Dienekes' Place: The Climate Change Con: 'The Whole F**king Thing is Falling Apart..."

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Climate Change Con: 'The Whole F**king Thing is Falling Apart..."

Imagine spending years and ~~tens~~ hundreds of millions to create a worldwide public hysteria with the ~~plot~~ plan to reap billions in rewards...only to have the fraud discovered just as the cash register is about to ring.

Such is the scam of ~~global warming~~ climate change.

The Continuing Climate Meltdown

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.