RUSH: There was a story in the UK Telegraph yesterday: “The Fiddling with Temperature Data is the Biggest Science Scandal Ever.” It’s by Christopher Booker. “When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records — on which the entire panic ultimately rested — were systematically ‘adjusted’ to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.
“Two weeks ago, under the headline, ‘How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming,’ I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
“This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognized by expert observers around the world — one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.” Grab audio sound bite number six.
Grab sound bite number six. Now, this story… I have to admit to you, I read the story, and it’s a little thin in terms of its sourcing. It does quote Paul Homewood, but it doesn’t tell us how Homewood got the data.
It just makes it sound like it’s easily obtainable, the real temperature data from all of these weather stations around the world.
It makes it look like anybody — if you wanted to take the time and knew where to search — could find the truth about how temperatures have been lied about in reverse. Now I, frankly, doubt the substance of this. I mean, this is one of the greatest hoaxes in science. There are others. But you talk about a place where standards have declined? Boy, science may be at the top of the list.
It’d be a tight, close race with politics.
Science is supposed to be infallible — and if you follow the scientific method, it is, ’cause there is no opinion in science, and there certainly cannot be a consensus. Science is not up to a vote. Science is not up to what a majority of a hundred scientists happen to think about something. Science… Whatever concept in science you’re trying to establish, it either is or it isn’t, or you don’t know. It can either be proved or it can’t be, and if it can’t be, then it isn’t. That’s science.
You talk about something been corrupted?
It’s been corrupted by politics, specifically the money.
Here you have a bunch of white-coated laboratory specimens called scientists, and they don’t make much money. But they’re given grab the after grant after grant after grant to research climate change — a big, important issue the Democrat Party and the left. You essentially pay them for the result you want. Like any welfare recipient, if they are dependent for what ends up being a great lifestyle on certain outcomes being part of their data report, then you’re gonna get it.
If the people giving you the money want there to be global warming, you’re gonna give it to ’em.
You’re gonna learn how to fake ice core sample temps. You’re gonna learn how to go to obscure places in Siberia and dig 30-feet down and find an age-old tree drunk that’s been buried that has tens of thousands of years of temperature data in the bark. You’re gonna come up with hockey stick theories left and right.
You’re gonna find any number of ways to make the claim that the average Joe couldn’t refute.
And then you’re gonna get with PR people and sell it with phony pictures of polar bears on little thin strips of ice, made to look like melting glaciers. And you sell it. And the reason you want to sell global warming is ’cause it advances government. It grows government, and it gives government more power over people to raise taxes, to guilt trip them into supporting policies that they have ultimately caused (i.e., climate change).
It’s almost an automatic. It’s as big a slam dunk as national health care is for gaining control over a population.
But the thing that’s interesting here is there are more and more stories now — you see ’em everywhere — popping up not arguing with the global warming data. That used to be… I know some climate scientists. I used to get frustrated at ’em because they would accept the premise of the global warming crowd and then, as is their wont, dig into it intellectually and try to refute it scientifically.
I would tell ’em, “You guys are missing the boat here.
You are falling for the trap by accepting the premise.” They would all say to me, “We only can refute their premise if we accept it.” I said, “But it’s not science. They’re making this up.” Of course they wouldn’t listen to me, because I’m not a scientist, in the traditional sense. But I say, “You’re falling for a trap! You’re wasting so much time refuting a false scientific premise,” and what they would do, all the climate scientists…
They did some great work. Pat Michaels and, of course, our official climatologist here, Dr. Roy Spencer. They did some great work, but they accepted the premises of these people, when these people have been political from day one. If a premise is filled with made-up data and false data, yeah, you can set out to try to disprove it. They’ve done that, but it’s been on the playing field of the hoaxers.
I always thought what needed to first be asserted is, “This is a hoax, you guys are making this up, and there’s no way what you’re claiming can ever be known,” and then set out to prove that.
But accepting the premise then going to every ice core sample or the hockey stick or whatever. I just didn’t like it. It got so esoteric and deep that the average person wasn’t able to keep up. So those people became known as “the deniers,” the climate deniers, the people that didn’t care whether the polar bears were dying and the people that didn’t care whether Big Business was polluting the skies so much that the North Pole and the South Pole were melting.
