—Or, Why There are No Climatology Rock Stars

Scientists Respond to “Climategate” E-Mail Controversy: Scientific American

U.N. Climate Talks Deadlocked as Clashes Erupt Outside – Europe | Map | News – FOXNews.com

Watch a TV show about Astronomy or Physics, or maybe Paleontology, and you will likely hear a lively discussion about various alternate hypotheses about observed phenomena, witness something of the scientific process of trying to understand the Universe, maybe even see a heated argument or two.  Every time a bird drops a scrap of baguette in the  Large Hadron Collider, it’s front-page news.  Guys like Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson are very popular in their efforts to communicate the discoveries of current scientific explorations to the general public—probably the closest scientists get to being rock stars.

Ask a professional climatologist how he arrived at theories of global warming and carbon trading, and you will likely be branded a knuckle-dragging Republican.  What is the difference?  Why is it okay for a field of scientific inquiry to be conducted by ad hominem tirades and squiggly lines as innocent of demonstrated statistical integrity as a Scientology tract?  

The difference is that the climate debate isn’t about science, or the climate, and it’s certainly not about the welfare of the species or the planet.  It’s about a political opportunity to intimately control people, by restricting their access to energy, by taxing them for living their lives. 

People will not stop eating, breathing, and moving about the world because of a squiggly line that curls up on the end.   If the proponents of anthrogenic climate change theories and radical intervention in energy production and global weather won’t rationally discuss their reasoning and the basis for their findings with the rest of us, we will have to reach our own conclusions without them. 

And if there really is a looming climate crisis, this sneering condescension does the species a grave disservice.

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