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."
CRU Vice-Chancellor of Research Trevor Davies responded in an official statement:
"There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest-quality of scientific investigation and interpretation."
Michael Mann, co-author of the Copenhagen Diagnosis and lead author of the UN IPCC Third Assessment Report, blamed skeptics for taking the personal emails out of context.
"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world. Suddenly, all these are subject to cherry picking," he said.They've turned "something innocent into something nefarious," Mann added.
The vital point being left out, he said, is that "regardless of how cherry-picked," there is "absolutely nothing in any of the emails that calls into the question the deep level of consensus of climate change."
This is a "smear campaign to distract the public," said Mann. "Those opposed to climate action, simply don't have the science on their side," he added.
Professor Davies called the stolen data "the latest example of a sustained and, in some instances, a vexatious campaign" designed "to distract from reasoned debate" about urgent action governments must take to reverse climate change.
According to Somerville, the comments in the emails "have nothing to do with the scientific case" for climate change.
It is "desperate" to launch this right before Copenhagen, Eric Steig, co-author of the Copenhagen Diagnosis, said on the call.
Sen. Inhofe, meanwhile, lauded the timing of the incident.
"The interesting part of this is it's happening right before Copenhagen. And, so, the timing couldn't be better. Whoever is on the ball in Great Britain, their timing was good," he said.
Science Can't Silence Skeptics, Still
The fallout from the scandal is putting some of the world's leading climate scientists on the defensive and underlining the influence of skeptics, even as the case for human-caused warming gets stronger.
According to the Copenhagen Diagnosis report, climate change has rapidly accelerated beyond all previous predictions and humans are to blame.
The findings are a synthesis of 200 peer-reviewed papers that continued to pour in from all over the world after the UN IPCC issued its 2007 analysis. Somerville described the report as an "authoritative assessment" of the newest climate change data.
The results reveal that global warming emissions in 2008 were nearly 40 percent higher than those in 1990. Further, sea level rise is 80 percent above past IPCC predictions.
If 2 degree Celsius warming is to be avoided—the point at which catastrophic damage is predicted to occur—fossil fuel emissions must peak between 2015 and 2020, "and then decline rapidly," the authors warn.
"There's an urgency to this that is not politically or ideological driven," said Somerville. This is "objective scientific reality," he added, and we're "running out of time," to stop the problem.
In a statement released on Tuesday, three of the UK's leading science organizations—the Met Office, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society—issued an unusually strong statement in advance of Copenhagen. They wrote:
The scientific evidence which underpins calls for action at Copenhagen is very strong. Without co-ordinated international action on greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts on climate and civilization could be severe.
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"There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest-quality of scientific investigation and interpretation."
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What a disingenuous lie. If the date was cooked from the get go, of course the peer reviews could not have ripped the work apart.
Garbage in - garbage out.
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well you just be a Sen. Ahole [Inhofe] follower and jusus will show you the way
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well you just be a Sen. Ahole [Inhofe] follower and jusus will show you the way
Keep name calling as every single liberal idiotic "issue" exposes as lies one by one.
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i'll tell you one thing i will be glad when the rapture comes so all the idiots are gone :D
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i'll tell you one thing i will be glad when the rapture comes so all the idiots are gone :D
You have been watching Al Gores nonsense movies too much. The hysterical thing is that people like yourself are just as guilty as those you point the finger at and mock when it comes to believing the most ridiculous things.
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thats the difference between you and me i believe science and you believe fairy tails
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maybe you should believe in a websters if what you think al gore believes in is science
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yes it was all an illusion - that tv show where they were growing vegetables in greenland - yes these emails prove it
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I guess you didnt read that they dumped all the data?
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Climate change data dumpedJonathan Leake, Environment Editor
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
Related Links
The great climate change science scandal
EU figurehead says climate change a myth
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.
Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.
He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
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You still trust these people?
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I guess you didnt read that they dumped all the data?
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Climate change data dumpedJonathan Leake, Environment Editor
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
Related Links
The great climate change science scandal
EU figurehead says climate change a myth
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.
Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.
He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
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You still trust these people?
Actually working at a place where we use quality controlled data that is not surprising. There is a shit load of data and it takes up a lot of storage space. There are issues such as faulty instruments - spikes caused by electrical faults - all these things have to be processed and removed from the data to give a true indication. So what was your point again?
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Brilliant article-- hard to argue with anything the man says.
Nuclear power isn't safe.
We were only minutes away from a total meltdown the other year. And we got some of the best plants and security systems in the world.
This Hanson bloke must either ignore incidents like those or be completely in the dark about it. Because there has been some real close calls recently.
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Nuclear power isn't safe.
We were only minutes away from a total meltdown the other year. And we got some of the best plants and security systems in the world.
This Hanson bloke must either ignore incidents like those or be completely in the dark about it. Because there has been some real close calls recently.
How does Europe manage it?