“If the North Pole melts, where’s Santa Claus gonna live?” That kind of crazy crap.
This may be thinly sourced or what have you, but I have no doubt. I’ve known from the beginning just because I know liberals that this whole thing has been a hoax. It’s been fascinating to watch it play out with be and now there are more and more people like the story in the UK Telegraph that are now beginning to just stand up and say, “They’re lying!”
Rather than accept their premise and try to disprove it scientifically, they just standing up and saying, “They’re lying. They’re making it up. This is a big hoax.” They’re starting to use the word “hoax” now. Some of them are.
Listen to this. Audio sound bite number three. They was on NPR Friday afternoon, the Leonard Lopate Show. He spoke with the Center for Investigative Reporting contributor Mark Shapiro, and they’re talking about climate change and had this little exchange.
LOPATE: Is the debate over climate change mostly scientific, economic, or political? Because many conservatives are saying that the environmental movement is like a watermelon: Green on the outside and Marxist red on the inside.
SHAPIRO: Wow. I haven’t quite heard that. (chortling)
LOPATE: Oh, you should check out. So many people! Rush Limbaugh. There are a couple of books about it.
SHAPIRO: Yes, there are books about the… We call them “the climate denialist.”
RUSH: See, called the climate denialists or the climate deniers. Now, this joke that environmentalists are “green on the outside, red on the inside”? This guy Shapiro, who talked about the climate, claims he hadn’t heard the joke. That joke is at least 30 years old! I first heard that joke from a timber company in Humboldt County in California when I went out there to try to help ’em save the day, back when I was wearing my Brian Williams hat.
No, no.
No, no. I just went out there and I did a speech, a Rush to Excellence Tour, and met… (interruption) No, there were no dead owls floating in the river. The only spotted owl we saw was living in the K of the Kmart sign. It wasn’t in an old growth tree. There was a spotted owl in a Kmart sign. Anyway, I did meet with some timber companies, executives after the Rush to Excellence Tour. This is when they were being bombarded and under assault by Earth First, and they had no idea what to do.
They had never encountered this.
Their integrity, their business was under assault, and the timber guys said, “You know, for every tree we cut down, we plant 10! I don’t know what these idiots are talking about. Our business is timber. We go out of business if there isn’t any. We’re not destroying forests. We’re planting forests,” and they were really frustrated. I tried to tell ’em, “You guys are missing the boat. This is not about specifics. They’re attacking you because you are capitalist.”
“If you want to defend yourselves, you can certainly talk about how you plant 10 trees for every one you cut down, and that would be valid. But you better understand why they’re after you.
It’s not the trees. That’s just a smoke screen, the trees you cut down. They’re after you because you’re capitalists, and they are socialists, and they hate capitalism. They’re gonna come up with ways of attacking you to make you look like you don’t care about average people, that you don’t care, that you would…
“You’d just as soon cut down an old redwood tree as save a baby’s life.
They’re gonna demonize you and you guys are gonna be the biggest boobs on the face of the earth.” Thirty years ago, nobody knew how to deal with this. It was… Well, for the individuals involved, it was unprecedented. Leftist attacks on institutions have been around forever. But to these guys, they didn’t know how to defend it. They didn’t know how to react to it, how to respond to it. Because it was ideological. This is the bottom line.
The attack on the timber industry, the whole spotted owl cause, all of that was ideological leftist ideology, liberalism. If these guys were not active, committed conservatives, there was no way they were gonna understand what they were up against, and they didn’t, even after I tried to explain it to them. They were a little bit better off, but they couldn’t get past the idea that they could defeat the environmentalists with real world statistics.
“No, we don’t destroy forests.
We plant 10 trees for every tree we cut down.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I’d tell them. “You’re still cutting down a tree, and a tree has a life.
And a tree provides life for a spotted owl, a tree provides life for whatever, and you’re cutting it down. You’re mean-spirited extremists cutting down everything in your sight, and then what do you do? You’re selling it for money! You’re profiting off the destruction of the earth.”
“Do they really look at us that way?”
“Damn right they look at you that way! It’s the same way they look at the oil companies.
You’re polluting, you’re destroying, you’re any number of things.”
I’d say even now, that a number of people under assault by the left still don’t know how to deal with it, and I guess that would include the Republican Party.