By James Lewis
Pajamas Media
Good King Wenceslas walked barefoot ‘midst snow and ice, to bring food and kindling to starving peasants on the second day of Christmas — and lo! — a miracle preserved him and his faithful servant from the bitter cold. Wenceslas — Saint Vaclav in the original Czech — was a legendary Santa Claus figure, a holy bringer of hope and cheer in the darkness of the[1] European winter.
Well, we have our own Vaclav to cheer us up this holiday season; but this one is Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, and a dangerous skeptic on the crusading faith of global warming. In his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, President Klaus [2] writes that:. The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.
Vaclav Klaus is an honest man, but that doesn’t count for much in the boiling cauldron that is socialist Europe today. Just recently, President Klaus was verbally mobbed by the other presidents of the European Parliament, including “Danny the Red” — Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former anarchist street fighter during the infamous ‘68 riots — who is now a big Green honcho in [3] European politics. [4] Said Danny the Red to Vaclav Klaus:
You can believe what you want, I don’t believe, I know that global warming is a reality. (italics added)
And there you have it, folks, the voice of skeptical reason assaulted by militant dogma, ready to burn as many witches as may be needed to defend the One True Faith. If this sounds familiar, just think of Galileo and Pope Innocent III, who did not want to peer through Galileo’s telescope at the night sky, having a rock-hard faith that made evidence unnecessary. Danny the Red, shake hands with the Renaissance Pope. Two peas in pod.
Enter the Barack Obama administration. Between new “Climate Czar” Carole Browner and Science Advisor John Holdren, the True Believers are now [5] taking over Federal policy on energy and the weather. (The weather? Yes! We are now blessed with an official bureaucracy tasked to change the weather. It includes NASA Goddard Space Center’s James Hanson, who believes that CEOs of energy companies “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature” if they spread[6] foul skepticism about global warming. Hanson’s career at NASA was boosted by Al Gore when he was “reorganizing government” during the Clinton years. His job is to spread planetary catastrophism, come hell or high water. We have our own Danny the Reds, who know the answers without bothering to consult Mother Nature.)
The trouble is that the actual evidence for global warming has been shot full of holes, and has actually flipped the other way in the last ten years. Here is a list of [7] 10 failed predictions.
The planet, as far as we can tell, is getting [8] somewhat colder, perhaps due to solar cooling. So the Obama administration is coming into power at exactly the moment when the evidence for their idée fixe is crumbling. But True Faith passes all reason, and there is no indication that any Obamanistas have bothered to take notice of [9] inconvenient facts.
Which should given pause to honest people, including scientists. A lot of scientists can tell a flaming fraud when they see one, but they are keeping their heads well down. [10] Freeman Dyson, one of the great physicists, [11] tells us why:
When science gets rich it becomes political.
According to Dyson, our problem is not underfunding science; it’s overfunding scientists until they become [12] politicized. But that kind of science will sell out its only real mission — of discovering and telling the truth — to the highest bidder.
This is bad news. Because the whole climatic doom scenario is based on simplified math models relating speculative “greenhouse gases” to Planetary Doom — basically computer games like [13] SimCity, which don’t come close to the real complexity of the atmosphere by a[9] long shot. Every physicist worth his or her salt knows that. Simplistic computer models don’t work because they ignore too many factors — like atmospheric water and Mr. Sun, just to name two. In their own specialties most scientists would dismiss such simplistic models out of hand. This one they don’t dare to touch.
Freeman Dyson [12] writes:
I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”
We are therefore seeing science by political fiat — which is to say, science that is prostituted to the powermongers. It is a direct descendant of Hitler’s denunciation of Einstein’s Relativity Theory as “Jewish science,” and Stalin’s heady fantasy that he could force Soviet crops to grow bigger, dazzled by his favorite agronomical “scientist” [14] Trofim Lysenko. Commanding the weather to change is not much different from those totalitarian fantasies. Barack Obama has already told us that his mere election [15] will slow the “rising of the oceans.”
This is not joke. It’s actually [16] Groucho Marxism:
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” [16]
So where’s the laugh line?
The world’s Green politicians are gathering in Poznan, Poland, to split the loot through a new[17] Kyoto II Treaty. They blame the failure of the last Kyoto Accords on the United States, and now that America has seen the light by electing Obama, by golly, they are going to collect but good. Sugar plum fairies? How about power and riches through a worldwide carbon trading scheme? How about a centralized international planning bureaucracy for all the smokestack industries in the world (except in China and India, which have wisely exempted themselves). How about selling Papal indulgences to make all the dirty sinners living off coal and cars and cow meat beg for forgiveness for their transgressions against Mother Gaia?
From a political viewpoint it’s better not to have any evidence on global warming. If we had facts, we might find out that warming, if it existed, might actually go away. It’s not much good to tax a sin that can be absolved. Much better to tax that pervasive feeling of guilt directly. Leave it to the popular media to spread free-floating guilt, and to the political experts in the new administration, who know in their very bones, like [4] Danny the Red, that “You can believe what you want, I don’t believe, I know that global warming is a reality.”
Bow down, ye sinners. The time has come for you to pay through the nose.
Merry Christmas!
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/santa-klaus-takes-on-global-warming/
URLs in this post:
[1] European winter. : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_King_Wenceslas
[2] writes that: http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Green-Shackles-Vaclav-Klaus/dp/B001A3W3BK/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=book
s&qid=1229967350&sr=8-8
[3] European politics.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Cohn-Bendit
[4] Said Danny: http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/12/which-ones-democrat.html
[5] taking over Federal policy: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/flawed-science-advice-for-obama/#more-467
[6] foul skepticism: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/11/hansen-wants-skeptics-in-jail.php
[7] 10 failed predictions.: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24820442-25717,00.html
[8] somewhat colder,: http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=287279412587175
[9] inconvenient facts. : http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.3762v3
[10] Freeman Dyson,: http://www.sns.ias.edu/~dyson/
[11] tells us why: : http://www.towntopics.com/nov1908/other3.php
[12] politicized. : http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
[13] SimCity,: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simcity
[14] Trofim Lysenko. : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
[15] will slow : http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D912VD200&show_article=1
[16] Groucho Marxism:: http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1969
[17] Kyoto II Treaty.: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,593712,00.html
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