What is most interesting to me about the Page One story in the Washington Post is its title, where honesty finally shows through: “Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda.“
Skeptics have been proven right time and again concering the weaknesses in the “consensus argument” — that we can say with certainty that humans are responsible for global warming. These claims have been shown to be backed by inadequate or even incorrect data, based on models that lack critical inputs, and defended fiercely by promoters of the consensus through vicious ad hominen attacks on climate skeptics and (finally, publicly revealed) attempts to suppress dissenting studies in peer-reviewed publications.
It should be noted that the MSM in the U.S. has been an active participant in the squelching of debate and fair-handed understanding of the weaknesses of the consensus view. Thank God a free press in the U.K. exists to finally expose the consensus charlatans to the light of public approbation and ridicule – since the errors and falsehoods in the IPCC reports are getting precious little attention on this side of the pond in such bastions of public information as the the New York Times or CNN.
Months ago, when skeptics pointed out the fact that the IPCC’s claims about the melting of the Himalayan glaciers were mistaken and based on faulty research, the IPCC chairman accused the skeptics of vodoo science, not worth considering. The U.S. media didn’t investigate, for that would be to admit that they were wrong, and the debate was still open. Months later, R. K. Pachauri was forced to acknowledged that he knew at the time that the skeptics were right — and the report, which he vouched for, was wrong. Like the author of the faulty section of IPCC report, Pachauri had a political agenda — to motivate political action to restrict carbon emissions. Nothing, not even facts, could get in the way of that agenda.
That is the key issue upon which climate skeptics are finally being vindicated. The climate consensus is not science — it is a secular religion pushing for political outcomes. No amount of errors, no evidence contrary to the consensus, no contradictory conclusions concerning future climate effects produced by the climate models or published in the peer-reviewed literature, no evidence of malfeasance on the part of consensus scientists will change the consensus view that humans are causing climate calamity and that they must repent andreject their sinful, consumerists lifestyles before they inflict further harm.
When scientists are pursuing a political agenda, they are no more acting as scientists attempting to objectively pursue the truth and understand the wonders of the universe than any other interest group with a stake in the outcomes of the policies that would flow from a given agenda. The IPCC has become, at its core, a political lobby, and thus its view should be given no more or less respect than any other political lobby.
To get a real understanding of what is actually taking place climatologically and what may take place in the future, we must now look to other sources than the IPCC – we should look to scientists who still understand that science’s only agenda is the pursuit of knowledge. Any agenda beyond that enters the realm of the normative: ethics and politics — and in those realms, scientists have no special insight or authority.