Responding to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by 16 scientists who reject global warming catastrophism (discussed here), 38 academic climatologists have offered their counterargument, which amounts to 1) disagreeing with the 16 scientists’ factual claims about the climate and 2) claiming that since most of the scientists are not climatologists, their claims are uninformed.
Both points are wrong.
The 16 scientists correctly pointed out that in the last decade, contrary to catastrophist predictions, there has been no significant warming. This flat trend goes against catastrophist climate models, which had predicted rapid temperature increases.
The “expert” climatologists respond to this point only by confirming their expertise in diverting attention from the issue. They try to alarm us by pointing out that the last decade’s temperature was high relative to the last century—while conveniently ignoring that it is likely not high relative to the last millenium and ignoring the all-important issue of the flat trend and botched predictions.
The climatologists’ faulty arguments point to the lie in their claim that their critics are unqualified to comment. The members of the climatology establishment are united, not by some ultra-sophisticated understanding of the climate, but by their participation in a pseudoscientific campaign that finances, guides, and virtually defines the field of climatology—a field that superior scientists have generally avoided or been shut out from. This is exactly the sort of field that needs to be challenged by better scientists from related fields—which is what the Wall Street Journal piece did.
The rhetoric used to dismiss the critics is typical of academic climatologists. “Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition?” The 16 “dentists,” you see, are not all credentialed experts in climatology per se, but only in such fields as physics and engineering. And the ones who are climate experts are not to be heard from because their views are known by everyone to be “extreme.”
A more apt question, however, would be “Do you consult your dentist about the existence of the tooth fairy—or do you consult the real experts: children who have lost teeth?”
The catastrophists say that the question of global warming is a complicated, technical problem for which we ought to seek the separate advice of a number of independent experts in the science that is relevant to such problems. Like if you wanted to know how many prime numbers there were below one million you would ask a mathematician, and preferably even a number theorist.
The claimed “consensus” about global warming is portrayed as hundreds of independent experts coming to the same dire conclusion, and a bunch of hacks and shills trying to muddy the issue. But the climatologists are the opposite of independent, and the dire predictions are what pay their bills. History shows us that it is possible for an insular, propagandistic movement to fake its way into academic institutions. The 16 original op-ed authors already pointed to one such example: Lysenkoism, a bogus theory of evolution that won academic approval in Soviet Russia, displacing Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
When pseudo-scientific movements, empowered by government privilege, replace science with authority, the inevitable consequence is rampant falsehood masquerading as plain truth that only enemies of the people would dare to question.