Friday, April 19, 2013

Making believers

This story explains a lot about the global warming scam.
The alarmists in the federal government hand out free money to "study" something -- global warming in this case -- and local politicians and bureaucrats fall all over themselves grabbing for the cash.
Of course there is global warming! If there wasn't, they wouldn't get any free money. And, the alarmists say, the studies the taxpayers' money pay for "prove" there is global warming caused by humans.
Except it doesn't.
There hasn't been any warming for about 15 years, a fact alarmists are squirming over. The computer models they rely on are bogus.
In this case, the money is supposed to be used to plan for the flooding that global warming is going to cause in a century or so.
These guys are bureaucrats who already are paid to plan. Why do they need more money to do what they are supposed to be doing every day?
It doesn't cost any more to plan for flooding than it does to plan for increased traffic. None of their plans are likely to have any effect any way, even if they are needed.
Local politicians aren't going to pony up the money for the dikes, or whatever. They will turn to the alarmists in the federal government, who will be only too happy to shovel more money their way.
In a century, when the "threat" has been exposed as a hoax, they won't be around to be held accountable. Meanwhile, your children and grandchildren still will be paying the tab.

Monday, April 8, 2013

The unthinkable happens

It was 40 years ago that the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
I won't even go there on the question of whether they were right pre-1973 or post-1973.
The point is that this science was a consensus for many years.
Global warming alarmists call people who don't buy their guff "deniers" and sniff that the belief in this theory is a "scientific consensus."
Let's leave aside the fact that there are thousands of scientists who don't buy it.
But just what is a consensus? It is a common belief among a group based on what they know.
Let's face it: Scientists just don't know everything about the weather, or climate.
Currently, there is widespread embarrassment among alarmists over the fact that there hasn't been any warming for the past 20 years.
Their computer models insist that it should be warming, and that anticipated future warming predicted by these models will wipe out mankind. These models are the basis for the demand that humans worldwide completely change their way of life and spend trillions of dollars in the process.
Maybe before that, we should have models that work?
Previously, they said no warming over a period of 10-20 years would be evidence that the theory is at fault. Now that period has passed, they are insisting it will take 30-40 years to show catastrophe is not imminent.
Let's also step back and take note that all this furor is over an increase in global warming of less than one degree since it began being measured.
At about the time psychological scientists changed their consensus, national news magazines were writing about a scientific consensus that the Earth was facing a new Ice Age.
That's right. There had been a cooling period of several years, following a warming period, and the science was settled, according to news accounts. Glaciers were coming.
Not long after that, a new consensus was formed and global warming was born.
They assured us it was not just a normal cycle of warming and cooling. Humans were causing it with their electric plants and automobiles. Don't worry about the fact that most of the increase occurred before electric plants and automobiles.
Common carbon dioxide -- without which life cannot exist on Earth -- came to be a "pollutant." Politicians want to tax it.
But the public is catching on. Global warming now ranks very low on the list of what people worry about, according to opinion polls.
Maybe those in the alarmist community might want to re-examine their consensus as the psychologists did 40 years ago.




What institutions of "higher education" produce

You have to despair upon reading something like this.
Probably, this kid had sense at one time. But after four years in a university, his brain has turned into mush, if this column is any evidence of what goes on inside his head.
Just to use two examples:
He talks about the "rivers" of oil terrorizing Arkansas residents.
The amount of oil released could easily be contained in two swimming pools. Is that enough to flood an entire state and drive people from its cities?
Then, to avoid the moral crime of using oil he suggests everyone should switch to an electric car.
Where does he suppose the electricity is going to come from in an oil-free world? Windmills?
He probably thinks this is bold, new thinking, and quite daring. This is nothing more than standard, knee-jerk liberalism, instilled in him by professors who are steeped in rivers of it.
You can get your fill of it any day on MSNBC or in the columns of the New York Times. Fewer people make those choices every day.
We all hear the nonsense from "educators" that we cannot teach facts; we must teach people "how to think."
If this is an example, I'll go for facts any day.